Political shootout near the Märkisches Museum-An Action in Fabian | Readify Wiki: A Better Way to Explore Books

Political shootout near the Märkisches Museum begins as a partisan quarrel and ends with two men from opposing political camps being carried together to a hospital. The episode makes violence tangible in wounded bodies, a stolen revolver, and a taxi summoned in the night; Jakob Fabian and Stephan Labude’s attempt to help both men exposes the gulf between political slogans and the shared human cost of street conflict.

Causes and Background

The immediate trigger is a dispute in a tavern. According to the wounded Communist worker, his opponent drew a swastika on the tablecloth; the worker objected, words followed, and he struck the other man behind the ears. The innkeeper threw them out. The National Socialist pursued him, denounced the Communist International, and fired when the worker turned around. The account traces the shootout to a political provocation that escalates through argument, a fistfight, and pursuit into gunfire.

The clash occurs amid a broader atmosphere of political and economic breakdown. Elsewhere in the novel, Malmy describes state support for large landowners and heavy industry, the suppression of wages and mass purchasing power, and capital fleeing across borders. He also links technological increases in production to shrinking employment, while grain and coffee are destroyed or wine growers complain of abundant harvests. These speeches do not explain the specific quarrel outside the tavern, but they frame the shooting within a society where hardship and political antagonism intensify together.

The Shootout and Its Immediate Aftermath

Labude and Fabian hear a shot, a cry, and then three more shots from another direction. Labude runs along the bridge toward the Märkisches Museum; Fabian follows, despite the pain in his heart. At the foot of the Märkischer Roland, they find a stocky young man in a cap crouching with a revolver and firing across the street at an unseen opponent. Labude takes the weapon from him. The man says the bullet has gone through his calf, and Labude kneels to make a makeshift bandage with a handkerchief.

The injured worker resists the prospect of police involvement. He complains that a policeman would only arrest a proletarian for having the nerve to let a Nazi break his bones. Labude keeps him from getting up and sends Fabian to find a taxi. Fabian runs along the street and the nighttime riverside path, then hires a car to collect the wounded man at the museum. His heart pounds painfully during the errand, a bodily reminder that the violence is not abstract even to the friend who treats it with irony.

Opposing Wounds and Fabian’s Intervention

As Fabian returns, another injured man calls out from the ground, explaining that he is the other participant in the exchange of fire. Fabian initially laughs at the grotesque symmetry: across the street, a National Socialist and a Communist have each been shot, one in the calf and the other in the buttock. He apologizes for his laughter, but the wounded man answers that a day will come when Fabian will no longer find anything funny. The echo from the museum’s masonry gives the moment a bleakly theatrical quality: the duel’s two halves are now exposed together, though their political antagonism has not disappeared.

Labude arrives in irritation, and Fabian identifies the second casualty as the other half of the duel. The friends call the chauffeur and place the National Socialist in the car beside his Communist opponent, then climb in and direct the driver to the nearest hospital. The cramped shared journey turns the episode’s central irony into a physical arrangement: the men who had aimed weapons at each other must now travel side by side because both need treatment. Fabian has taken the second man’s revolver, while Labude has already disarmed and bandaged the first; their practical interventions interrupt the cycle of shooting without pretending that the antagonism has been settled.

Inside the car, Fabian addresses both men as political opponents caught in a common crisis. He argues that Germany cannot continue as it is and condemns the attempt to preserve untenable conditions through dictatorship, but rejects the idea that shooting one another can achieve anything. A better aim by either gunman would have changed the destination from a clinic to a morgue, without accomplishing a political purpose. He tells the National Socialist that his party knows what it opposes only imperfectly, then turns to the worker, who describes the proletariat as a force fighting its exploiters and calls Fabian a bourgeois. Fabian accepts the label of petty bourgeois, which he notes has become an insult, and insists that the worker’s demand for justice is a duty. He calls himself the worker’s friend because they share an enemy and because he loves justice, while warning that poverty alone does not make people good or wise. Labude cuts off the worker when he begins to invoke his leaders, refusing to let the exchange become another recitation of party claims.

Hospital, Wider Street Violence, and Consequences

Fabian rings the hospital entrance bell, and attendants carry the two wounded men from the car while the duty doctor greets their rescuers. The doctor says that nine people have been admitted that night, including one with a serious abdominal wound; all are workers or clerks. He observes that the injured are usually residents of the suburbs who know one another, and compares these political shootings to brawls at dance halls. Both, in his view, are excesses of German associational life. His bitter joke that the combatants seem intent on reducing unemployment by shooting one another reframes the gunfight as both political violence and a grotesque response to mass joblessness. Fabian acknowledges that the people are agitated; the doctor answers with the image of a continent suffering from hunger typhus, a patient already delirious and striking out. The hospital door closes on the wounded men, leaving the political antagonism unresolved but its human cost unmistakably shared.

The episode belongs to a larger pattern of escalating public violence. In another confrontation, at Weddingplatz, police cordons face approaching workers; mounted officers wait behind the barrier, while uniformed working-class policemen stand against civilian workers. As the workers’ songs grow louder and turn into angry shouting, police advance and the two sides collide. The police strike, horses charge, shots ring out, windows shatter, and stones fly; a police sergeant is stabbed before reinforcements arrive in trucks and drive the crowd back. Fabian presses through the mass of people and continues on, while the noise fades quickly enough that streets only a few blocks away seem orderly. Set beside that dispersal, the museum shootout shows another face of the same crisis: not a mass demonstration met by state force, but two political adversaries turning a tavern dispute into gunfire, then depending on their opponents for immediate aid.