Horse

Horse is a recurring animal presence in the novel, appearing as a mounted instrument of police force, as a performer in a cheap amusement, and as part of the rural landscape Fabian sees while leaving Berlin. These appearances connect the animal to sharply different human uses and settings, without giving it an independent role in the plot.

Political Force

At Weddingplatz, mounted police wait behind a barrier as workers approach along Reinickendorfer Straße. Once the two sides meet, the police horses move into the open space; their clattering hooves accompany the escalation from a charging police line to gunfire, broken windows, stones, and baton blows. The horses are part of the machinery of crowd control, carrying the mounted police into the clash as the workers scatter and regroup at the edges of the square.

A separate street shooting reveals the same presence in a more incidental way. After Fabian and Stephan Labude hear gunshots and run toward the Märkisches Museum, a wounded man explains that an argument in a tavern over a swastika on a tablecloth had turned into a shooting. In a speech meant to stop a further quarrel between political opponents, Fabian argues that neither party gains anything by shooting its rivals. He imagines the alternative to a wounded man being taken to a clinic as a body carried to the morgue, making bodily injury the measure of the dispute’s futility.

Amusement and Display

Later, Fabian enters a tent advertising a hippodrome and dancing for an admission price of twenty pfennigs. Its two rings turn animals and people into components of a cheap spectacle: a tin orchestra plays between a dance floor and a sand arena, where three worn-out horses are kept moving by a whip-wielding ringmaster. A woman rides one small, one-eyed white horse sidesaddle, laughing as she bounces in the saddle.

The scene lingers on the repeated, awkward routine. The woman’s skirt rides up as the horse trots; she pulls it down when passing Fabian, then eventually leaves it raised. On a later circuit the horse stops beside his table and gazes into his beer glass with its blind eye. The woman says there is no sugar there, and the ringmaster cracks his whip to send the horse on. The animal’s exhausted circuit and the rider’s calculated display make the tent a miniature of the novel’s urban commerce in bodies and attention.

The Journey Away from Berlin

As Fabian sits on the train after deciding to leave Berlin for his hometown and his mother, the countryside passes outside his window in a wavering, almost mechanical panorama. Among the images that punctuate the fields and meadows is a horse grazing in a pasture, followed by a foal hopping along a fence and tossing its head. The brief image differs from the horses in the city: there is no rider, whip, crowd, or police line. It is simply part of the landscape Fabian watches as the train carries him away, offering a quiet counterpoint to the violence and staged movement of the preceding urban scenes.