The Märkisches Museum is the setting for a nighttime political shooting in which Stephan Labude and Jakob Fabian encounter two wounded opponents, one Communist and one National Socialist. Its surroundings, especially the Märkischer Roland, become a makeshift first-aid station and a point from which the friends try to move the injured men toward a hospital. The scene makes the museum’s urban setting a sharply localized view of a wider political crisis: ideological enmity has become physical violence, while Fabian’s uneasy attempt at intervention confronts both the immediate wounds and the older catastrophe of war.

The Museum and the Street Clash

The episode begins as Labude and Fabian argue about whether the reasonable and just should nevertheless dare to seek power. Gunshots and a cry interrupt them. Labude runs along the bridge toward the museum, and Fabian follows despite the pain in his heart. At the foot of the Märkischer Roland, they find a man crouched in the street, waving a revolver and shouting at an unseen opponent. A shot breaks a streetlamp, scattering glass across the pavement. Labude takes the weapon from the wounded man, who explains that a quarrel began in a tavern after another customer drew a swastika on the table. The argument turned into blows; after the landlord threw both men out, the other man pursued him, denounced the Communist International, and fired when the wounded man turned around.

Labude examines the first man’s wound, discovers that the bullet has passed through his calf, and tries to bandage it with a handkerchief. When the man attempts to rise, Labude holds him back and sends Fabian to find a taxi. Fabian runs across the road and along the dark riverside path, then directs a driver to the Märkischer Museum, where, he says, there is a patient to collect. The museum is therefore not merely a landmark in the friends’ route: its immediate surroundings become the place where an ideological street fight is converted into an urgent effort to get the wounded to medical care.

Two Enemies Bound for the Same Hospital

Fabian returns to the museum to find the first injured man still on the ground, and a second man has appeared: the National Socialist, wounded by a bullet lodged in his buttock. Fabian’s involuntary laughter draws an angry rebuke from him, but the exchange is cut short when Labude calls Fabian back across the street. The friends summon the taxi and put both opponents inside, seating the National Socialist beside the Communist. They climb in after them and direct the driver to the nearest hospital. The cramped ride makes the scene’s irony physical: men who had been shooting at one another are now carried together by the same vehicle, their wounds demanding care before their political hostilities can continue.

Street Violence and Its Political Diagnosis

The gunfight is presented not as an inexplicable eruption but as the street-level consequence of political antagonism. The first wounded man recounts that the quarrel began in a tavern when his opponent marked a tablecloth with a swastika; after an exchange of words and a blow, the landlord expelled them, but the National Socialist pursued him and fired. The man’s account supplies a concrete sequence of provocation, retaliation, and armed pursuit, while the unseen opponent’s cry about the Communist International shows how quickly party language turns a personal quarrel into an ideological confrontation.

Once both men are together, Fabian takes the revolver and addresses the two factions. He argues that Germany cannot continue in its present condition and condemns the attempt to preserve untenable circumstances through a cold dictatorship, but insists that shooting one another in the body achieves nothing. Had the shots killed instead of merely wounding, he says, the result would have been a trip to the morgue rather than the clinic, without any political gain. His intervention names the conflict’s futility without pretending the parties share a program: he tells the National Socialist that his party knows only what it opposes, and tells the Communist that he himself is a petty bourgeois, a term the worker uses as an insult. The exchange leaves their antagonism unresolved even as the wounded men are carried toward treatment.

The scene’s political violence also opens onto a larger, older violence in Fabian’s mind. As he walks back toward the museum, his heart pounding beneath his jacket and in his throat, he recalls photographs of mutilated First World War soldiers and imagines men still confined in isolated institutions, fed through glass tubes inserted into ruined mouths. Their families have been told they are missing; years later, wives have remarried, while the men survive only as photographs above sofas. The contrast between the wounded present-day adversaries and those unseen survivors makes the museum episode more than an isolated street fight: the city’s latest armed clash summons the war’s enduring bodily cost and Fabian’s fear that another war will come.

The museum thus functions as a compact urban stage for a crisis extending beyond its streets. The combatants’ parties, the tavern dispute, the revolver, and the improvised journey to hospital give political conflict a material, bodily form; Fabian’s attempt to interrupt that cycle is humane but cannot reconcile the opponents or remove the conditions that produced their violence. The scene’s movement—from argument, to gunshots, to first aid, to the shared taxi—offers a brief practical cooperation, while its memories of war and its unresolved party hostility deny any assurance that the violence has ended.

Place in the Novel’s Wider City

The museum episode belongs to a cityscape in which unemployment, political agitation, and street violence are not remote abstractions but pressures encountered in ordinary movement through Berlin. Elsewhere, Fabian passes through the administrative maze of the employment office, where clerks send him from one branch to another before he joins a queue of unemployed office workers presenting their control cards. At Weddingplatz, he witnesses police lines advancing on workers, mounted police charging, shots and stones, and reinforcements arriving in trucks. These episodes differ in scale and immediate cause from the shooting near the museum, but together they show political conflict taking shape in streets, institutions, and encounters between people whose social positions leave them exposed to the crisis.

The novel’s satirical method helps explain why such locations matter. Its preface presents the book as a warning about economic depression, mass unemployment, political opportunism, and the paralysis of hearts, and describes its urban portrait as a satirical distortion rather than a neutral photographic record. The street outside the Märkisches Museum gives that warning a sharply concrete form: a tavern argument over a swastika becomes a gunfight, and two political opponents must be transported together because both have been wounded. The museum itself is not given a separate history or institutional role; its narrative significance lies in serving as a recognizable landmark around which the violence, Fabian’s memories of war, and the fragile act of getting the injured to a hospital converge.