Auerhaus New Year's party is the shared house’s crowded New Year celebration for its residents, their schoolmates, patients on leave from the psychiatric hospital, and Harry’s wide circle of gay friends. Its exuberant public welcome briefly turns the village street into common ground, but the night also sharpens the narrator’s fear that the household’s happiness may not last: he cannot breathe in a locked car, loses Vera to Harry behind a closed door, and sees Frieder moving with a freedom that seems both precious and precarious.

A Party Made of Several Worlds

Frieder proposes the party as both a New Year’s celebration and a housewarming for Harry and Pauline. His suggestion surprises the narrator, who thinks of himself and Frieder as people who dislike parties: when they attend one, they usually sit apart from the crowd, drink, and watch the people around them. Frieder’s plan turns that quiet habit inside out. The party is not simply a night out but an invitation to bring the house’s separate circles into one room.

The school’s upper years arrive despite the holidays, and the guests from Schwarzes Holz are able to leave the hospital until one o’clock. Harry has invited gay men from between Munich and Paris. Their arrival makes the party’s reach visible in the street: cars come in small convoys, park first beside the low wall by the manure heap and then along the road and neighboring streets. Their plates come from Stuttgart and Ulm, with cars from Augsburg and France among them. The guests carry sparkling wine and bowls of chocolate cream, nicknamed “Mußoschokola.”

Harry’s own entrance completes the scene. A convoy rounds the corner led by an enormous old American car, and Harry climbs out, followed by several men. He had long boasted that he would soon buy a car, provided it was neither too small nor too economical. The oversized vehicle gives his arrival a public, comic flourish, while the scale of the gathering shows how far his invitation has traveled beyond the household.

From the House to the Street

As the party fills, its noise and movement make the narrator feel increasingly out of place. He wants to sit quietly and watch, but Frieder keeps saying he will join him in a moment and then disappears into another conversation. The narrator understands the difference between sitting in silence as a pair and sitting alone: the first can look relaxed; the second feels like failure. He follows Frieder through the house, where Frieder talks to people and even dances in the kitchen. The sight matters because the narrator knows how difficult it usually is for Frieder to look people in the eye.

The old house is cold everywhere except the kitchen upstairs. A rusty oil radiator is pushed from room to room, providing warmth mainly to whoever sits on it. As midnight approaches, the party spills out of the crowded kitchen and down the stairs. The school students go first; the hospital guests follow. Late arrivals cannot get inside and remain outside with their sparkling wine and chocolate pudding. Axel opens his car doors and turns up the radio. The fanfare of “The Final Countdown” sounds from the speakers before a presenter begins counting down to the new year.

The whole street joins the countdown. Bottles stand on the asphalt as rockets shoot into the sky and fireworks crack around the crowd. At the stroke of midnight, the people outside the Auerhaus embrace one another: the school’s upper years, the hospital residents with leave, and Harry’s gay guests stand together in the middle of the village. The temporary gathering crosses boundaries that ordinarily divide the young people, patients, and neighbors. The neighbors watch; some of the women come over to toast with the guests, while children race the hospital residents to the main road and back. One neighbor, Seidel, instead calls his roughly fifteen-year-old son home and slaps him before sending him inside.

The Narrator’s Panic and the Closed Door

For the narrator, the street’s noisy welcome does not erase his sense of impending loss. He thinks of the coming year and of two things that will happen: he and Vera will separate, and Frieder will die by suicide. During the celebration he retreats to Axel’s car, the only place where he can briefly catch his breath. Axel has turned off the music and left the vehicle. The narrator finds that he cannot open the door. In his panic, the car seems to contract around him: he feels unable to breathe, as if the dashboard were at his lips and he were being buried alive. He strikes the door, dashboard, and steering wheel until the horn sounds, pressing his forehead against it.

Axel eventually opens the door. When the narrator looks up, he sees Axel’s face and polished black shoes; when he opens his eyes again, the shoes are speckled white and stand in a puddle of sparkling wine and crumbly tzatziki. He wipes his mouth, calls Axel an insult, and climbs out of what he has experienced as a grave. The episode makes the party’s sensory abundance—noise, drink, food, bodies, and celebration—coexist with the narrator’s bodily terror rather than simply overcome it.

He looks for Vera, expecting that couples should be the first to wish one another a happy new year, but cannot find her outside or in the kitchen. He congratulates Frieder and receives kisses on the cheek from Cäcilia and Pauline. Harry is also missing. The narrator eventually knocks on Vera’s bedroom door. She comes out, runs to the kitchen for a packet of condoms, kisses the narrator, wishes him a happy new year, then goes back inside and locks the door behind her.

The closed door gives Vera’s familiar idea that love is not a cake a painful complication. She has argued that love does not diminish simply because it is shared. The narrator wants to accept that account and not be jealous—or at least not want or feel obliged to be jealous. But this particular cake, he thinks, has shut the door: it does not merely become smaller; it seems to disappear altogether. He realizes that the person behind the door is Harry, who is attracted to the narrator, while the narrator is attracted to Vera but not to Harry. The tangle of possible choices leaves him with jealousy rather than an easy illustration of Vera’s theory.

Intimacy in the Margins of the Crowd

After someone in the kitchen gives the narrator a cigarette that smells of marijuana, he takes two deep drags and feels his head grow light. He describes the effect to himself as a little life-courage, a dose that has him feeling properly adjusted. Around him, other intimate dramas continue: Axel kisses a man in a mesh shirt, and Cäcilia sits on the stairs crying over Axel. The party’s apparent openness does not mean that everyone is equally at ease or protected from hurt.

The narrator then sits with Pauline in the hayloft, where she has become frightened by the number of people. The recorder can be heard faintly through the wall, interrupted by a voice when someone laughs or shouts especially loudly. Away from the crowded rooms, the narrator points out that Frieder is dancing. Pauline and the narrator kiss and touch one another for what feels either like a minute or a week. Pauline takes his hand, and he understands her invitation, moving his fingers slowly beneath her sweater. Their brief encounter is another private intimacy nested inside the public celebration, but it does not resolve the narrator’s feelings about Vera, Harry, or Frieder.

A Temporary Community, a Remembered Night

The party’s defining image is its street-wide embrace: people from the school, the hospital, and Harry’s distant social circle gathered in front of the Auerhaus, while the village’s usual divisions are briefly unsettled. The house functions as a place where people can be invited in, fed, watched over, and allowed to belong even when their relationships and circumstances are not easily sorted into conventional categories. That communal welcome is made out of concrete, imperfect acts—arriving in cars, sharing food and drink, making room in a cold house, and joining a countdown together.

Yet the celebration is not a guarantee of lasting safety or harmony. The narrator’s suffocating confinement in the car and the locked bedroom door sit beside the embraces and fireworks; Frieder’s dancing is a moment of visible animation, but the narrator already associates the coming year with his death. In that contrast, New Year’s Eve becomes both a passage into a shared future and a night shadowed by an ending. The party gathers the Auerhaus’s chosen household and its wider community for a moment, while the narrative lets the reader feel how much of that moment cannot be held in place.