Auerhaus begins supplementing household funds through theft when Frieder turns shoplifting into a collective practice: household needs are met through a mixture of donated food, stolen goods, and contributions, with stolen items assigned a shared value. The episode makes an improvised domestic economy out of scarcity, resourcefulness, and risk. What begins with Frieder stealing coffee and wine becomes a household lesson in how to take goods, how to account for them, and how to imagine private and communal prosperity as compatible.

Causes and Household Economy

The household’s kitchen fund is under pressure even though the residents have several sources of support. The narrator’s mother brings supermarket food: partly filled crates of rejected apples or peppers, and a few cups of yogurt just past their expiration date. Frieder’s parents pay the baker in grain, allowing him to collect an enormous loaf of bread every Friday. The narrator also works at a chicken farm and receives a half-orphan’s pension. Even so, the kitchen fund runs out quickly.

Frieder has already begun stealing coffee, wine, and other expensive items from Penny; Vera had suggested the idea, and it worked fairly well. Cäcilia refuses money from her parents. The refusal preserves her pride but leaves less money available to the household. These different contributions do not fit neatly into a single category: food arrives as a gift, bread through an exchange with Frieder’s parents, the narrator’s support comes from work and a pension, and some of Frieder’s provisions are stolen. The household’s need is therefore met through overlapping forms of provision rather than a dependable shared income.

Frieder proposes bringing every free item into the household account. In his private vocabulary, getting something for free means stealing it. The proposal changes the meaning of shoplifting within the group: it is no longer only Frieder’s personal way of acquiring costly goods, but a practice to be counted as a household contribution. Vera points out that he steals more than the others can possibly contribute, revealing a disagreement over how much the shared arrangement should recognize individual effort and how much it can actually absorb.

The Rule of Half Value

Frieder and Vera offer to teach the others to steal, after which each stolen item will be credited at half its shop price. Their example is a packet of coffee costing ten marks: it counts as five marks in the household fund. The rule gives the goods a stable accounting value without pretending that their retail price has become cash. It also makes the deal attractive on two levels. Each person can keep more money for private use, while the shared household still receives the goods it needs.

Vera states the promise in explicitly collective terms: the more they steal, the more prosperity they can have, both individually and together. The narrator connects this claim to the school subject of civics and to economic theory, thinking of prosperity for all and of Ludwig Erhard, a figure relevant to the narrator’s coming oral Abitur examination. The household’s scheme borrows the language of public economic policy, but applies it to coffee, wine, and shared domestic supplies. Its accounting rule is practical and comic at once: a stolen item is neither credited at nothing nor treated as its full cash price.

Frieder also establishes an exception for his weekly visit to Kaufhof’s delicatessen department. Whatever he gets there for free will not be counted toward the household account; it is a gift. That distinction matters because the group is not simply treating every acquired object as an interchangeable resource. It separates goods that count as a contribution from those Frieder claims for himself, even while the household’s broader calculation turns on sharing.

Training at the Kitchen Door

The lessons begin in the house itself. Frieder writes “Trainingszentrum” on a piece of cardboard and fixes it with drawing pins to the outside of the kitchen door. Vera sits beside the door as cashier, while Frieder points out the coffee and wine arranged on the windowsill as the items to be taken. The domestic kitchen becomes a rehearsal space, complete with a sign, a designated role for Vera, and a practice scenario organized around ordinary shop procedures.

Frieder teaches the group to assess what can be seen: whether there is a security mirror in a corner or a one-way mirror in a wall, and whether someone nearby might be a shop detective. Vera demonstrates the next part of the performance, telling the would-be thief to take the item as if intending to buy it. The object should be handled naturally, like any other intended purchase, rather than treated as forbidden. It should then disappear into a jacket, beneath a poncho, or into a shopping bag at the moment no one is watching.

The lesson centers not only on hiding an object but on controlling what a witness thinks they have seen. Frieder advises maintaining eye contact and smiling if someone looks over: the coffee can appear to have been picked up, considered, and returned because it was too expensive or otherwise unsuitable. The casual explanation makes the act harder to distinguish from ordinary shopping. In the training scene, the rule is practiced with coffee concealed under Frieder’s poncho, while a yogurt is presented to Vera and paid for with an imaginary coin. The rehearsal borrows the gestures of a legitimate transaction to make theft look like one.

First Attempt and New Confidence

The narrator is not immediately convinced. When asked to practice, the narrator says there is too much fear of being caught. Frieder, by contrast, describes coming out of the shop with stolen goods as a feeling of omnipotence, and Vera insists that the act becomes easy with practice. Their contrasting responses establish that the training is not merely technical: it asks the narrator to cross a personal threshold as well as learn a method.

After several rehearsals, the group has its premiere. At the supermarket, the narrator turns from the refrigerated display with a hand still inside a jacket pocket and meets the saleswoman’s eyes at the end of the aisle. The narrator smiles with deliberate distraction, although the moment demands intense concentration. A packet of salami slips through a slit in the jacket lining and into the jacket itself. Behind the saleswoman, Frieder conceals a block of Emmentaler beneath his poncho. The narrator pays for an unrelated Mars bar or piece of gum, preserving the appearance of an ordinary purchase.

Outside, the narrator stands on the village square, where the dark-green Christmas tree is still undecorated and shines with rain. The narrator runs away slowly, stops behind a Volkswagen van, and feels for the salami. The imagined possibilities immediately multiply: more salami, an expensive bottle of liqueur, or something as small as a jar of capers. The moment turns the theft from a feared rule-breaking exercise into a newly acquired capability. For the narrator, shoplifting is like learning to ride a bicycle or hitchhike: a skill that seems to open the world, even as the narrator waits for Frieder, who has not yet emerged from the store.

Significance

The household’s theft scheme grows out of a concrete shortage, but it also gives the residents a way to name and distribute their dependence on one another. Gifts, labor, benefits, barter, and stolen goods all help keep the kitchen supplied; Frieder and Vera’s half-value rule translates one especially contentious form of provision into an explicit collective contribution. The scheme’s ideal of simultaneous individual and shared prosperity is built on a practical contradiction: goods can serve the household while remaining stolen, and the promise of shared benefit depends on participants accepting the risks unequally.

The shift in the narrator’s experience gives the episode its decisive movement. At first, the narrator cannot imagine shoplifting without fear; after training, the hand conceals the salami, the face offers a smile, and the world seems newly open. The passage does not make that confidence equivalent to safety. Instead, it shows how a rehearsed performance can make a risky act feel ordinary, and how a household improvisation can become, for its newest participant, a startling sense of freedom.