Franz Biberkopf—Reinhold

The relationship between Franz Biberkopf and Reinhold is the novel’s most consequential friendship and enmity: it draws Franz from street trading into criminal life, survives a violent betrayal that leaves him disabled, and remains emotionally binding even after Reinhold murders Mieze. Its pattern is one of repeated approach and refusal. Franz believes loyalty means standing by his friend; Reinhold treats that loyalty as something he can use, test, and finally exploit. Yet the narrative refuses to make their connection simple. Franz resents Reinhold, returns to him, and ultimately sees him with an affection that neither excuses the damage nor disappears under it.

First Contact and an Unequal Friendship

Franz first encounters Reinhold through the circles gathering around Meck and Pums. Pums introduces himself as a fruit dealer who could use barrowmen, but Franz notices how many of the supposed fruit traders seem to belong to a shady business. He keeps his distance and tells himself that selling newspapers is safer. Reinhold, whom Franz has already watched in a shabby army greatcoat, later becomes a more immediate presence: thin, withdrawn, and severely stammering. Franz initially wonders whether he has been in prison, then learns that Reinhold has not served time. He has taken political action once, in a failed attempt involving a gasworks, and was never caught. Their first link is therefore not criminal partnership but mutual recognition among men on the margins, complicated from the start by Franz’s uncertainty about the company Reinhold keeps.

That guarded acquaintance changes when Reinhold confides that he wants to end his relationship with a driver’s wife who has already left her husband for him. Reinhold says he cannot make her understand that he no longer wants her and asks Franz to take her off his hands. Franz treats this as an absurd but manageable favor. When the woman arrives carrying a pair of stout boots for him, Franz thinks of the exchange as a small payment from Reinhold and goes along with the arrangement. The woman subsequently returns to Reinhold and says she no longer needs him, while concealing that she has found somebody else. Franz turns up in his new boots, and the two men embrace and slap one another on the back. For Franz, the episode confirms friendship: he has helped Reinhold and expects no medal for it. For the reader, it also establishes a recurring imbalance. Women become the medium through which Reinhold’s difficulties pass to Franz, while the friendly gestures afterward help make the transfer seem harmless.

Women, the Salvation Army, and Franz’s Refusal

Reinhold’s pattern with women is not a one-time predicament. He becomes intensely attached to a new woman, then says that after roughly four weeks his interest vanishes and he can scarcely bear to see her. He describes returning to the Salvation Army, speaking with someone there, praying, and gaining a temporary interval of relief. The effect lasts six or eight weeks, he says, before the cycle begins again. Franz is astonished that Reinhold has prayed and tries to imagine how he might help. Reinhold himself doubts the value of the meetings and insists that he cannot stop the desire from returning. His confession gives their friendship an unusual intimacy: Franz is permitted to hear an account of a private compulsion, but the practical answer Reinhold repeatedly proposes is still that Franz should take the next woman.

When Reinhold asks him to take Trude, the blond woman with whom he is then involved, Franz’s response changes. He is living with Cilly, and at first he tries to tell her that helping Reinhold is simply what a friend does. Cilly calls him naive and condemns the arrangement. Watching her distress makes Franz reconsider: he puts the boots away and decides that he will not take Trude. He instead invites Trude to speak with him and Cilly, and tells her that Reinhold’s treatment of her is cruel. This is a departure from the earlier exchange. Franz no longer accepts Reinhold’s claim that a woman can simply be passed along, and he tries to offer Trude support without making her his own responsibility as a transferred partner.

Franz then confronts Reinhold directly. He says that Cilly is staying with him and asks Reinhold to curb his conduct and behave decently. He refuses the material inducements Reinhold imagines Trude might provide, including a watch or a fur cap, and tells him to keep Trude rather than discard her. Franz’s argument is that affection creates an obligation: a woman should not first be wrapped in love and then rejected, one after another. Reinhold listens without much visible response, says that Franz need not take Trude if he does not want her, and leaves. The exchange reveals the central conflict in their ideas of friendship. Franz attempts to help Reinhold by asking him to change; Reinhold accepts the friend’s refusal but does not accept the moral demand behind it.

That night Franz cannot sleep. The narration places his hatred of Reinhold beside the image of a bird startled awake by a serpent passing nearby, a figure for danger that has not yet been fully perceived. Reinhold, meanwhile, sleeps beside Trude. The contrast makes the friendship’s apparent resolution unstable: Franz has taken a stand, but the threat between the men has not been settled. Their connection is no longer just a series of favors. It has become a contest over what loyalty permits and what one person owes another.

The Car, the Lost Arm, and the Return

Later, the relationship turns on Reinhold’s attack on Franz. When Franz visits him, Reinhold has a gun, and Franz’s missing arm makes the change in their balance unmistakable. Franz recalls the car incident in which Reinhold threw him out and the vehicle ran over his arm. He does not attack Reinhold. Reinhold sets the gun on the table, and the two sit together while Franz watches his friend’s two arms against his own one-armed condition. Reinhold asks to see the scar, and Franz opens his jacket to show the stump. Reinhold also shows photographs of Cilly, who has been with him again. The meeting binds physical loss, betrayal, and sexual rivalry into the same room, but Franz remains unable to turn his anger into violence against Reinhold.

Franz later returns to Reinhold’s room by choice. This time he is not trembling; he sits upright and is glad to be alive. When Reinhold asks what must be settled between them about the car, Franz says that no settlement can make his arm grow back, but he also says the injury brought his street-selling phase to an end. He regards that former life as something he could not have continued. Reinhold asks what Franz does now and suggests that pimping must be boring, probing whether Franz still has any fight in him. The exchange is a reconciliation only in a limited sense: Franz does not demand repayment, and Reinhold recognizes that the earlier attack has not erased Franz’s capacity for resistance. But Reinhold also reads that capacity as a reason to test him again, not as a reason to repair the friendship.

Franz soon goes to the room where Reinhold and the Pums gang are gathered and asks to join them. He insists that he has never informed on anyone and points to what happened to him as a warning he has already learned from. His account connects the loss of his arm with his former effort to live respectably: he had served four years for the woman buried in the Landsberger Allee cemetery, then tried selling newspapers, and believed he could become respectable. After the car incident, he says, he stopped selling newspapers and other things. He makes clear that he does not hold Reinhold responsible in the way the gang expects, and leaves after urging its members to learn from their own mistakes.

Reinhold accepts Franz’s entry into the gang, but his reasoning exposes how little has changed between them. He calls Franz a pimp who has no chance of going straight, wonders why he has come to the gang rather than to Herbert, and concludes that the gang can manage him. If Franz tries anything, Reinhold says, they can beat him down. Franz’s return is therefore both an act of agency and a surrender to the conditions that have narrowed around him. He chooses to join, but Reinhold makes clear that the old injury has become part of the leverage by which he expects to control him. The friendship now has an organized-crime setting: shared work and shared silence bind them, while suspicion remains active beneath the bond.

Mieze and the Cost of Franz’s Loyalty

The most severe consequence of Franz’s attachment to Reinhold concerns Mieze. Franz does not tell her what Reinhold has done to him or make clear the danger he associates with Reinhold. Later, when Franz reads that Karl the tinsmith has informed on the gang, he pieces together that Karl was also involved in taking Mieze to Freienwalde with Reinhold. Franz tells Herbert and Eva that Reinhold had earlier thrown him under a car and that Reinhold then took Mieze because he wanted to crush him. He insists that he does not hold the car attack against Reinhold, and says that nothing could have stopped what happened. His explanation reveals how thoroughly he has confused loyalty with a refusal to act: he treats his own silence and restraint as unavoidable, even when the danger has shifted to Mieze.

Herbert tells Franz that Mieze might still be alive if Franz had warned her, and vows to find Reinhold. Eva is afraid for Herbert. Franz instead asks Herbert to leave Reinhold alone, saying that the matter is not Herbert’s to settle. He turns away from the others and weeps for himself and Mieze. The sequence marks a decisive break between Franz’s self-image as a loyal friend and the consequences of that loyalty for someone who trusted him. He has protected Reinhold from retaliation and from disclosure, but he cannot protect Mieze from the harm that follows. His grief does not erase his responsibility; it arrives alongside the recognition that his silence helped leave her exposed.

The later judgment of Franz makes that responsibility explicit. He is condemned for having failed to see what Reinhold was and for having made his own strength and decency the measure of events. The rebuke also returns to his conduct toward Mieze: she cared for him, while he spoke of her to Reinhold in a way that made her a means of proving himself against his friend. Franz’s attachment to Reinhold thus becomes more than misplaced trust. It shapes his treatment of Mieze and helps explain why her death cannot be understood solely as something Reinhold did to Franz. The novel distinguishes Reinhold’s murder from Franz’s part in the relationship that placed Mieze in danger.

Trial and the Survival of the Bond

At Reinhold’s trial for Mieze’s murder, Franz gives evidence but refuses to say more about Reinhold, their quarrel, or the car attack. He describes Mieze as having had no affair with Reinhold and characterizes Reinhold as having a terrible compulsion concerning women, but stops short of exposing their personal history. The public gallery includes Eva and members of the Pums gang. Franz and Reinhold look at one another across the courtroom. Franz feels no pity for Reinhold in the dock, yet the narration presents his attention as a strange affection: he continues to regard the accused as a faithful comrade even while knowing who he is and what he has done.

Reinhold considers whether to expose the Pums operation if the case turns against him, especially if Franz speaks against him. He hesitates, sees the gang in the gallery, and decides that he will need his friends again. Franz’s silence therefore has a counterpart in Reinhold’s decision not to implicate the gang. Their loyalty is compromised and self-interested, but it remains consequential: neither man uses the trial to sever the criminal network that joins them. Reinhold is sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for voluntary manslaughter. Franz, who has not been indicted, turns at Eva’s sobbing and collapses, overwhelmed by Mieze’s death and the judgment that he failed her.

The relationship ends without a clean moral or emotional verdict. Franz no longer mistakes Reinhold for an uncomplicated friend, and his account of Mieze’s fate exposes the terrible cost of continuing to protect him. Yet Franz cannot reduce Reinhold to an enemy whom he can simply abandon: at the trial he watches him with a lingering, unsettling tenderness. The bond’s significance lies in that contradiction. Friendship gives Franz a language for loyalty and a reason to return; it also becomes the mechanism through which he tolerates betrayal, enters the gang, and fails to warn Mieze. Reinhold’s harm does not cancel Franz’s attachment, while attachment does not absolve Franz of what he could not bring himself to do.