Episode 2, How is One to Live if One Doesn’t Want to Die? :
The episode opens on money troubles. Franz is out of work and down to his last ten pfennigs. His girlfriend, Lina, offers to work in some unspecified way, but Franz refuses to even entertain the notion. Again, sexual politics enters the show. He gets a job selling tie-holders (I have no idea what these are) which is a slightly gendered occupation. He quits his job due to feeling ridiculous, selling a luxury item he does not need himself, and decides to take up hawking newspapers. A local newspaperman gives him some "sexual education" pamphlets to sell. Franz becomes touched by a story from the "homosexuality" pamphlet. (In this story, a bald man picks up a young man and does not have sex with him. I believe sexual impotence is here again.) This horrifies Lina who believes he's caught the gay-fever, but he bites her on the neck, like a vampire, and, thus assured of his attraction to her, all is well once more. Lina furiously returns the pamphlets to the newsman. Observed by Franz, he likens her actions to that of the Prince of Homburg, who attacked his enemy and triumphed without direct orders (and was nearly executed for his insubordination.) I believe the show may be building to a theme on duty. After the triumph over the demons of sexual debauchery, they talk about unemployment rates and repeat the number of unemployed in Berlin (which is 673,582) about ten times. Again, the eerie fixation on detail and trivia.
Franz is then hired by a fascist newspaper. He is made to wear an armband with a swastika on it. He's confronted by one of his old friends, Meck, who wears a communist's red scarf. Meck then confronts Franz (with a gang of burly commies in tow) at a bar which Franz is a regular in. Franz doesn't realize what a difficulty he presents to the communists. They claim to represent the oppressed and dispossessed, but he, an ex-con and underemployed dude, is against them. A fist-fight seems all but inevitable. Franz tries to reason with them but, overcome, falls to raving about peace and fatherland, prison and war. The communists retreat, surly and bewildered. Outside, he meets up with Lina and bites her.
It appears that the beginnings of WW2 will be covered in this series. This partly explains the oddly pronounced inclusion of Hasidic Jews in the first episode. I wonder if Franz's impotence will transmute into misdirected rage? I suspect this show will not allow Franz to go long without suffering in some way, so I suspect he'll find fascism to be as difficult as democracy to handle. There is also some discussion of a decorative bird in a cage at the bar. The bird is female, we learn. Franz wonders about the bird's little lungs. After the pornography-returning scene, his girlfriend puts her head "where she imagines Franz's heart to be" but is in fact his upper lung, the show tells us in narration. There's that scientific trivia again, but also some obscure business with lungs which I have no idea what it means. Ok, on to the next episode.
Episode 3, A Hammer Blow to the Head Can Injure the Soul:
Franz decides to quit politics and instead hooks up with shoelace merchant. This is Lina's idea and when she hits on it, she and Franz gleefully repeat "shoelaces" to each other about 10 times in a row (the German for shoelace sounds like shnooze-ankle. It's kind of silly when they do it.) Lina and Franz mirror each other's actions in the shoelace-merchant's house and Lina declares afterwards that she believes in "them." Their relationship is seemingly better than ever. Franz immediately finds success when he reminds a widow of her husband and she buys dozens of shoelaces out of sentimentality (and also treats him to a spot of sex) The sex is not the relationship-destroyer you might think however, for since Lina was a whore, her attitude towards sex is pretty laissez-faire. Unfortunately, the shoelace merchant finds out about this and extorts the widow for more money. Franz meanwhile runs into his old girlfriend, Eva, the woman for whose assault he went to jail. They have a very brief moment together and it is this which is the relationship destroyer.
After Franz discovers the shoelace-merchant's plot, he vanishes, leaving Lina, Meck, and all of his friends. The episode ends with Lina and Meck making plans to live together. Meck kisses Lina on the neck, where Franz bit her at the end of last episode. Lina does not seem to enjoy it.
This was a plot-heavy episode. I think there was some machinery going on here, removing Franz, shifting Lena and Meck together, reintroducing Eva. There's something to be said about the difficulty of redemption, what with an easy but cruel life of crime always tantalizingly close to Franz's fingertips. He has another freak-out in a homeless shelter, the gaunt, nude bodies of out-of-work men and close-stacked bunk beds reminding me strongly of photos of holocaust camps. I suspect I'm just getting sleepy but this episode didn't seem as full of interesting little dead-ends and connections as the previous one did. Perhaps, as ever, I'm imagining things? We'll have to see what the future brings.
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