Ensingen

Ensingen is the setting for a traffic-light confrontation that makes the group’s dangerous play real to the police and lays bare how little the narrator can know about Frieder’s intentions. The town also anchors a later reckoning: after the incident is reported in the newspaper, Frieder admits that he had deliberately tried to provoke an officer into shooting him.

Setting and the traffic-light incident

A police report read aloud by the narrator’s mother places the encounter at the Ensingen exit toward Gebingen, beside the Optikergeschäft Binder. At about 11:30 p.m., a patrol car stopped at the traffic light on its way back to the station. A conspicuous American-built car drew up in the left-turn lane, the direction of Uhldingen. From its open passenger window, someone pointed a weapon at the officer.

When the light changed from red to yellow, the car sped straight ahead toward Gebingen, against the traffic rules. The narrator’s mother’s newspaper account presents the officers’ composure as the reason nobody was injured. Its dramatic language contrasts with the scene’s actual outcome: the apparent weapon was a convincing replica, not a real firearm.

The town in the newspaper account

The article describes the event at length and includes a large photograph of Brillen-Binder and the traffic light at the town exit. Its caption refers to the traffic signal at the height of Uhlandstraße and says that the police’s measured conduct prevented bloodshed. The narrator’s mother recognizes the car as an American vehicle, but when she asks whether the group was involved, the narrator denies it.

That denial sits beside the details that the report cannot contain. Harry drives the car at high speed; Pauline urges him to shoot; and Frieder turns around, tells the others to lower their heads, and makes shooting sounds as he aims out through the rear window. The town’s ordinary junction thus becomes both a public news scene and the setting for the group’s private, reckless performance.

What the incident reveals

After the article appears, the narrator sits with Frieder and asks what happened. Frieder says that he had deliberately set the situation up, hoping the officer would shoot him. The narrator responds by striking him and then beating him, furious that Frieder had put the others in danger as part of his attempt to die. Frieder turns aside and tries to throw him off but does not fight back.

The episode sharpens the difference between a visible act and an unknowable intention. Earlier, Frieder had told the narrator that he had not wanted to kill himself, only to stop living; he believed those desires were different. He had also said that the narrator could rescue him in a sudden life-threatening emergency, because he wanted to choose for himself. At the traffic light, however, he admits to engineering a situation in which someone else might kill him. These statements do not resolve into a single stable account of his will to live or die.

Ensingen in retrospect

The narrator later recalls that the question of why Frieder first tried to kill himself had gradually faded through their conversations, even though no answer emerged. After Frieder’s eventual suicide, the narrator wonders whether the reasons were the same as before. That retrospective uncertainty changes the meaning of the Ensingen incident: the confession makes Frieder’s earlier conduct more legible, but it does not explain either his first attempt or his death.

Ensingen therefore remains less a source of resolution than a place where uncertainty becomes public and dangerous. A traffic light, a newspaper photograph, and a replica weapon preserve the outward facts; Frieder’s confession reveals the concealed intention behind them without making that intention fully comprehensible.