Crete von Joachimsthaler

Crete von Joachimsthaler is an old friend of Hugo Halder whose Berlin flat becomes a recurring destination at the end of the men’s nights out. Although the account offers little biography beyond her friendship with Halder, it gives her home a vivid and singular presence: musicians gather there, an admired conductor holds court at an untouched piano, and the nights can end with Halder and Nisa massaging Crete in a vast black bathtub while Hans Reiter waits alone for morning. The flat is both a social stage and a place where the companions’ different forms of intimacy and solitude become visible.

Identity and Setting

Crete is described as an old friend of Halder, with whom he maintains relations marked by subterfuge and misunderstandings. The narrative does not explain the history or substance of those complications, leaving their friendship suggestive rather than fully defined. What it does establish is the practical intimacy of their connection: the men repeatedly end their nights at her flat, which functions as a familiar setting within Halder’s Berlin circle.

The flat is distinguished by its scale and by the company it attracts. Musicians often visit, and after evenings at Crete’s home the gathering can continue into the late hours. Her residence is not merely a backdrop for conversation: its salon, wide hallways, kitchen, windows, and exceptional bathtub organize the movement and separation of the people inside it.

The Musical Circle

Among Crete’s visitors is an orchestra conductor whom Halder greatly respects. The conductor is thirty-five, yet the women admire him as though he were twenty-five and his followers venerate him as though he were eighty. When he comes to Crete’s flat to conclude an evening, he sits at the piano without touching it. His stillness is enough to gather a spellbound court around him; when he rises to leave, the narration likens his departure to that of a beekeeper moving away from a swarm, except that he is unprotected and any bee that tries to sting him, even in thought, is in danger.

The conductor’s most expansive claim is that the fourth dimension contains the three dimensions and thereby puts them in their place, obliterating the familiar three-dimensional world. He associates it with the fullness of the senses and Spirit, and contrasts the Eye with ordinary eyes, which he characterizes as limited organs absorbed in the routine sequence of birth, training, work, and death. Against that conventional life, the Eye travels along the rivers of philosophy, existence, and fate. Music alone, he says, can express the fourth dimension; he names Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. Crete’s apartment thus hosts both a concrete social ritual and an abstract argument about perception, art, and the world beyond ordinary limits.

Nights in the Bathtub

After the musicians leave, evenings at Crete’s flat usually end in bed or in a bathtub described as eight feet long and five feet wide, with black enamel and claw feet. At Crete’s express request, Halder and Nisa massage her from her temples to her toes while remaining fully dressed, sometimes even wearing their coats. Crete, naked except for the foam, moves in the water like a mermaid, turning from her back to her belly and sometimes going underwater. The scene makes the bathtub an extraordinary private theater, its extravagant proportions and carefully specified details setting it apart from the ordinary rooms of the apartment.

Hans remains outside this intimate arrangement. During the massages he waits in the kitchen, prepares a snack, pours himself a beer, and walks through the wide hallways or stands at the large salon windows. From there he watches sunrise spread over the city like a wave, with an image of engulfment that turns the view into something more ominous than a simple change of light. Crete’s gathering therefore brings the companions together under one roof but also makes their divisions unmistakable: Halder and Nisa attend to Crete, while Hans occupies the margins of their company.

Hans at Dawn

Hans sometimes mistakes a feverish flush in his face for desire, but the narration makes clear that he is wrong. At other times he opens the windows to clear smoke from the salon, turns off the lights, and sits bundled in his coat in an armchair. The initial heat gives way to cold and fatigue; he closes his eyes and, an hour later, is shaken awake by Halder and Nisa, who tell him they have to leave. Crete never appears at that hour. The dawn scene keeps her presence decisive but offstage: the others emerge from the night, while she remains behind.

Halder always carries a bundle that he tries to conceal under his coat. Once outside, Hans notices that his friends’ trouser legs and suit sleeves are wet and steaming in the cold, while the three men’s breath forms clouds in the morning air. The account does not identify the bundle or explain the wet clothing, and it does not state what has happened to Crete during the interval. These details preserve the night’s unexplained quality rather than resolve it. The friends refuse taxis, walk to the nearest cafe, and eat a large breakfast, moving from the secretive, private hours of the flat into an ordinary public routine.

Narrative Role

Crete’s characterization is concentrated in a small number of recurring circumstances rather than in an account of her past or inner life. The narrative shows her through the relationships and rituals associated with her apartment: Halder’s ambiguous friendship with her, the conductor’s musical gatherings, and the nocturnal bathtub scene. Its restraint leaves important matters unresolved, especially the meaning of Halder’s concealed bundle and the full nature of his connection to Crete.

Her home also gives the young Hans a vantage point on a world he does not fully share. He is physically present, making food and watching the sunrise, yet separated from the intimacy unfolding in the bathtub. The apartment’s elaborate social and sensual life is set against the cold morning walk and the military future approaching Hans: in 1939 he is drafted, trained, and assigned to the 310th Regiment. Crete’s flat consequently belongs to the prewar passage of his story, a remembered enclosure of music, secrecy, and waiting that stands on the threshold of his departure into military life.