Auerhaus als Wahlfamilie

Auerhaus als Wahlfamilie is the shared household’s transformation into a family of choice: a refuge organized around friendship and care, rather than blood ties, and a home whose meaning depends on who is speaking. Its intimacy is made through everyday acts—moving in, eating together, talking, and watching over Frieder—but it remains temporary. The group’s effort to make that life feel permanent gives the house its warmth and makes its ending harder to face.

A Home Chosen Against Home

For the narrator, moving in with Frieder offers a way out of his mother’s boyfriend’s household. There he has been expected to help pave the driveway, paint the facade, and nail ugly boards onto the ceilings, while enduring constant complaints. His silence is taken as evidence of arrogance: the boyfriend mocks him as the boy who attends secondary school and will not speak to everyone. When the narrator’s mother talks with him for more than five minutes, her boyfriend sulks for three days and then drinks six or eight beers before exploding. Against this home of imposed labor and unpredictable hostility, living with Frieder means a concrete alternative, not just a change of address.

The decision to join Frieder is also framed as a shared responsibility. The narrator wonders whether he should move in alone or whether two people could live there and keep an eye on Frieder, so that the burden would not rest so heavily on one person. Vera agrees to join them. The household thus begins not as an abstract ideal but as a response to a specific vulnerability: Frieder has tried to kill himself, and his friends want him not to be left alone with that history.

Making a Household Together

The first evening establishes the house through a modest, imperfect scene. The residents gather around the kitchen table while a recorder plays the only cassette they have readily available; the rest are still somewhere among the boxes. The music is too loud for conversation, but that does not matter. They are at the beginning, with little to discuss, turning spaghetti around their forks and bouncing their knees. Cäcilia suggests that Frieder could learn an instrument. The house becomes a home not through a declaration or a settled plan, but through being together in an unfinished space, sharing food and making room for what might come next.

That ordinary life acquires a protective purpose. The narrator remembers it as a life with a great deal of talking—at breakfast, lunch, and dinner—and understands what all that talk means: keeping watch over one of them who has attempted suicide. He admits that he cannot fully understand why someone would want to die, even after weeks of living together. He can grasp the idea in some sense, but struggles to accept that someone would actually try. His incomprehension does not cancel the care; instead, the household’s repeated conversations become a practical response to a crisis he cannot entirely explain.

The idea of home also changes according to the audience. On December 24, the narrator says he is at home, meaning with his family; strictly speaking, however, home is the Auerhaus. Among people who do not live there, home means family, while among those who do, it means the house. The distinction shows that the group’s kinship is real but context-dependent: its members can describe the shared house as home among themselves without replacing the language they use with outsiders. The narrator’s return to his family’s house makes that split visible. His sister is watching television on his portable set in his old room, which has become hers after he moved out; the sister old enough to dislike the boyfriend has inherited the television. The move has altered the arrangements in both households, not only the one the friends created.

Care, Conversation, and Its Limits

The Auerhaus group’s care depends on attention and presence, but the novel does not present it as an easy cure. Later, the narrator and Frieder talk through Saturday and resume where they left off on Sunday morning. Both understand that they are talking for Frieder’s life. The narrator no longer dares to say that their conversations are circling, or even to think it. When they are not talking, they sit silently and follow the conversation’s spiral, which approaches its center so slowly that an ordinary person could scarcely notice. The image holds two truths together: talking is a form of staying with Frieder, and the friends cannot be sure that their words are changing the course of his despair.

Their shared life therefore differs from a simple promise of rescue. The narrator once does not understand how someone could attempt suicide; later, he recognizes the stakes of a conversation that continues across a weekend, while still fearing that it goes nowhere. What the household can offer is company, repeated attention, and a refusal to abandon the difficult subject. Its care is sustained by the everyday, but the everyday cannot guarantee safety.

Impermanence and the Meaning of the House

The residents know that the Auerhaus will eventually end, yet fear that speaking about its ending might make it arrive sooner. They have behaved as if their life there were their real life—something that could go on forever. Frieder captures the difference between that feeling and its limit with an image of floating on an air mattress: eyes closed, a gentle wind, the conviction that the lagoon is home for the rest of one’s life; then the eyes open, and it is only an afternoon at a quarry lake, already over. The image does not dismiss the happiness as an illusion. It makes the happiness precise: it was lived as a lasting present, even though it could not last.

The departure comes after Harry finishes his apprenticeship. The residents move together to Cologne and rent a run-down house in the middle of the city. The narrator describes the Auerhaus story as nearly over, like the end credits of a film, when what remains is to learn what became of the people afterward. The move preserves the group’s continued connection while ending the particular household that had made their chosen family visible. A new shared address does not erase the significance of the first one.

Frieder’s Memory and the House’s Legacy

After Frieder’s death, his father tells the gathered people that the time in the Auerhaus had been Frieder’s happiest time, and that Frieder wrote this in his book. The father’s use of the word Auerhaus is striking because the house had belonged to him; in remembering Frieder’s life there, he acknowledges the shared house as the name for a period of happiness. He also recalls Frieder’s writing about cutting down the Christmas tree on Christmas Eve: Frieder had written that he was fully present and that everything was good.

That recollection gathers the meaning of the chosen family into a finite span. The house did not make Frieder’s life permanently safe, and its residents could not make their arrangement last forever. Yet his father’s account confirms that the time there mattered to Frieder as a life, not merely as an interval between crises. Auerhaus as Wahlfamilie is therefore both an act of care and a remembered home: assembled by young people who take responsibility for one another, lived with the intensity of permanence, and finally held in memory as Frieder’s happiest time.