Bastian—Frederick

Bastian’s abuse of Frederick at Schulpforta is a repeated exercise in institutionalized cruelty, not a single outburst. By naming Frederick the weakest, ordering the other cadets to chase him, and directing a subordinate to strike him, Bastian converts the school’s discipline into public punishment. Frederick’s refusal to cry out or ask to leave intensifies Bastian’s hostility; Werner Pfennig watches the violence and repeatedly fails to intervene. The relationship exposes how the school’s hierarchy recruits its pupils into the abuse it authorizes.

The Exercise Becomes a Test

Every afternoon, whatever the weather, the commandant summons the fourteen-year-olds with a whistle and addresses them about the different ways a person can die. His lesson divides them into fighters and nobodies, and ends by demanding that the boys consider how they themselves will die. The rubber hose twirling in his hand makes the speech’s violence more than a metaphor: it is an instrument already present in the daily ritual.

On a windy afternoon, Bastian singles out Helmut Rödel, a small boy who habitually keeps his hands clenched, and asks him to identify the corps’ weakest member. Rödel points directly at Frederick. Werner Pfennig feels the choice land heavily, while Bastian calls Frederick forward. The question has turned the cadets into participants in a public ranking, with Frederick exposed before the group before anyone lays a hand on him.

Bastian sends Frederick running across the snowy field, with the other boys racing after him. Frederick runs hard, but the fastest cadets pursue him with a new urgency, eager to discover what will happen when someone is caught. They haul him down when he is fifteen strides from Bastian. Once the boys gather around, Frederick stands in the middle, panting and blinking, while Bastian asks whether he is the weakest. Frederick answers that he does not know. When Bastian insists that he look at him, Frederick replies that people can be weak in some ways and others in different ways. His answer resists the simple category the exercise is designed to impose, but it does not protect him from the punishment.

Bastian Directs the Beating

Frederick’s reply changes Bastian’s expression. The commandant’s lips thin, his eyes narrow, and malice becomes visible in his face. He takes the hose from around his neck and gives it to Rödel, urging him to use it on Frederick. The transfer matters: Bastian does not merely strike Frederick himself. He orders another cadet to carry out the violence while he remains in command and watches.

Rödel hesitates only briefly before swinging the three-foot hose across Frederick’s shoulder. Bastian says, “Again.” The next blow catches Frederick on the jaw. On the third, Frederick continues to withstand the beating; on the fourth, he raises his arms and the hose strikes his forearms. Rödel swings again, and Bastian invokes Christ as an example before the blows continue. Werner Pfennig hears the hose whistle and the deadened impacts against Frederick’s hands, shoulders, and face. The staged religious language does not interrupt the assault: it accompanies and legitimizes it within the scene.

During the beating, Werner Pfennig’s thoughts turn to Zollverein and to childhood afternoons with his sister, Jutta. He remembers Frau Elena moving among the dormitory beds at night, reassuring the boys that she is beside them. These memories sharpen his recognition that what he sees is wrong, but recognition does not become action. Werner opens his mouth and closes it again; he shuts his eyes and his mind. When the beating stops, Frederick is facedown in the snow, and Werner has not intervened.

Repetition and Escalation

The violence does not end with that afternoon. Three times in nine days, Frederick is selected as the weakest during field exercises. Bastian walks farther away and counts faster, forcing Frederick to run four or five hundred yards, often through deep snow, while the other boys chase him. Each time they catch him; each time Bastian watches as Frederick is beaten; each time Werner Pfennig does nothing to stop it. The repeated format makes the punishment a system: selection, pursuit, capture, blows, and the commandant’s supervision recur with only the distance and pace altered.

The number of blows Frederick can endure before falling decreases across the assaults: seven, then six, then three. He never cries out and never asks to leave. Rather than prompting restraint, his endurance appears to frustrate Bastian further, until the commandant seems to quake with homicidal frustration. The narration associates the attacks with Frederick’s dreaminess and otherness, qualities the cadets and commandant treat as if they were evidence of weakness. His capacity to walk for hours in the woods and identify distant warblers by their songs makes the imposed label especially stark: the test defines strength narrowly, according to speed, obedience, and survival under sanctioned assault.

Witness, Complicity, and Consequence

Werner Pfennig is both witness and bystander. In the first beating, he tries to stay at the back of the running group and longs to cry out that the scene is wrong, yet he does not speak. Across the next three exercises, his failure becomes a pattern as definite as Bastian’s command and Frederick’s punishment. The account does not describe Werner striking Frederick or ordering the attacks; its moral pressure comes instead from the repeated gap between his awareness and his inaction.

Afterward, Werner tries to lose himself in work in Dr. Hauptmann’s laboratory, where he has built a prototype transceiver and tests its fuses, valves, handsets, and plugs. The work cannot contain what he has seen. He becomes ill, wakes in the night, and sees Frederick in his Berlin bedroom, wearing eyeglasses and a necktie and freeing trapped birds from the pages of a massive book. That image recalls Frederick’s attentiveness to birds and makes his disappearance from Werner’s immediate surroundings no escape from the violence: Frederick persists in Werner’s troubled consciousness as the person the school’s ranking could not describe. Bastian’s abuse therefore reaches beyond the field. It injures Frederick directly, makes other cadets instruments and spectators, and leaves Werner carrying the consequences of having watched without stopping it.