Axel

Axel, nicknamed “Central-Locking Axel,” is a classmate whose new car and remote central locking give him a conspicuous place in the narrator’s recollections. The device first makes him an object of attention in the schoolyard; later, his persistent handling of its key accompanies a party scene in which that confident pose gives way to an awkward encounter and an unexpected kiss. His small, recurring role makes the car key a comic marker of status, but also ties Axel to the novel’s shifting social relations.

Identity and Introduction

Axel first appears in the school car park beside the brand-new car his parents have given him for passing his driving test. In the smoking area, he demonstrates its remote central locking: no student, and not even a teacher, has a car with the same feature. He extends his hand toward the vehicle and opens and closes it with a click and a clack. The scene makes the car’s technology a public performance, and the watching students’ attention gives Axel a brief, unmistakable distinction among his peers.

The narrator’s nickname for him, “Central-Locking Axel,” grows directly out of that display. It reduces him, humorously, to the feature he is proudest of and the object that sets him apart. The nickname recurs at later moments, so the car is not merely background property: it becomes the shorthand through which the group recognizes and remembers him.

Military Service and the Car’s Limits

When the narrator worries about receiving his own summons for military medical examination, the class’s different plans for conscription come into view. Some are preparing applications to do civilian service; others are already planning how to arrange military leave around the start of university. Axel is among the boys considering a two-year enlistment. His enthusiasm is met with Frieder’s joke that Axel will discover a tank has no central locking, only a hatch. The quip turns the feature that elevated him in the school car park into a measure of his inexperience with military life.

The narrator, by contrast, thinks of putting off the examination summons and eventually leaving for Berlin. The passage does not establish what Axel ultimately does about enlistment. It does, however, place him among the classmates who imagine military service as a possible next step, while the narrator recoils from the prospect of weapons, crawling through dirt, and obeying others. Axel’s recurring nickname lets the novel carry the schoolyard joke into this broader contrast between youthful plans and the institutions that may shape them.

At the Party

At a party in Harry’s room, which the narrator calls the slaughterhouse kitchen, Axel is among the older students invited by Cäcilia. The room is crowded and smoky; the cigarettes have run out, and a man in a mesh shirt comes in to ask for more. He turns his attention to Axel in a half-joking, openly admiring way. Axel grimaces, but the man persists and keeps looking at the car key in Axel’s hand. Axel continues pressing it.

The key repeats the school-car-park gesture in a very different setting. Earlier, Axel used the remote to make the car respond before an audience; at the party, he keeps operating the key while another person studies it and tries to draw him into an interaction. The object still attracts attention, but no longer solely on Axel’s terms. The scene pauses with the mesh-shirted man asking whether he can try it too, leaving the exchange poised between flirtation and the key’s literal function.

Change in the Group’s Relationships

Later in the same party, Axel is kissing the man in the mesh shirt in the kitchen. On the stairs, Cäcilia cries over what the narrator calls the “Central-Locking-Axel bastard.” Her reaction makes the kiss consequential beyond Axel’s private encounter: it is entangled with another person’s hurt, and the scene juxtaposes intimacy in the kitchen with grief just outside it. The nickname, formerly a joke about a car feature, becomes part of Cäcilia’s angry way of identifying Axel in the moment.

The narrator offers no further account here of Axel’s motives, of what he and Cäcilia had understood their relationship to be, or of what follows the party. What the episode does show is a change in the meaning of his recurring image. The remote key that once made him conspicuous as the boy with something none of his classmates possessed returns as he navigates an encounter whose emotional effects cannot be controlled with a button. Axel remains a secondary figure, but the repeated detail gives his appearances a clear arc: a display of status becomes a comic refrain, then a counterpoint to the more complicated desires and injuries unfolding around him.