Auerhaus-Gemeinschaft

Auerhaus-Gemeinschaft is the group of friends who establish a shared home around Frieder after his suicide attempt, turning cohabitation into a form of mutual care. The household offers the narrator an escape from a hostile family home and gives Frieder company and supervision, but it cannot make his intentions transparent or ensure his survival. Its meaning lies in that tension: Auerhaus becomes a chosen family through ordinary shared life, while the danger at its center remains unresolved.

Formation and a New Home

The narrator’s decision to move in with Frieder is also a way out of the household dominated by F2M2, his mother’s unpleasant boyfriend. The narrator has been expected to help pave the driveway, paint the facade, and nail ugly boards over the ceilings, while enduring F2M2’s constant complaining. When the narrator’s mother speaks with him for more than five minutes, F2M2 takes offense and falls silent for three days; after drinking six or eight beers, he explodes. Moving to Frieder’s is therefore not simply a practical change of address but a departure from an atmosphere of resentment and intimidation.

The plan grows from concern about leaving Frieder alone with the responsibility of rebuilding his life. The narrator wonders whether they should live together so that two people can look after him and the burden will not rest on one person. Vera agrees to join them. Frieder transports the narrator’s belongings by tractor and trailer; the small television stays behind, and the narrator hopes his sisters will not miss it as much as he once did. In the next village, the trailer carries their mattresses, boxes, and a standing lamp, which falls over at the first bend. The move is improvised and modest, but it makes a shared household concrete.

Cäcilia joins as well. Vera’s parents will not allow her to move in alone with two boys, so Cäcilia’s presence makes the arrangement possible. The narrator cannot understand why she would leave a comfortable home of her own, with a large room, an often-empty house, and even a basement swimming pool. Cäcilia tells her mother that Frieder has no chance of getting out of the psychiatric hospital without her help, and her mother permits her to go. The household’s formation thus depends on both friendship and the negotiations required to make that friendship acceptable to families.

Everyday Life and Mutual Care

The first evening establishes the house’s unceremonious rhythm. The four sit around the kitchen table with only one cassette available because the others are still somewhere in the boxes. The music is too loud to talk over; that does not matter, since there is little to discuss at the beginning. They wind spaghetti around their forks and bob their knees to the music. The scene gives the new household no grand founding ceremony: its common life starts with unpacked belongings, a meal, and simply occupying the same room.

That ordinary routine acquires a particular purpose. The narrator describes a real life full of conversation at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with all the talking serving, in part, to keep watch over one of them, who had once tried to kill himself. The narrator admits that even after weeks he does not understand why someone would want to die, though he can understand the idea in some abstract sense. Living together does not erase that incomprehension. Instead, it makes care a repeated daily practice carried out alongside it.

The group’s sense of home also changes with its audience. On Christmas Eve, the narrator is with his family, but explains that “home” actually means Auerhaus to those who live there. When speaking to people outside it, “home” means family; among the Auerhaus residents, the word points to the shared house. Back at his family’s home, the narrator discovers that his sister is using the portable television he left behind, and that the two sisters now have separate rooms. His departure has altered the arrangements of both households, while the word “home” marks a belonging that depends on who is speaking to whom.

Expanding the Household

The group grows beyond its original four members. After Christmas, Harry stops going home and makes a bedroom in the slaughterhouse kitchen: he puts Styrofoam panels over the tiles and lays down a blanket. Pauline brings her belongings from the transitional home the next day, Christmas Day, and settles in the hayloft. The house now has six residents. The narrator counts them playfully as half a dozen, half a shilling in pence, or a small packet of eggs; the comic arithmetic makes the increase feel domestic and immediate rather than like a formal change in membership.

These new spaces are improvised from parts of the property rather than prepared as proper bedrooms. Harry’s floor-and-blanket arrangement and Pauline’s hayloft accommodation show the house absorbing people by making room where it can. Auerhaus becomes a refuge not only for the friends who first planned to watch over Frieder, but also for people who have left other living arrangements. The group’s composition and its physical home develop together through these practical decisions.

Care, Risk, and Its Limits

The residents’ closeness does not grant them dependable access to Frieder’s state of mind. The narrator remembers that Frieder distinguished wanting to die from no longer wanting to live. Elsewhere, Frieder says he can be rescued if he is suddenly in danger and wants to decide for himself; he also argues that a person who imagines what will happen without him believes others depend on him. For the household, these statements offer neither a simple rule nor reassurance. They expose the difficulty of responding to a wish for death when the same person may also express a wish to choose, to remain consequential, or to be saved.

The uncertainty becomes especially acute when Frieder’s mood changes. The narrator does not know whether a cheerful Frieder has decided never to try again or has resolved to die that day, and cannot tell whether apparent sadness means anything beyond tiredness. Frieder has said that someone who has thought about suicide for a long time may suddenly seem cheerful after making a decision. Consequently, the residents’ vigilance cannot rest on outward appearance as a reliable guide. Their collective presence can offer companionship, but it cannot remove the ambiguity around what Frieder may do.

That limit becomes irreversible after Frieder dies by suicide. The narrator looks back and finds that repeated conversations have made the question of why Frieder first wanted to die fade until it has almost disappeared; no answer has replaced it. He also cannot know whether Frieder’s reasons at the time of his death were the same as those behind the earlier attempt. In recalling the logic of preserving a possibility by not acting today, the narrator makes clear how little certainty the household’s care could secure. Auerhaus remains the place where the friends made room for one another and tried to sustain a shared life, but it could not turn companionship into control over another person’s survival.