Political turmoil and street violence in Berlin

Political turmoil and street violence in Berlin form a recurring measure of the city’s crisis: ideological antagonism repeatedly becomes physical, while unemployment, factional politics, and official responses deepen the sense that ordinary life is approaching a rupture. The violence appears not as one isolated outbreak but across arguments, gunfire, demonstrations, and the public explanations that follow them. The novel’s preface describes its urban portrait as satire and warning, linking mass unemployment and political agitation with a broader social paralysis.

A Crisis Beyond the Street

The novel places political violence within a breakdown that is economic as well as partisan. In a conversation with Fabian, the editor Malmy describes a precarious financial system: he claims that a sudden large-scale withdrawal of money could bring down banks, cities, corporations, and the state. He also outlines a chain of pressures in which state support for large property and heavy industry coexists with depressed wages, weakened mass purchasing power, and capital moving abroad. The account presents instability as structural, not merely the result of individual misconduct.

Malmy connects that instability to technological change and unemployment. In his description, machinery multiplies production while reducing the workforce; goods are destroyed or left unused even as people lack food. The contradiction makes the prosperity promised by industrial expansion appear inseparable from mass hardship. In this setting, political violence emerges amid a social order that creates insecurity and then offers no convincing remedy.

The novel’s preface makes this warning explicit. It says the book was intended to alert readers to the abyss toward which Germany and Europe were moving, naming mass unemployment, the psychological depression that followed economic crisis, political parties acting without restraint, and a widespread inertia of the heart as storm signs. The preface calls the novel satire rather than a documentary portrait: its distorted images and exaggerations are meant to force attention to conditions that might otherwise be ignored.

Gunfire Near the Märkisches Museum

An earlier episode near the Märkisches Museum turns political disagreement into a street shooting. Fabian and Stephan Labude hear a shot and a cry, followed by more shots from another direction. Labude runs toward the museum, and Fabian follows despite the pain in his heart. At the foot of the Märkischer Roland, they find a wounded young man with a revolver, still shouting threats toward an unseen opponent. A streetlamp has been shattered in the exchange.

The wounded man explains that the confrontation began in a tavern. Another man had drawn a swastika on a tablecloth; the two argued, the wounded man struck him, and the landlord expelled them. The other man then followed him, denouncing the International, and fired when the wounded man turned around. This account supplies a concrete sequence: a political symbol and hostile language lead from an indoor dispute to pursuit and gunfire outside.

Labude takes the weapon from the wounded man and attempts to bandage his leg. Fabian asks whether the incident has convinced him of anything, making the scene a challenge to the man’s certainty as well as an act of immediate assistance. When another participant reaches for a weapon, Labude restrains him and Fabian removes the revolver. Fabian then argues that shooting at one another will not change the country’s conditions, and that a political movement defined only by its enemies does not know clearly what it opposes. The worker answers that his side fights the exploitation of the proletariat and calls Fabian a bourgeois; Fabian accepts the label of petty bourgeois, while disputing the usefulness of further violence. The encounter leaves the antagonists’ political divisions unresolved, but the immediate exchange of gunfire is interrupted.

Wedding: Protest and Police Action

Later, after losing his job and separating from Cornelia, Fabian encounters a larger confrontation at Wedding. He sees police vehicles leaving the barracks and follows them as crowds gather in the streets. At Weddingplatz, police block Reinickendorfer Straße while workers approach. Mounted police wait behind a cordon; uniformed working-class police face civilian workers. The staging makes the divisions within the working class visible even before the two sides meet.

As the workers’ songs grow louder, the police advance in a line, leaving a measured distance between officers. Singing gives way to angry shouting. The collision is first registered through sound; then cries confirm that the two sides have met and the police are striking the crowd. Mounted officers ride forward, a shot is heard, windows break, and the confrontation expands. Stones are thrown, a police sergeant is stabbed, and officers raise their batons and begin running. Reinforcements arrive in three trucks. Workers flee, then gather again at the edges of the square and in nearby streets.

Fabian presses through the crowd and leaves. A few streets away, apparent calm has returned, and a woman calls after him to ask whether there is fighting at Wedding. His answer treats the confrontation as a reciprocal measure-taking between opponents. The distance between the violence and the ordinary street around it is part of the episode’s force: disorder can seem to vanish within a few blocks without having been resolved.

The next day, Fabian reads the police report in a small room. It says the sergeant who was stabbed has died in hospital, three demonstrators were seriously injured, and others were arrested. The newspaper labels the demonstrators irresponsible elements and presents the police as carrying out an important duty; it also argues against reducing the police budget and uses the incident to support preventive policing. The report shifts attention from the encounter itself to the competing public interpretation of it, presenting a justification for greater police authority rather than exploring the conditions that brought workers into the street.

Political Language and the Prospect of Ruin

The street scenes belong to a wider political argument about whether Germany can continue on its current course. In a conversation with Labude, Fabian says that reasonable people and just people are unlikely to come to power. Labude grabs him by the coat and presses the implication: should they not try anyway? Their exchange is interrupted by the gunfire near the museum. The movement from political disagreement to an actual shooting gives their argument a setting in which inaction and action are both charged with risk.

Fabian encounters the same rhetoric of impending conflict in his conversation with Wenzkat, who says he belongs to the Stahlhelm but does not wear its badge because of his civilian professional practice. Wenzkat calls the situation a desperate struggle. Fabian counters that, if his side begins a fight, it will lead straight to despair. Wenzkat accepts the prospect of national ruin as an outcome, insisting that history has always worked that way. Fabian objects that a group cannot presume to impose destruction on sixty million people merely to satisfy wounded pride and a taste for fighting. Their argument exposes a political attitude that treats historical precedent and national honor as sufficient reasons to risk catastrophe.

Across these episodes, violence is shown alongside economic desperation, organized political identities, and narratives that justify force. The tavern dispute over a swastika becomes gunfire; a workers’ march meets a police cordon; a newspaper recasts casualties as evidence for policing. The pattern supports the preface’s warning: the city’s danger lies not only in visible clashes but also in the social inertia and ready-made explanations that allow them to recur.