Establishing student communal life at Auerhaus is the making of a chosen household around Frieder after his suicide attempt. Its residents do not begin with a settled plan or a confident belief that they can keep him safe. They build a place to live together because sharing responsibility seems more bearable than leaving him alone; everyday acts of moving, painting, eating, and talking gradually give that decision the shape of a home.

A shared answer to danger

For the narrator, moving in with Frieder offers an escape from the F2M2, his mother’s hostile boyfriend. At home, the narrator has been expected to help pave the driveway, paint the facade, and nail ugly boards over the ceilings, while enduring the F2M2’s complaints. The conflict also reaches into the household’s silences: when the narrator’s mother speaks with him for more than five minutes, the F2M2 punishes her by refusing to speak for days, then drinks six or eight beers and explodes. The prospect of leaving is therefore more than a change of address. It is a way out of a home organized around grievance and intimidation.

The move is also organized around Frieder’s need for company. The narrator considers whether someone else should join him, so that watching over Frieder will not be a responsibility borne alone. Vera agrees to move in. Her decision makes the household collective from the start: care is not assigned to one friend as a private burden, but shared among people who will have to live alongside uncertainty.

Cäcilia joins for a different, practical reason. Vera’s parents will not let her move in alone with two boys, so Cäcilia becomes part of the arrangement. To secure her mother’s permission, she argues that Frieder has no chance of leaving the psychiatric hospital without her help. The sacrifice involved is visible in the contrast between what she leaves and what she chooses: she has a large room at home, a television she can watch without being criticized, and, as Vera has heard, a swimming pool in the basement. During the move, Cäcilia argues with her mother as a man carries out a glossy white bedroom chest decorated with gold flourishes. She insists that she does not need any of it. A comfortable family home has not made the shared house unnecessary; she leaves it to take part in this more precarious form of support.

Moving in and making a home

The move gathers the prospective household across several villages. Frieder comes to the narrator’s home in a tractor and trailer, and they load the narrator’s belongings into the back. The small television stays behind, with the hope that the narrator’s sisters will not miss it as much as he did. The trailer is mostly empty: old hay is wedged into its gaps, while mattresses lie side by side beside boxes and a floor lamp. The lamp topples at the first bend. The scene is modest and makeshift, not the arrival of a fully equipped household, but the physical beginning of one.

Frieder knows a shortcut along the fields. When the group reaches his grandfather’s house, a moving van is already there. Cäcilia’s belongings are not simply an addition to the household’s possessions; their removal marks the argument with her mother and the change in where Cäcilia will live. The shared home comes into being through these separate departures and arrivals, with each person bringing a different history and reason for being there.

The rooms take on distinct colors. Because the windows are small, the group paints the rooms orange so that, as Vera puts it, it will always seem sunny. Frieder rejects the cheerful color as silly and paints his room white and pale blue: white walls, pale-blue skirting boards, door, and window frames, with even the bed, table, and chair painted blue. The difference does not prevent the rooms from belonging to the same house. Instead, the competing choices give its common space room for individual tastes. Frieder’s blue room also fits his enthusiasm for Greece and for the film Alexis Zorbas: he admires its central character for living in the moment and not thinking too much.

Frieder hangs a pale-blue frame beside the door containing a menu that offers the household’s food and drink for free while supplies last. The joke is answered by Vera, who asks why the menu gives quantities if everything is free. Even at the point when the house is being furnished, its communal life appears in a small negotiation between shared provision and finite supplies. The residents are making room not only to sleep together but to eat together, and the question of what they have to share is already part of the house’s language.

The first evening and a name

On the first evening, everyone sits around the kitchen table while the recorder plays the only cassette readily available; the other tapes are still lost somewhere among the boxes. The music is loud enough to make conversation impossible. That hardly matters. It is the beginning, when there is not yet much to discuss: they eat spaghetti, winding it onto their forks, and move their knees to the music. The first shared meal is not presented as a moment of instant intimacy. The room, the food, and the music hold the group together before there is much they can say to one another.

Cäcilia tells Frieder that learning an instrument might help him. Her suggestion belongs to the ordinary talk of people trying to find something constructive to do, but it also shows how readily the residents turn toward helping Frieder. Their life together will contain that impulse without resolving what help can accomplish.

The house receives its name through another small encounter. Seidel, the farmer from across the road, appears in the doorway holding an axe. Frieder lowers the music so Seidel can explain that Frieder’s grandfather had lent him the tool; after the grandfather became ill and died, Seidel had not forgotten the loan, and he has now sharpened the axe. Its return connects the house to the dead grandfather’s life and to the people who live nearby. While the song Our House plays on the recorder, Frieder tells Seidel that his father had already been looking for the axe. Seidel hears the name Auerhaus and answers by linking it to aurochs. The name emerges not from a formal decision but from the conjunction of a song, a returned family object, and a neighbor’s wordplay.

The routine that follows is deliberately ungrand: in the mornings the residents play badminton outside, and in the evenings they visit one another’s rooms or sit around the kitchen table, talking and smoking. Such repetition is what makes the building a shared home. The household is not defined by one declaration of affection but by returning to one another across rooms and days.

Care, family, and the meaning of home

The narrator describes the house’s life as full of talk: conversation at breakfast, at midday, and in the evening. The point of all that talk is also its burden—to keep watch over one of them, who had tried to kill himself. The household’s cheer, including the cry that hunger makes people eat while stinginess keeps them from enjoying it, exists alongside an unceasing awareness of danger. Frieder’s attempt cannot be made safe simply by surrounding him with friends.

The narrator admits that even after weeks in the house, he does not understand why someone would want to kill himself. He can understand it in some way, but not that someone would actually try. Frieder later distinguishes wanting to die from wanting not to go on living, saying he had not wanted to kill himself but had only not wanted to live. The household gives that distinction a daily setting: it is spoken among people who share meals and conversation, but it does not supply a simple explanation that makes the risk disappear.

The residents’ vigilance has no dependable signal. The narrator remembers an empty place beside him at school and imagines Frieder hanging in the hayloft. Frieder has said that when someone who has thought about suicide for a long time suddenly becomes cheerful without a reason, that person may have made a decision. A change in mood, then, can seem more alarming rather than reassuring. The narrator cannot know whether Frieder’s sadness means he is tired or whether his happiness signals that he is about to act. Shared life brings them close enough to notice changes, but not close enough to read them with certainty.

That uncertainty surfaces in the narrator’s direct question about rescue. If Frieder were suddenly in mortal danger, such as breaking through ice, would he want the narrator to save him, or would he be angry? After a long pause, Frieder says that the narrator may save him: he wants to choose for himself. He also reasons that someone who wonders how life would continue without him believes that his presence matters. These answers leave both the wish for agency and the possibility of rescue intact. The household must live with both rather than turn either into a rule that guarantees what Frieder will do.

The meaning of home changes with the people speaking. On December 24, the narrator is at his family’s home—although, in the deeper sense, home is the Auerhaus. Among people outside the household, home means family; among those who also belong to the Auerhaus, it means the shared house. The distinction is made concrete when the narrator enters his old room and finds a sister lying on the bed, watching television on the portable set he left behind. He had not known that the room now belonged to her: after he moved out, his two sisters stopped sharing a room, and each had one of her own. The sister old enough to dislike the F2M2 has inherited the television. Leaving home has altered the family household too, just as joining Auerhaus has created another place the narrator can call home.

The limits and legacy of the household

The shared home does not insulate its residents from conflict or the outside world. After Cäcilia is picked up by her father, he says nothing and does not look at the others; Frieder, Vera, Pauline, and the narrator walk back together. Vera remarks that if they ever really shot a politician or a factory owner, the police could identify them immediately. The line follows a moment of separation and makes the household’s solidarity visible, but also its exposure: the residents share a life in which consequences beyond the house can reach them.

Later, the narrator asks Frieder what happened at the traffic lights. Frieder admits that he had deliberately risked being shot by the policeman. The narrator responds by hitting him and demanding, amid his anger, that Frieder not involve the others if he wants to kill himself. Frieder turns aside and tries to throw him off, but does not fight back. The confrontation reveals the cost of the household’s continuing responsibility: care can curdle into rage when the person being watched has acted in a way that endangered everyone around him. The house has made the narrator a participant in Frieder’s crises, not a person able to control them.

After Frieder’s successful suicide, the narrator considers whether it had the same reasons as the earlier attempt. The more he had talked with Frieder about the first attempt, the fainter the question had become, until it nearly disappeared; he found no answer. He prefers the possibility that leaves more possibilities open: if he does not kill himself today, tomorrow remains available, whereas a decision to die today forecloses tomorrow. The house’s history therefore cannot be reduced to the consoling claim that friendship solved the danger. Its achievement is more particular and more fragile. A place was made where responsibility, conversation, meals, and belonging could be shared; Frieder’s death remains beyond their power to explain or prevent.