Franz hears Zannovich’s story in a Jewish home during his disoriented first days back in Berlin. What begins as shelter from the street becomes a confrontation over the difference between a flattering cautionary tale and its humiliating ending. As Eliser recounts how Stefan Zannovich’s imposture was exposed, Franz recognizes a parallel between the condemned adventurer and prisoners treated as irredeemable. The story changes the terms of his distress: he argues not only for himself, but for the possibility that people who have been imprisoned can get back on their feet.

Arrival and Shelter

Newly released and overwhelmed by the city, Franz retreats into building entrances, hunches inside his yellow summer coat, and groans to steady himself. A small, red-bearded Jewish stranger follows and asks whether he is ill. Franz tries to escape the renewed press of Berlin’s streets, moving between doorways and gripping a banister as he insists inwardly that he will not go back outside. The stranger persists, assuring him that the city is large enough for one more person.

The man brings Franz into a home where an old resident objects to the noise because sick grandchildren are resting in the back rooms. The host allows Franz to stay on condition that he be quiet. The welcome is therefore real but precarious: Franz is among strangers, and even the refuge has rules and limited room. Sitting on the sofa, he fixes on the red walls; then he slides down onto the carpet and clutches it, resisting the stranger’s effort to get him up. His fear of being moved on is expressed through his attachment to the floor and his insistence on remaining where he is.

The Dispute over Zannovich

The household’s uneasy hospitality becomes a quarrel when Eliser, the red-bearded man’s brother-in-law, challenges the story Nachum has apparently told Franz about Zannovich. Eliser accuses Nachum of presenting the adventurer’s apparent success without telling how it ended. His intervention turns an anecdote into a dispute about what a story leaves out: Zannovich may be remembered as a man who prospered through audacity, but Eliser insists that the last part cannot be separated from the rest.

According to Eliser, Zannovich wrote letters to princes and then went to Brussels presenting himself as the Prince of Albania. He became involved in high-level politics and offered the government an army of one or two hundred thousand men in the event of war. When officials declined to enter into such an arrangement, he used their letter—addressed to him in princely terms—to borrow money. The scheme collapsed when he could not repay the loans. He was prosecuted in Brussels, where his imposture came to light, and, Eliser says, died in prison by suicide at the age of thirty. Eliser also describes the degrading treatment of his remains after death. The tale’s apparent lesson in boldness is thus revised into a story of exposure, punishment, and posthumous indignity.

Franz’s Response

Franz asks whether Eliser’s account is true, then presses beyond the fate of Zannovich himself. He wants to know what happened to others like him—not only ministers, bankers, or the officials involved in the case. Nachum and Eliser exchange a look, and Nachum’s answer is that the others watched. The exchange leaves Franz with a picture of people observing a man’s ruin rather than intervening, a response that sharpens his anger at the way institutions and bystanders treat the powerless.

Franz makes the comparison personal by opening his coat and showing how loose his waistcoat and trousers have become after half-starvation. He interprets the change in his body as evidence of how imprisonment breaks a person, and rejects the assumption that everyone who has been jailed is beyond recovery. He condemns the handling of Zannovich’s body as an affront to human dignity, not a just consequence of wrongdoing. His argument does not excuse Zannovich’s fraud; it separates punishment for an act from the claim that a person may therefore be treated as worthless.

Departure and Narrative Significance

Nachum tries to qualify the lesson, saying that people cannot always do what they wish and that circumstances may turn out differently. Franz accepts the men’s good intentions without accepting that explanation as justice. He shakes Nachum’s hand, gives his name as Franz Biberkopf, and thanks the household for taking him in. Before leaving, he straightens the displaced carpet and moves the table, making a small, practical repair to the room in which he had just been lying on the floor. The gesture contrasts with his earlier helplessness, though it does not erase it.

The men escort him to the door and remain concerned about whether he can walk alone. Franz goes upright across the cluttered yard, stepping over a patch of petrol, and insists that he still has his hands, feet, and eyes. His words mark a brief recovery of agency after the tale has confronted him with degradation and death. Yet he leaves muttering about getting brandy and threatening to strike anyone who approaches him. The ending therefore holds resolve and instability together: he has articulated a claim for the dignity of former prisoners, but remains frightened, combative, and drawn toward drink.

The episode also establishes a pattern in the novel’s use of stories within the city narrative. Zannovich’s life reaches Franz through competing tellers, and the quarrel over what Nachum did or did not relate makes the act of telling part of the event’s meaning. Later biblical episodes, including the account of Job’s losses and the father-and-son sacrifice scene, likewise place suffering inside inherited narrative frames. Here, however, the immediate force of the embedded tale is social and practical: Franz turns a stranger’s downfall into an argument against treating prisoners as permanently disposable.