Kaufhaus des Westens is both a practical refuge from the rain and a stage on which Berlin’s social judgments become visible. Jakob Fabian enters to pass the time without money or an umbrella, but the department store’s crowded rooms bring him face to face with a child being shamed for stealing a small gift and, later, with the humiliating economics of his own unemployment. Its polished commercial order contains both casual exclusion and an unexpected act of solidarity.

Setting and Commercial Life

As rain begins, Fabian walks through the store because it offers entertainment even to people who have no money and no umbrella. A saleswoman plays the piano skillfully; the smell of fish drives him from the food department, and on the furniture floor a young salesman presses him to buy a large wardrobe, calling the opportunity exceptional. Fabian evades the sales pitch and wanders into the book department, where an antiquarian table holds a selection of Schopenhauer.

The store’s departments shape a sequence of small encounters between need and commerce. Fabian reads Schopenhauer’s reflections on differences in people’s susceptibility to pleasure and pain, then asks an elderly saleswoman whether she has cotton socks. She regards him indignantly and directs him downstairs. That abrupt dismissal takes him away from the book and toward the porcelain and ceramics department, where a crowd has gathered around a crying girl. The store is not simply a backdrop: its goods, sales routines, and public aisles bring private deprivation into view.

The Girl and the Ashtray

The girl, about ten years old, wears a schoolbag and shabby clothes. She trembles as adults surround her with angry faces. An older woman says she caught the child stealing a small, colorful ashtray; the department head orders the girl taken to the director, and another saleswoman grabs her by the shoulder. A bystander condemns the younger generation, while the child weeps under the crowd’s scrutiny.

Fabian pushes through the onlookers and orders the saleswoman to let the girl go. When someone challenges his right to interfere, he taps the woman’s fingers, making her release the child, and draws the girl to his side. He asks why she took an ashtray in particular and whether she already smokes cigars. The girl explains that she had no money, then rises onto her toes to add that it is her father’s birthday. Her answer changes the scene’s terms: what the crowd has treated as a simple offense is also a child’s attempt to bring her father a birthday present.

The woman who condemned the girl objects that lack of money cannot justify stealing. The scene leaves the accusation intact but refuses to let it be the only measure of the child. Fabian’s intervention interrupts the store’s impromptu tribunal: he does not erase the theft, but he stops the adults from turning it into a spectacle of punishment and contempt.

Poverty in the Public Space

The episode takes place against Fabian’s own concealed loss of work. Earlier, he has left his mother believing he is going to the office and must keep up the pretence that he has not been dismissed; his only suit is one he bought himself, while his mother has spent her life working and saving. After leaving the department store, he opens car doors for passers-by and receives small coins. At first the money is given without his asking, and he wonders whether he already looks like a beggar. A quarter of an hour later, he has earned sixty-five pfennigs this way.

The store episode thus sits within a wider movement from observing hardship to being exposed to it. Fabian has just defended a child whose poverty has made her a target; outside, his own need takes on a public form that resembles begging. He imagines how his friend Stephan Labude might react to seeing a man with literary-historical training opening car doors, but the thought no longer frightens him. He would still dread meeting his mother or Cornelia Battenberg in that condition. The difference between the girl’s shame and Fabian’s self-consciousness is not a difference in the store’s commercial world so much as a difference in what each can afford to conceal.

Irene Moll’s Encounter

Among those who give Fabian money is Irene Moll, who has watched him from the street. She hands him a larger coin and addresses him with a mixture of mockery and familiarity, asking whether he has fallen so low. She reminds him that he refused her husband’s offer and could have kept the keys, and says she had expected his reserve to bring him back to her bed. She then has him carry her packages, treating the coin as a tip already paid.

As they walk, Irene asks what she can do for him and infers that he has lost his position. She says she bears him no grudge, but that Felix Moll can no longer be relied upon: he has gone to sea, perhaps to France or somewhere else, while the criminal police now occupy their home. She reveals that Felix embezzled money entrusted to his notary office and that the theft had been going on for years. The encounter extends the store’s concern with money beyond buying and selling: coins offered as charity, packages carried for a tip, a rejected sexual proposition, and embezzled funds all register different forms of dependence and exchange. Kaufhaus des Westens is where Fabian’s precarious situation meets Irene’s revelation, with the everyday traffic of commerce providing the setting for a sharp exposure of both.