Horses

Horses in Berlin Alexanderplatz are neither decorative countryside figures nor detached symbols: they move through the city’s labor, trade, and cold-weather routines. The novel shows them pulling butcher wagons, being bought and sold, and running at night, while also using the image of a fallen, kicked horse to render Franz Biberkopf’s desperate physical momentum. Their appearances connect the city’s ordinary economy to bodies that are made to work, endure, and keep moving.

Work and trade beside the slaughterhouse

Along Eldenauer Strasse, dirty grey walls topped with barbed wire border the slaughterhouse grounds. In winter, with bare trees waiting for spring, butcher wagons hurry along the street. Their yellow and red wheels turn behind light horses, making animal labor part of the brisk traffic around the market and slaughter complex. The scene’s movement is practical and unsentimental: the horses are at work amid commercial business, not an idealized rural landscape.

A skinny horse runs behind one wagon as people call after it and bargain over the animal. The proposed price is 50 marks, accompanied by a round of drinks for eight; the horse turns, shivers, and nibbles at a tree while the driver pulls it back. The bargaining treats the horse as a saleable creature, while its small gestures and exposure to the winter street remain visible within the transaction. The exchange concludes when a man slaps the horse and the deal is settled. The abrupt gesture makes the human decision decisive, but the horse’s shivering body has already given the scene its measure of vulnerability.

The surrounding setting sharpens that contrast without making the horse’s fate explicit. Administration buildings, a war memorial, and long halls with numbered entrances mark a highly organized site devoted to the handling and slaughter of animals. The working horses pass along its outer streets, part of the same urban economy but not identified as animals destined for the slaughter rooms. The narrative keeps their particular labor and the institution’s larger machinery in view without confusing the two.

Night labor and the cold

In another winter passage, vegetable carts are going to the market hall while Franz lies awake beside Cilly. His toes are freezing, and he imagines that he would not want to be a horse running around at night in the cold; a stable, by contrast, would be warm. The thought turns a passing urban routine into a comparison of exposure and shelter. The horse’s imagined working night gives shape to Franz’s own bodily discomfort, but the passage does not claim that he knows the animals’ experience beyond this immediate thought.

The scene is built out of contrasts: Cilly sleeps while Franz cannot; a stable offers warmth while the street is cold; carts keep moving as he remains awake. The animal enters his thoughts at the point where ordinary traffic and private distress meet. Rather than supplying a separate episode about a horse, the image lets the laboring animal register the material conditions of the city’s night—movement, cold, and the need for somewhere to rest.

The horse as an image of bodily force

When Franz hurries through crowded Alexanderplatz, the narration compares him to an old nag that has slipped on wet asphalt, been kicked in the belly, scrambled up, and careered away. The simile gives his movement a history of injury and compulsion: he runs not with effortless freedom but like a body recovering from a blow and escaping the next one. The horse image makes his speed physical, awkward, and exposed.

That comparison also draws on Franz’s own past as an athlete. He still has muscles, and as he jogs along Alexanderstrasse he notices that his firm tread resembles a guardsman’s precise marching. The passage moves between animal flight and disciplined human marching, placing Franz’s body between two kinds of driven motion. The horse does not become a character with a narrated inner life; instead, its familiar vulnerability lends concrete force to the description of Franz as he struggles through the crowd.

Animals within the city’s rhythms

Across these scenes, horses belong to several overlapping rhythms: the brisk passage of butcher wagons, the stop-and-start bargaining over a skinny animal, the imagined night journey of carts, and Franz’s sudden run through the square. The novel sets these movements among the institutions and streets of Berlin, where work and traffic continue through winter. Horses make that continuity bodily visible: they carry the pace of commerce, while their shivering, exposure, or imagined exhaustion interrupts any view of urban movement as purely mechanical.

Their narrative function is therefore grounded in specific encounters rather than a single fixed meaning. The horse beside the slaughterhouse is a commodity being negotiated over; the horse in Franz’s comparison bears the marks of a fall and a kick; the horse in his sleepless thought is exposed to cold and longs, in his imagining, for a warm stable. Together, these appearances place animal labor and human hardship in proximity without making them identical. The city’s motion depends on vulnerable bodies, and the novel repeatedly makes that dependence visible in the streets.