Franz refuses to take Trude from Reinhold after Cilly forces him to face what Reinhold’s treatment of women means. The episode turns a routine exchange between friends into a moral confrontation: Franz first sees himself as helping Reinhold, but comes to recognize that accepting another woman would make him part of a cycle of harm. He intervenes for Trude, rejects the material advantages Reinhold’s arrangements have brought him, and asks Reinhold to change. Yet he does not renounce their friendship, leaving the scene’s central contradiction unresolved.

Background: Friendship and the exchange of women

Reinhold asks Franz to take Trude, continuing a pattern in which he gives up one woman and moves on to another. Franz initially agrees to speak with Cilly about it. The decision seems to him an ordinary favor to a friend, even though it would involve another woman being passed between men. His own reflection on trafficking in women interrupts that easy acceptance: he suddenly wants something different and no longer wants to take part.

Cilly’s account gives the pattern a history and a human cost. She describes Reinhold as a man who picks women up and discards them, insisting that she was neither his first nor his eighth, but more likely one among a very large number. Her comparison of him to a sparrow, pecking and snatching at women, makes his conduct sound both habitual and predatory. She recalls meeting him in a dance hall on Chausseestrasse, and describes how he could appear to transform himself from a shabby, exhausted man into a polished, talkative dancer. The change in presentation helps explain how he repeatedly attracts women; it does not excuse what follows.

Cilly’s warning is personal rather than detached. She tells Franz that Reinhold has no real claim to friendship and that Franz should report him to the police, even mentioning the possibility of a reward from Berlin Police Headquarters. The suggestion sharpens the choice before Franz: he can continue to shelter Reinhold under the name of friendship, or acknowledge the damage Cilly says he is doing. Franz knows some of what she describes, but knowledge has not yet made him act.

Cilly challenges Franz’s complicity

When Franz explains that he has spoken with Reinhold and intends to help him, Cilly becomes angry and then breaks down. She calls Franz worse than Reinhold because Franz understands what is happening yet still helps him. Her response also makes visible the material side of the arrangement. Franz has received boots from Reinhold, just as a fur collar had earlier come through one of Reinhold’s women. These gifts are not incidental: they show that Franz has benefited from the same network he is now being asked to extend by taking Trude.

Franz at first tries to calm Cilly and insists on his loyalty to Reinhold. He invokes Reinhold’s supposed need for support, including the possibility that he might go to a Salvation Army meeting on Dresdener Straße. But Cilly’s distress, and the sight of the boots, make his defense harder to sustain. He takes the boots and throws them on top of a cupboard. The gesture does not undo his earlier complicity, but it gives his change of mind a visible form: he will not let the gifts decide what he does next.

Franz tells Cilly not to leave and asks her to speak to Trude the next morning, after Reinhold has gone out. He offers to stand by her and proposes that the three of them talk. This is a shift from treating Trude as a problem to be transferred to treating her as someone entitled to hear what is happening and decide what to do. Franz’s promise remains tentative—he does not yet know exactly how he will help—but he has stopped agreeing to take her off Reinhold’s hands.

Franz intervenes for Trude

At midday, Trude comes to Franz and Cilly’s home. She is pale and sad, and Cilly tells her plainly that Reinhold is upsetting her and does not care about her. Trude bursts into tears and cannot understand why the two of them have summoned her. Franz tries to reassure her without denouncing Reinhold outright: he calls Reinhold his friend and refuses to hear him condemned, but describes his conduct toward women as cruel and ruthless. He tells Trude not to let Reinhold frighten her into leaving, and says she can depend on him, though his offer to do something more remains unfinished.

The encounter exposes the strain in Franz’s position. He wants to protect Trude from being discarded, but still wants to preserve Reinhold’s standing as his friend. He can name the cruelty while resisting the conclusion Cilly has drawn about the man who commits it. The episode therefore does not present a clean conversion from complicity to moral certainty. Franz’s intervention is real, but it begins within the language of loyalty that has helped shield Reinhold.

The refusal becomes a confrontation

That evening, Reinhold picks Franz up from his stand in bitter cold and treats him to hot grog. After some preliminary talk, he raises Trude directly: he has had enough of her and wants to get rid of her that day. Franz answers that he has another woman already, and says he will not give up Cilly. He describes Cilly as settled with him and a decent woman, then urges Reinhold to behave like a decent human being and stop the cycle.

Reinhold wonders whether Franz’s objection has to do with the fur collar. He imagines what Trude might bring him—a silver pocket watch or a fur cap with ear flaps—and thus reduces the conflict to the possible value of another gift. Franz rejects that bargain and says he will buy his own things. His answer connects the earlier boots and collar to the present decision: material benefit has been one way the arrangement draws him in, but he will no longer accept its terms.

Franz then tries to persuade Reinhold as a friend, telling him to keep Trude and get used to her. He argues that a woman is a human being, not disposable “fluff,” and contrasts affection followed by rejection with buying a sex worker who can return to the street. Reinhold listens, drinks his coffee slowly, and looks vacant. He says that if Franz will not take Trude, he need not; he managed before Franz came. He then leaves, pleading lack of time. Franz has made the refusal unmistakable, but he has not persuaded Reinhold to change.

Aftermath and significance

The immediate result is therefore double. Trude is not handed over to Franz, and he has refused to participate in Reinhold’s next discard-and-replace arrangement. At the same time, Reinhold’s calm withdrawal leaves the underlying practice untouched. Franz has challenged his friend but continues to speak from within the friendship, a loyalty that keeps the break incomplete.

That night Franz cannot sleep. In the freezing room, with Cilly asleep beside him, he feels something inside being crushed without knowing by whom. The narrative connects his wakefulness to hatred of Reinhold, which presses through the door and disturbs him. A nearby image of a sleeping bird startled by a serpent gives the unease a form: danger has been present without being noticed. Reinhold, by contrast, sleeps beside Trude and dreams of murder. The juxtaposition does not resolve what will happen, but it makes clear that Franz’s refusal has not ended the danger surrounding Reinhold’s conduct. The episode’s decisive change is narrower and more consequential: Franz recognizes that friendship cannot justify passing another woman into the same destructive pattern, even when he is not yet ready to sever the friendship itself.