Bundeswehr

The Bundeswehr enters the story as a system of conscription that seeks to summon, examine, classify, and assign young men to military service. Its authority is encountered through a police-delivered order, an impersonal medical examination, and a verdict of full fitness—not through the experience of serving. When Frieder takes the narrator’s examination file, that bureaucratic object becomes part of a wider conflict over who may record, classify, and direct a person’s life; even after the legal proceedings are discontinued, the narrator’s conscription paperwork remains unresolved in the state’s files.

Conscription and Examination

The narrator’s encounter with the Bundeswehr begins with an official document. Police chief Bogatzki shows him a stamped and crested notice directing the police to collect him and take him to the conscription examination. Bogatzki insists that the narrator has already received two summonses and must attend. The narrator had expected a third notice, but the official document makes the state’s demand immediate: he is to appear, whether or not he regards himself as ill or ready for examination.

At the district military replacement office, the institution’s setting gives bureaucratic uniformity a physical form. The exterior, stairwell, corridors, floor, benches, and most uniforms are all brownish gray; the narrator describes the staff as nearly disappearing into their surroundings. Young men fill the waiting area, while Vera is the only woman, and the men stare as she accompanies the narrator to registration. The scene makes the examination a public process of sorting, with the person summoned entering a space already organized around gender and official categories.

The examining doctor is conspicuously unlike the muted surroundings: he wears a white coat, is much taller than the narrator, and has a flushed head. After studying the file and breathing in through his nose with a faint whistle for about a minute, he throws it onto the desk and orders the narrator to undress, allowing him to keep his underwear on. The narrator replies that he is not sick. The doctor answers that cooperation is compulsory and that refusing to participate would violate the conscription law. The exchange defines the examination as more than a medical consultation: the state’s procedure requires the subject’s bodily participation, and refusal itself is recast as an offense.

Classification and Assigned Futures

After a long wait, the narrator is called before the conscription commission. Four men sit behind a brownish-gray table, including the examining doctor and officials in uniform. The doctor classifies the narrator by visual assessment as T1 and fully fit for service. One official says that this rating could send him to the guard battalion; another suggests the paratroopers. The brief exchange turns a clinical verdict into possible military destinations, presenting institutional classification as a decision with consequences beyond the examination room.

The narrator’s file later becomes the object of a different kind of examination. After Frieder takes it, the file is found in the course of the investigation at the Auerhaus. A prosecutor identifies the alleged offenses as theft under section 242 and suppression of documents under section 274 of the German Criminal Code. The papers bear federal eagles on their letterheads and stamps; Frieder has drawn a line through every eagle, turning the official emblems into images of skewered chickens, with little campfires drawn beneath them. The defacement makes the file at once a conscription record, evidence in a criminal case, and a surface for mockery of state authority.

The prosecutor adds further possible charges: denigrating the state and its symbols under section 90a, forgery of documents under section 267, and property damage under section 303. Thus the file links the Bundeswehr’s effort to classify the narrator with the criminal investigation into the Auerhaus residents. The military record does not simply disappear when it is taken; its seizure and alteration redirect it into another state process, where its markings acquire legal significance.

The File After the Investigation

The narrator later hears nothing further from the Bundeswehr. Cäcilia’s lawyer tells him that his Bundeswehr file is still among the investigative materials and, judging by how the prosecutor’s office works, is likely to remain there. The lawyer succeeds in having all the proceedings discontinued. Harry alone receives a warning because marijuana was found in his room. The narrator’s conscription file is therefore not reported as returned or formally resolved; it remains caught in the investigative record even as the case against the household ends.

A later postcard summons the narrator for another examination, and he does not know why the authorities want to examine him again. He considers two possibilities: his file may still be at the prosecutor’s office, or the institution may simply enjoy examining people who have nothing wrong with them. His sardonic list of possible classifications—combat swimmers, ordinary men, or men needing crutches—reduces the promise of neutral assessment to another round of sorting. By then, however, he says the matter no longer really concerns him; the postcard comes in useful as he and Frieder set off with a mattress and boxes in the back of Harry’s Gluckgluck car.

Institutional Absence and Narrative Significance

The Bundeswehr remains important even when it is absent from the narrator’s daily life. After the lawyer’s intervention, the narrator hears nothing more from it, but its file persists in the prosecutor’s collection, and the later examination postcard restores its claim on his attention. Its power is therefore conveyed through documents and procedures that outlast the immediate encounters: a summons can bring the police to someone’s door, a medical category can propose a military assignment, and a missing file can become evidence in an unrelated case.

The novel also places conscription alongside the narrator’s reflections on prison and psychiatric hospitalization. Harry jokes that someone in prison does not have to join the Bundeswehr, and neither does someone in a psychiatric hospital; in his formulation, Berlin is both prison and psychiatric hospital, and so the narrator there need not join the army. This is Harry’s comic explanation, not a new formal ruling about the narrator’s status. Its force comes from the contrast it draws between institutions that confine or classify people and the military system that would classify them as fit for service.

The Bundeswehr is thus represented less as a military organization in action than as an administrative presence in young people’s lives. The doctor’s demand for cooperation, the commission’s T1 rating, the suggested assignments, and the altered file show how examination converts a person into a record and a category. Yet the record can also be stolen, marked over, held by prosecutors, and left unresolved. The narrator’s later indifference to the renewed summons does not erase the institution’s authority; it shows that its claim can continue in paperwork even after the people caught up in it have moved on.