Reinhold’s compulsive cycle of relationships

Reinhold’s compulsive cycle of relationships is a recurring pattern of sudden infatuation followed by equally sudden rejection, with women passed from one man to another as if they were obligations that could be handed off. The pattern first appears as comic business between Reinhold and Franz Biberkopf, but Cilly’s account and Franz’s later refusal to take Trude make its cruelty harder to laugh away. Reinhold describes himself as unable to stop; the women bear the cost of that compulsion.

The Pattern Begins

Reinhold, first identified as the man in an army overcoat, tells Franz about the driver’s wife who left her husband for him. Now Reinhold no longer wants her, but says she cannot understand his repeated attempts to end the relationship and insists he must keep her until he dies. Franz treats the situation as ridiculous. He jokes that Reinhold should simply dismiss her, then agrees to take her off his hands as a favour. Their talk makes a transfer between friends sound like an ordinary solution to a private inconvenience.

The arrangement acquires the shape of a transaction when the driver’s wife arrives at Franz’s with a pair of stout boots Reinhold had asked her to bring. Franz thinks of the boots as Reinhold’s thirty pieces of silver, but goes with her that night to look for Reinhold, who is absent as planned. After she turns her affection toward Franz, she settles into his home. She mends his clothes and cleans his boots, including Reinhold’s oversized pair. Franz laughs at the incongruity and jokes that the two men could fit in one boot; they even try, and discover that his boast was an exaggeration. The scene’s warmth and physical comedy do not undo the arrangement’s premise: the woman’s change of partner is treated as a practical exchange between men.

Exchanges Become a System

Reinhold soon has another girlfriend, Cilly, while Franz remains with the driver’s wife. When Reinhold asks whether Franz has got rid of her, Franz says he likes her and will not send her away yet. He points to her lack of summer clothes and says he cannot afford to buy them, using the change of season to explain why the relationship might end later. Reinhold, meanwhile, comments on her inadequate winter clothing. Their long discussion of the temperature and the newspaper weather forecast is comic displacement: neither speaks plainly at first about the real proposal.

Franz eventually understands that Reinhold wants to be rid of Cilly too. Reinhold points to her imitation rabbit-fur coat, while Franz objects that he cannot support two women and that money is scarce. Reinhold says he is not asking him to keep both; another man can take the first one. Franz then recasts this succession of partners as chain trading, comparing it to dealing during the inflation, and enthusiastically offers to find a man for the driver’s wife. The joke reveals how readily the two men turn a woman’s intimate life into a chain of substitutions. Reinhold, watching Franz’s response, regards him as foolish for apparently considering keeping two women at once; their comic misunderstanding also shows that the friends do not understand the arrangement in the same way.

Reinhold’s Confession

The pattern becomes more troubling when Reinhold takes Franz to a meeting of the Salvation Army in Berlin. At the call for penitents to come forward, Reinhold abruptly leaves the meeting. Outside, he warns Franz that the service can soften a person until he agrees to anything. Later, in a pub, he admits that he wants to get away from women. He anticipates having to ask Franz to take Trude, a blond woman, but this time Franz says that he need not worry about him.

Reinhold explains that his attachments follow a repeated timetable: after roughly four weeks, he tires of a woman and cannot bear to see her, although before that he had been intensely infatuated with her. He says he has visited the Salvation Army twice, spoken with someone there, and prayed. The practice helps for six or eight weeks, he says, before the pattern returns. He does not believe in prayer and dismisses it as useless, even as he describes its temporary effect. His account puts an interval of relief inside the cycle rather than bringing it to an end.

He also insists that he does not know what makes him fall for a particular woman. A detail such as bobbed hair or a woman’s jokes may attract him, but he cannot explain why he suddenly becomes absorbed and pesters her. He says that he cannot stop. Franz listens with astonishment and tries to imagine how he might help, even wondering whether someone could put Reinhold off women altogether. Yet Reinhold can already predict the next reversal: despite his present disgust with Trude, he expects that another woman will soon captivate him and that he will spend everything to have her. The narrative sets his stated helplessness beside his active pursuit of women and his repeated demands that they leave, without making the consequences disappear into his self-description.

Cilly’s Account and Franz’s Refusal

Cilly gives Franz a sharper account of what Reinhold’s pattern means for the women involved. She calls him no friend and no pimp in the ordinary sense, but a thug who picks up women and discards them; she says that many women could tell the same story and suggests that she was far from his first partner. She recalls seeing him in a dance hall in Chausseestrasse: at first he seemed like a down-and-out man looking for sleep, then appeared as a polished, talkative dancer. Cilly says he pursues women even when they are married. Her account makes the cycle look less like a succession of private misunderstandings and more like a repeated predatory practice. Franz laughs during the exchange, but the warning remains between them.

When Trude comes to Franz and Cilly’s home, she is pale and distressed. Cilly tells her plainly that Reinhold is making her unhappy and does not care about her. Franz still defends his friend, saying that he will not hear Reinhold condemned, but he also calls the treatment of Trude cruelty to a helpless creature and tells her not to let Reinhold frighten her into leaving. The mixture of loyalty and disapproval marks a change: Franz is no longer simply amused by the business of passing women along.

That evening Reinhold again asks Franz to take a woman off his hands and says he already has someone new. Franz refuses to give up Cilly, who has settled with him, and urges Reinhold to behave decently and keep Trude. He rejects the suggestion that a watch or fur cap would make the exchange worthwhile, saying he will buy his own things. More important, he argues that a woman is a human being, not an object to be wrapped in affection and then discarded one after another. Reinhold answers quietly that Franz need not take Trude and that he managed before Franz arrived; then he leaves. Franz’s refusal does not end the cycle, but it breaks the friends’ easy cooperation with it.

That night Franz cannot sleep in the freezing room. As carts go toward the market hall, he thinks of a horse finding warmth in its stable, while Cilly sleeps beside him. His unease takes bodily form as something within him being crushed, and the narrative turns to the image of a bird awakened by a serpent passing nearby. Franz’s hatred of Reinhold weighs on him. Reinhold, meanwhile, sleeps beside Trude and dreams of murder, a dream in which he finds room to breathe. The contrast closes this episode without resolving Reinhold’s pattern: Franz has recognized the harm and refused one transfer, but Reinhold’s cycle remains in motion.