The image of Paradise

The image of Paradise is both a story of perfect beginnings and a measure of what life in Berlin cannot provide. The novel invokes Eden’s untroubled joy, then sets that ideal against crowded entertainment, smoke and cold, political disillusionment, and Franz Biberkopf’s repeated effort to feel at home. Paradise remains vivid, but never secure: it appears as a remembered myth, a popular fantasy of release, and a promise of companionship that can soften hardship without abolishing it.

Eden as an Opening Pattern

The first account of Paradise gives the image its fullest form. The Lord has made Adam and Eve, along with the animals, plants, heaven, and earth, and placed the pair in a garden of flowers and trees. Animals play around them; no creature torments another. Sun and moon rise and set in an orderly rhythm, while the day contains nothing but joy. This is not merely a beautiful setting but a world without injury or conflict, in which natural cycles proceed without threatening its inhabitants.

The narrative turns that description into a performance. It announces a joyful beginning and invites movement through a simple clapping and tapping song, with the right foot, then the left, circling around and returning. The refrain makes Paradise bodily and collective: the ideal is not only something to picture but something to enact together. Yet its return later in the book is not a return to Eden. The same playful cadence can briefly interrupt scenes of strain, but the city around it remains governed by work, money, politics, and physical limits.

Recreation and the Modern Paradise

At Hasenheide, Franz Biberkopf and Lina head toward the Neue Welt, where entertainment and merry-making promise a readily available version of happiness. Their approach is comic and flirtatious. Sitting together at home, they exchange a joke about what is in store when they share a sofa; they then drift toward the crowded venue, where a band in Tyrolean costume plays drinking songs. The Edenic promise has become an evening out, entered through music, beer, laughter, and the hope of leaving troubles behind.

The scene is deliberately abundant and ordinary. Civilians of both sexes fill the hall, joined by a handful of soldiers, each accompanied by a woman. Large families eat at tables; beer mugs, pipe and cigar smoke, cigarettes, and a comic spectacle attributed to Charlie Chaplin mingle with the music. A paper-tasselled stick costs fifty pfennigs and can be used to make playful contact with other visitors. The narrator’s attention to these small transactions and physical details makes this popular paradise tangible, but also shows that it is a public, commercial amusement rather than a protected garden. Pleasure is purchased, performed among strangers, and shared in a room that is already filling with smoke.

The contrast does not cancel the pleasure. Franz and Lina grin among the beer mugs and move their arms to the rhythm; the crowd sings along to a song promising that drink can set sorrow and pain aside. But this promise is temporary and knowingly fragile. Even the venue’s spectacle does not suspend ordinary relationships: the surrounding tables hold mismatched couples, changing attachments, and people watching one another. The modern paradise offers a noisy interval from hardship, not a world remade without conflict.

Exile, Smoke, and Physical Law

The account of the smoke makes that limit unusually explicit. As the hall grows fuggy, smoke rises through cracks, holes, and ventilators. Outside lie black night and cold. The smoke seems to regret its lightness and tries to resist the upward movement that has carried it away, but the ventilators turn only one way. It cannot reverse course; physical law has enclosed it. The passage transforms a commonplace feature of the crowded hall into a miniature expulsion from Paradise. Escape is possible, but it leads not into freedom or joy: it leads into cold, and there is no way back.

A war veteran gives that expulsion a human and political meaning. At the bar with Franz, he says his pension has been reduced and that he is therefore going over to the reds. He compares the one who drives people out of Paradise with a flaming sword to the archangel, and recalls sitting with his captain on Hartmannsweilerkopf. His broken sequence of reminiscence, including the correction from Storkow to Stargard, leaves the account conversational rather than grand. The image of lost Paradise belongs here to a veteran’s material grievance and remembered war, not simply to religious doctrine: expulsion is what happens to someone who has lost security and cannot regain the old place.

Paradise Recast as Order

Franz turns the image toward politics. Selling populist newspapers, he says that he has nothing against Jews but supports law and order, and insists that even Paradise must have order. His reference to the Stahlhelm and its leaders belongs to the same outlook: visible organization and authority seem to him reassuring alternatives to political disorder. The ideal garden has thus acquired a civic rule. Paradise is no longer only the place where no creature torments another; in Franz’s formulation, it is also a place where order must be maintained.

That confidence falters at Henschke’s pub. Franz bellowing there listens to himself as though from a distance and fears that houses and roofs will collapse on him. His appeal to law and order sits beside a mounting sense that the world is dreadfully wrong. The narrative then returns to Adam and Eve in Paradise, where birds and animals play. The remembered garden does not settle Franz’s crisis; its calm is set against the public scene and his terror. When the tension passes, the people around him turn to unemployment and economic grievance: timber magnates demand profits, Krupp lets pensioners starve, and the passage names one and a half million unemployed, up by 226,000 in a fortnight. The contrast exposes how little an abstract appeal to order can repair the conditions pressing on ordinary lives.

Joy, Companionship, and Fragility

The convivial song at the Neue Welt is not the only answer to hardship. After the pub episode, Lina walks with Franz and takes him dancing. On the tram she produces a crumpled Sunday copy of the Peace Messenger, which she has brought especially for him. Franz does not sell that paper, but he likes its name and the headline declaring that unhappiness can lead to happiness. They read together a poem by E. Fischer whose repeated assurance is that a traveller fares better with a friend. The image of Paradise shifts again: instead of a perfect garden, the relevant comfort is a companion’s hand and the relief of not proceeding alone.

The narrative links that intimacy back to the earlier action-song. As the tram rattles on, the Paradise refrain returns with its clapping, tapping, fish, and birds. The words retain their childlike buoyancy, while the setting is unmistakably urban and the riders are two people trying to make their way after an unsettling evening. Franz remembers his own singing, feels at home, and squeezes Lina’s arm. The modest gesture does not restore Eden or undo what has troubled him. It gives the image a smaller, human scale: for a moment, belonging is possible through shared song, reading, and touch.

That possibility remains provisional. Franz is described elsewhere in this stretch as cheerful and standing firmly on Berlin soil when he says he wants to be respectable; his respectable spell lasts for weeks, but is also likened to a stay of sentence. Paradise, accordingly, is not a final condition attained by good intentions or by an evening’s amusement. The novel keeps its promise in circulation—through Eden, drinking songs, a veteran’s memory, and Lina’s friendship—while showing how readily each version meets the forces that make happiness temporary.