Episode 6, Love Has Its Price:
This episode is almost the halfway point for the series and seems to be the beginning of the denouement. The episode opens with Franz reeling from a nightmare. He has dreamed that he became a succession of animals ending as a bird who is bitten by a snake. He turns into himself again and the snake turns into Reinhold, his aristocratic friend from the last episode who gave him his current girlfriend, Cilly. Sure enough, as soon as Franz hits the bar, Reinhold asks him to take another woman off of his hands. When Franz refuses, Reinhold becomes cold and angry. Clearly, Franz has made an enemy.
Franz later comes upon one of his fruit-selling friends who is being beaten up in the street by a gang of thugs. This is meant to indicate the sea-change taking place in Germany, the populace turning against various minorities and violence becoming more commonplace. The beaten friend begs Franz to deliver a message to the head fruit-seller. When Franz does this, he is greeted by a very made-up old woman with a gun. It turns out that the fruit-selling operation is a front for organized crime. All of Franz's friends are involved and all of them thought he was aware of what was going on. When he expresses his amazement, they claim that he has now "become involved" and the head gangsters will not allow him to leave. His friend Reinhold is sicked on him to prevent him from leaving. As Gremany is falling into the hands of thugs and criminals, so too is Franz.
Franz escapes out the back of the "fruit truck" and is instantly run over by another car (the wife of the driver urges him to just drive away, true to the deceitful nature of women in this show.) The other characters claim him to be dead and Cilly runs back into the wife-swapping arms of Reinhold. Reinhold and Cilly get steaming drunk and return to Reinhold's current girlfriend. He pretends not to know her and after some increasingly unpleasant mind-games strikes her, rips her clothing and throws her out. She tries to kiss him but he pulls her face off of his by her hair. The scene is incredibly unpleasant and long as well. Reinhold even has a stutter, to add frustration and that much more unpleasantness to an already dismal and aggravating scene.
A narrator shows up in this episode. There have been bits of narration before but this was the first time it became kind of obtrusive. The narrator talks at length about dark, poisonous waters and the deceit of man (both Franz and Reinhold are accused of deceit via juxtaposed narration.) The episode ends with Franz alive in the strangers' car. The narrator ominously cautions us that "there is no need to despair" and tells us that we will hear this repeated often in the episodes to come. Great.
Episode 6, Remember: An Oath can be Amputated
Franz is fine but has lost an arm. He's back with Eva and her boyfriend/pimp who insists that he extort the fruit-syndicate for money in payment of his lost arm. Franz keeps sullenly repeating that doing so won't bring back his arm, but does not object to Eva and the boyfriend rousing rabble on his behalf.
The fruit-gang catches wind of this and agrees to give Franz some money. Reinhold refuses outright, insisting they should just kill Franz, and leaves. One of the other fruit-ers shows up at Franz's hideout and offers him the money. This precipitates one of Franz's freak-outs and the fruit-er leaves Franz passed out on the ground. The narrator talks of slaughterhouses.
Dejected, Franz visits the red-light district. He is told by a pimp that one of his whores is the Whore of Babylon. He is intrigued but decides that sex is not his vice and waddles off to a bar. There he has a cute scene with a glass of beer and picks up an alcoholic woman with a laugh like a scream. They visit the newspaper-man to find that he has lost his testicles entirely by now.
This episode involves further dissipation of morals and impotence of men. Pimps and whores are featured in this episode. Two rich young dilettantes discuss working and conclude that being on welfare is for suckers and that being a pimp is the best profession. They go on to argue that there is no objective morality and that theft is not always theft. This raises a round of applause from the other bar-patrons.
I'm kind of just reporting plot-points here. I suppose I can argue that by now the German populace has become crippled, but apart from the disintegration of Franz and the newspaper-man, I don't see much to support my grand unified Franz=Germany theory. Also I don't see much new happening. Woman are deceitful, men are impotent, life progresses as usual. The bar patrons talk about how oppressive politics is becoming recently. Perhaps the descent into sex and booze mirrors a willfull ignorance on the populace's behalf. At any rate, the episode ends with Cilly discovering Franz is alive and confronting Reinhold about it.
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