Tiergarten is a Berlin park where Jakob Fabian’s intimate memories and unsettled relationship with Cornelia Battenberg intersect with the city’s grand public landscape. Its paths offer him room to wander, but not a way out of the past: he crosses the park amid monuments to dynastic history, then meets Cornelia again and walks beside her in silence.

A remembered intimacy

Tiergarten first appears as one of the places Fabian imagines visiting with his mother if they had more time together. He proposes a walk there, or a visit to the aquarium, before turning instead to stories from his childhood: the damaged bedstead he had scratched with a pin and proudly presented as a “herrliches Gemälde,” and the sewing supplies he once gave his mother as a birthday gift. The park belongs to a tender, domestic possibility—a shared outing and unhurried conversation—that the demands of work have displaced.

A route through Berlin

On leaving the house, Fabian travels to the Großer Stern and crosses Tiergarten toward the Brandenburg Gate. He wanders through the grounds as the rhododendrons bloom, then reaches the Siegesallee, where the Hohenzollern dynasty and the sculptor Begas seem indestructible. The sequence moves from flowering parkland to a monument-lined avenue: Fabian passes through a cultivated landscape in which the permanence claimed by imperial history stands in sharp contrast to his own uncertainty.

The reunion and its aftermath

After going to Café Schottenhaml and turning away, Fabian walks along Potsdamer Straße, hesitates at Potsdamer Platz, climbs Bellevuestraße, and returns to the café. Cornelia is there, apparently waiting, and signals to him. Their meeting continues outside: on Tiergartenstraße, he catches up with her after she has begun to leave. They walk in silence, feeling pity for each other, while Fabian wonders what he would say if she asked him to return to her and recalls that he has only fifty-six marks in his pocket.

Cornelia explains that the previous day was terrible and that the man involved had been repulsive. She fears what will happen if Fabian no longer cares for her; although they had seemed to have no worries, she says, their worries have grown. Fabian takes her arm, tells her to pull herself together, and apologizes for having hurt her. The park and its surrounding streets thus frame not a settled reconciliation but an encounter shaped by money, injury, dependence, and uncertainty. Tiergarten links a wished-for walk with his mother to a real, difficult walk beside Cornelia, making the same urban space hold both remembered closeness and an unresolved parting.