Franz’s expulsion order and welfare supervision turn his attempt to begin again in Berlin into a contest with administrative power. The police classify him as a danger because of his criminal record and give him fourteen days to leave a broad area around the city. A former-prisoner welfare office then takes him under social-work supervision, offering a way to remain in Berlin while making his work and whereabouts subject to regular scrutiny. The sequence replaces the prison gate with new boundaries: Franz is free, but not free to settle where he chooses.

Background: Freedom and a New Vow

Franz leaves Tegel penitentiary after serving four years. At the gate he hesitates, letting trams pass and pressing himself against the red wall rather than boarding one. The prison is behind him, but release does not immediately feel like uncomplicated freedom. Once he finally gets on a tram and enters the city, the movement of the crowd, the shops, and ordinary street life intensify his disorientation. The narration presents this return as a difficult passage into a world that seems familiar yet strangely lifeless to him.

Franz nevertheless tries to establish himself. He has sold the furniture from his former room, receives a little money from Tegel, and borrows some from his landlady and his friend Gottlieb Meck. After parting from Minna, he swears to himself and to the world that he will live decently in Berlin, whether he has money or not. The official notice arrives against this declaration of purpose: before his promise can become a settled life, the state challenges his right to remain in the city.

The Order and Its Reach

The notice is a yellow, official paper bearing the authority of the chief of police, Department 5. It cites Franz’s prison sentence for threatening behavior and assault resulting in death, and declares him a threat to public safety and morals. It invokes several laws governing movement and regional administration as the basis for an order expelling him from Berlin and a long list of surrounding districts. The document makes his past record the stated reason for restricting his future movement.

The prohibition extends beyond the city proper. It names Charlottenburg, Neukölln, Schöneberg, Wilmersdorf, Lichtenberg, Stralau, Friedenau, Schmargendorf, Tempelhof, Britz, Treptow, Reinickendorf, Weißensee, Pankow, and Tegel among the excluded areas. It also warns that settling in named neighboring places, including Potsdam, Spandau, Friedrichsfelde, Friedrichshagen, Rahnsdorf, Cöpenick, Steglitz, Zehlendorf, Teltow, and Wannsee, would bring another expulsion. Franz is given fourteen days to leave. If he is found in, or returns to, the prohibited area afterward, the notice prescribes a fine of 100 marks or, if he cannot pay, ten days in custody.

The form’s accumulation of districts, deadlines, legal references, and penalties gives the order a reach that exceeds a simple instruction to move house. It maps the places where Franz may not live and specifies the punishment awaiting him if he stays. His declared intention to live decently does not erase his file or alter the authority’s assessment of him. The collision is therefore both personal and administrative: he claims a future in Berlin, while the document treats his past as grounds to exclude him.

Welfare Supervision as an Alternative

Shaken by the order, Franz goes to the former-prisoners welfare center at 1 Grünerstrasse, near the S-Bahn and Alexanderplatz. Staff question him and have him sign a statement that he has placed himself under the supervision of their social worker. They say they will investigate whether he is working and require him to report to the office every month. The arrangement gives him a practical route around immediate expulsion, but it is not unrestricted independence: his conduct and employment are to be checked, and his continuing presence is tied to a regular reporting obligation.

The narrator briskly describes the matter as settled, contrasting the frightening scale of the police notice with the office’s routine procedure. Yet the contrast does not make the surveillance disappear. The police order has defined Franz as a risk; welfare supervision allows him to stay while continuing to monitor him. The shift is from a threatened removal to conditional oversight, not from institutional control to complete freedom.

Immediate Aftermath and Significance

For a time Franz takes the arrangement as the beginning of a new life. He eats meat, potatoes, and drinks beer for four weeks, then visits the Jewish acquaintances in Dragonerstrasse to thank them. They do not recognize him at first, so changed is his appearance. When asked about his business, he says he has none and can manage, claiming to have savings. He recalls the story of Stefan Zannovich and speaks of the possibility of marrying, but these remarks do not establish a new occupation or a settled plan. His confidence sits uneasily beside the notice’s demand that he work and report each month.

The sequence also gives the novel’s later return to Tegel a different weight. In a later passage, Franz rides the number 41 tram back toward the prison and looks at its red walls as part of his own life, rather than simply turning away from them at the moment of release. That later journey does not undo the order or the welfare arrangement; it shows how the apparent fresh start remains entangled with the institutions and history he hoped to leave behind. The expulsion notice is thus a decisive limit on Franz’s vow: Berlin is the place where he intends to live decently, but access to that life depends on administrative permission and continuing supervision.