Reinhold—Cilly

The relation between Reinhold and Cilly reveals how Reinhold’s revolving attachments turn women into people he can discard and replace. When Cilly brings Franz Biberkopf a fur collar from Reinhold, then tries on boots Reinhold had sent earlier, the gifts expose a pattern: Reinhold is shedding one woman while directing another toward Franz. Cilly’s account makes that pattern explicit, and Franz’s response shifts from amused participation to refusal.

Gifts and the attempted handover

Cilly arrives at Franz’s with a fur collar, explaining that she has been asked to bring it to him. Franz accepts it approvingly and treats the gift as another item Reinhold has passed along: previously, he says, Reinhold had sent him boots. He fetches the oversized pair and invites Cilly to try them. The scene turns into a comic tumble as she puts them on, Franz slips his feet into the boots behind her, and the two hop and topple together.

The playfulness also gives the exchange a sharper edge. Franz recalls feeling as though he had a standing subscription to new clothes and women. Reinhold’s hand-me-downs bind material gifts to the transfer of female companions, making the arrangement look at once casual and transactional. Cilly is not merely delivering an object; she is caught in the same cycle that has already brought women and clothing from Reinhold to Franz.

Cilly’s account of Reinhold

When Franz tells Cilly that he has just seen Reinhold, she first dismisses the subject, then grows resentful and demands to know what Reinhold said. Her anger breaks into a tearful warning: Reinhold is no friend to Franz, she says, and his conduct toward women is that of a thug. She describes him as a man who picks up women wherever he goes, including women who are already married, and insists that she was neither his first nor anything close to his only partner. Her estimate—that he may have had a hundred women—conveys the scale of the serial pattern as she understands it, not a verified count.

Cilly also describes Reinhold’s changing presentation. At one moment he is brooding over cups of poor chicory; at another he returns dressed smartly, speaking confidently and dancing. She recalls meeting him at a dance hall on Chausseestrasse. In her telling, the shift in appearance and manner is part of his ability to attract women and move on to the next. A song about lovers who do not remain faithful runs through the scene, lending his repeated changes of partner the quality of a familiar refrain.

Her testimony complicates Franz’s easy acceptance of Reinhold’s gifts. Franz laughs at parts of the account and acknowledges that Reinhold has told him some of it, but Cilly presses the moral consequence: the women are not simply interchangeable companions in a joke between men. Her direct, agitated speech gives her an account of Reinhold’s conduct in her own terms, even as Franz initially receives it through the frame of his friendship with him.

Franz refuses to take Trude

Cilly’s anger sharpens when she realizes Franz has been helping Reinhold and has not concealed that fact. She calls Franz worse than Reinhold, while he denies it and explains that, after looking at her, he has been reconsidering the arrangement. He will not take Trude from Reinhold, he says, and Cilly is staying with him. He puts the boots away on top of the cupboard, a small but decisive gesture that ends their immediate role as props in Reinhold’s exchange.

Franz then asks Cilly to speak with Trude the following morning and bring her to meet him; he promises to stand by her. When Trude arrives, pale and distressed, Franz tells her that Reinhold is his friend and refuses to condemn him outright, but calls Reinhold’s treatment of her cruel. He advises Trude not to let Reinhold frighten her into leaving and offers his support, though he leaves the exact form of that support unresolved. Reinhold’s later insistence that he has to get rid of Trude confirms that the threat Cilly described is not abstract: he is actively trying to end that attachment as well.

Friendship, harm, and the limits of loyalty

The episode places Franz between loyalty to Reinhold and recognition of the damage Reinhold’s conduct causes. Cilly’s warning does not immediately erase that friendship: Franz continues to call Reinhold his friend and will not hear him wholly denounced. But he draws a boundary where the proposed transfer of women is concerned. He will not accept Trude as another companion passed along by Reinhold, and he tries instead to make himself available to her as an ally.

Cilly’s relationship with Reinhold is therefore shown less through a settled account of their feelings than through the objects and testimony surrounding his departures: the fur collar, the boots, her anger, and her claim that his cycle has involved many women. The contrast between Reinhold’s easy succession of partners and Franz’s momentary refusal gives the relation its central tension. Franz has not fully broken with Reinhold, but he has begun to resist being made an instrument of Reinhold’s treatment of women.