Anhalter Bahnhof

Anhalter Bahnhof is a threshold in Jakob Fabian’s Berlin story: he passes through it while looking for work, then sits there again as he decides to leave the city. Its two appearances connect the grinding procedures of unemployment to the final severing of his ties to Berlin.

Setting and Employment Search

At Anhalter Bahnhof, Fabian buys a newspaper and asks the kiosk seller whether he could use an assistant. The seller explains that newspaper sales have fallen: people now read papers at the barber’s or in cafés, and even his former turnover had been meager. Fabian answers with a grim joke about a proposal to have the state deliver bread to homes like water, warning that one day even baking bread may not protect people from starvation. The brief exchange makes the station a place where the employment crisis is encountered not as an abstraction but as a dwindling trade and a failed prospect of work.

The station also belongs to Fabian’s futile circuit through the employment offices. After receiving incorrect directions, he goes by bus to an office near Wittenbergplatz, only to find that the indicated branch is not the one where he should register. At the proper office, a former consumer cooperative shop, unemployed clerks wait in a line to present their stamp cards and receive the required mark. Fabian is redirected again: because he is a propagandist, he is told to apply to the office for freelancers, academics, and artists. He travels by bus to Alexanderplatz, where the officials require proof that he has first registered with the regional employment office. The required preliminary registration sends him back to the place where he began his tour five hours earlier. Anhalter Bahnhof thus sits within a journey in which every referral creates another procedural obstacle rather than access to assistance.

Departure from Berlin

Later, Fabian is still sitting at Anhalter Bahnhof when he reads a newspaper account of Cornelia Battenberg beside Edwin Makart in a car. The caption presents her as Makart’s latest discovery and as a new type of intelligent German woman. Fabian quietly bids her well, then regards the photograph as if it were a grave. His profession is gone, Stephan Labude is dead, and Cornelia appears to belong to another man; the image crystallizes the losses that have made Berlin feel empty to him.

Fabian carefully cuts the photographs from the newspapers, puts the clippings in his notebook, and throws the papers away. He wants to go home, to his provincial hometown and his mother. Although he has not physically left Anhalter Bahnhof, he feels already absent from Berlin. When other people take up space at his table, he gets up, passes through the barrier, and boards the train waiting for its departure signal. The station changes from a waypoint in an exhausting search for work into the point of departure for his attempted return to an earlier life.

Narrative Significance

The station links two forms of stalled movement. In the employment-office sequence, buses carry Fabian between branches, but contradictory instructions return him to the beginning; the official process makes motion repetitive and unproductive. At the end, crossing the station barrier and boarding a train finally gives movement a clear direction: away from Berlin. Yet the departure is not presented as a confident resolution. Fabian wonders whether he will return, and the careful preservation of the photographs shows that leaving does not erase the city or the relationships he is abandoning. Anhalter Bahnhof therefore marks a physical exit whose emotional outcome remains unsettled.