Christmas

Christmas in the novel is less a single celebration than a recurring test of where the narrator belongs. Across the season’s meals, departures, jokes, and arrivals, the family home and Auerhaus compete for the name of home; the holiday makes that uncertainty visible while the shared house becomes a place built through practical care rather than blood ties.

A home divided between two households

On December 24, the narrator says he is home with his family, then qualifies the word: home is actually Auerhaus, though that meaning is understood only by people who live there. With anyone outside the shared household, home means his family’s house; among those who live at Auerhaus, it means Auerhaus. The same word therefore marks two different forms of belonging, depending on who is listening.

The family house has changed in his absence. His sister is watching television on his portable set in what is now her room; the sisters, who once shared, each have their own room since he moved out. One of them, old enough to dislike his mother’s boyfriend, has inherited the television. The narrator’s Christmas return puts a concrete domestic change beside his new life elsewhere: leaving did not merely alter where he sleeps, but rearranged the rooms and possessions of the family he left.

That departure had also offered an escape from his mother’s boyfriend. Moving in with Frieder would spare the narrator the work of paving the driveway, painting the facade, and boarding over the ceilings with ugly panels, as well as the boyfriend’s continual complaints and drinking-fueled outbursts. Christmas brings him back to a household where those tensions still matter, even as the possibility of another home has already taken shape.

The family Christmas and the hurried exit

The family prepares a familiar holiday meal: the narrator peels potatoes, his sisters chop onions, and they eat potato salad with sausages. At six o’clock they exchange presents. He gives his mother an expensive ointment for her legs and her boyfriend a paint-by-numbers Mona Lisa; his sisters receive Walkmans and cassettes, one with current teen music and the younger one with an audiobook. The narrator notes that he can no longer read aloud to her, a small sign of how distance has changed an old routine.

His gifts raise a question about money. His mother asks where he got it, but her boyfriend interrupts and the question is forgotten. The narrator has quickly improved his means of making a living and his equipment: besides a jacket with the lining cut open inside the pocket, he now carries a shopping bag with a false bottom. The concealed compartments sit alongside the presents as evidence of a resourcefulness not disclosed at the family table.

Immediately after the exchange of gifts, he leaves again. He has volunteered at a Christmas meal in town for elderly people and people without homes, serving food and talking with them. The service is real, but it also gives him an excuse not to remain at home until an argument begins. He reflects that people doing charitable work at Christmas may often be those who cannot bear staying at home. His walk to town sharpens the point: no one gives him a ride on Christmas Eve, so he goes several kilometres on foot beside the road, imagining that he might miss a deep frozen puddle and fall through the ice.

Winter customs and the shared house

In another Christmas scene, the narrator and his companions first try to hitchhike, then continue on foot. The Christmas tree shines on the village square as snow begins to fall. Vera and Cäcilia are already at Auerhaus: Vera leans out of the kitchen window while Cäcilia sits at the table with a pot of tea and an empty bowl of tzatziki. They have been eating the dish for weeks because the narrator made it from Frieder’s recipe. The holiday setting is therefore not a picture of plenty; its domestic texture comes from repeated food, a shared kitchen, and people arriving back at the house.

Vera rejects the Christmas tree as a Christian custom, arguing that it comes from the Germanic peoples and wondering whether Jesus had a tree with a candle for every year. The joke punctures the authority of the familiar holiday symbol without dissolving the group’s attachment to its rituals. Elsewhere in the same celebration, the residents turn an preserving kettle into a makeshift bath: they pour it into the bathtub, refill it with the shower hose, carry it to the stove, and take turns bathing, topping up the hot water between them. The improvised arrangement makes care collective and material, not ceremonial.

The Christmas sequence also records a household expanding. Harry arrives at the kitchen door with red and blue marks on his face, a crust beneath his nose, and two black eyes. He says he has told his father he is gay. He does not go home again; instead he lays Styrofoam sheets and a blanket on the floor of the slaughterhouse kitchen, which becomes his room. The following day, Christmas Day, Pauline collects her belongings from the halfway home and settles into the hayloft. The narrator counts the result as six residents, then makes a joke about half a dozen, half a shilling, and a small packet of eggs. Christmas is not simply a return to old family arrangements: it also marks the formation of a chosen household through shelter and accommodation.

Recurrence, transition, and loss

Christmas’s meaning is connected to an earlier transition in Frieder’s story. In autumn, after his hospitalization, Frieder is first permitted to leave the ward, accompanied by the narrator and restricted to the park. At the park exit Frieder says he wants to go into town, and the narrator panics, unsure what Frieder intends to do. This is not a Christmas outing, but it establishes the precarious movement between institutional confinement and ordinary life that will later make shared domestic life at Auerhaus significant.

Nor does Christmas repair the narrator’s relationship with his family or settle the competing meanings of home. The household at Auerhaus sustains itself through talk and the effort of watching over someone who has tried to die; the narrator admits that he cannot fully understand how a person might actually attempt suicide, even when he can understand the wish not to live. Set beside the holiday meals and the newcomers’ need for shelter, that care gives domestic belonging a serious, ongoing task rather than a sentimental gloss.

The group eventually remains at Auerhaus until Harry finishes his apprenticeship, then moves together to a dilapidated house in Cologne. The narrator describes this stage as an extended epilogue, after the main story has nearly ended. Much later, at Frieder’s burial on Maundy Thursday, the coffin is set on boards over the grave, raised with thick ropes, and lowered after the pastor removes the boards. Christmas and the burial are distinct occasions, but together they frame a life of provisional homes, shared acts of care, and transitions that do not restore what has been lost.