Frieder and Pauline’s Relationship

Frieder and Pauline’s relationship moves from a brief, striking encounter on a psychiatric ward into an intimate companionship within Auerhaus. Its defining quality is the difference between what the two share in practical and emotional closeness and Frieder’s claim that Pauline’s beauty made sexual desire impossible; their attachment is real, but it resists a simple romantic label.

Meeting in the Hospital

Frieder had been in the psychiatric hospital for several weeks when the narrator found him sitting on a brown couch, talking with a girl he had not seen before. Frieder’s posture had changed: instead of slumping, he sat upright and alert, and he was smiling. The girl was Pauline, whose appearance the narrator registers as striking, though he measures it against Vera. Her long, straight, dark-brown hair was notably greasy, a sharply concrete detail that sits beside the narrator’s extravagant impression of her beauty.

Pauline was on the locked ward after setting fire to something at a youth home. She dismissed the incident as only a doormat and not worth making much of. Her name recalled the fire-setting girl in the children’s book Struwwelpeter, an association that made the circumstances of her hospitalization echo through her name. Yet the scene does not reduce her to that history. Pauline has an unmistakable comic force: she calls out that the bear would rather destroy himself than anything else, gentle to everyone except himself. Her deliberately off-key shriek hurts the ears but is funny, and Frieder keeps smiling as she speaks. The joke also touches a central fact of his own life: the others are learning to live around a suicide attempt whose meaning they cannot fully understand.

Parting and Shared Life

When Frieder was first allowed to leave the ward in autumn, the outing was restricted to the park and required an escort; the narrator was made responsible for accompanying him. Before they left, Frieder said goodbye to Pauline at great length and with such elaborate hesitation that it did not seem like a farewell to someone he expected to see again in an hour or two. Pauline told the narrator to bring Frieder back safely. Her concern makes the outing feel less like a routine hospital privilege than a separation carrying genuine uncertainty.

Pauline later belongs to the new domestic world at Auerhaus, where Frieder and the others gather around the kitchen table for their first evening. They have only one cassette readily available; the rest are somewhere in the moving boxes. The music is so loud that conversation is impossible, but the silence is not a failure of companionship. It is the beginning of a shared life, before the household has much to say. They wind spaghetti around their forks and move their knees to the music. In that small scene, belonging is made through ordinary co-presence rather than declarations.

The household’s everyday talk also carries a practical purpose: the friends speak over breakfast, lunch, and dinner while keeping watch over one of their own, who had tried to kill himself. The narrator admits that he still cannot understand why someone would attempt suicide, even though he can partly understand the wish not to live. Frieder eventually distinguishes those states himself: he says that he did not want to kill himself but only did not want to go on living. Pauline’s place in this shared routine is not presented as a cure or as an answer to that distinction. Her closeness belongs to a collective effort to keep daily life going while Frieder’s condition remains uncertain.

Attraction and Its Limits

The narrator later asks Frieder what it is like to sleep with a woman, and Frieder turns the question back on him: the narrator has a girlfriend, while Frieder does not know from experience. Asked whether he had slept with Pauline, Frieder laughs and says no: she was too beautiful. He explains that she seemed so perfect that even thinking of her could not arouse him. The narrator agrees that she was strikingly symmetrical, with a center part and very straight teeth, but resists the conclusion Frieder draws. A girl, he thinks, is not a coin that becomes interesting only after wear or flaws; what she has experienced can be told in words rather than read from marks on the outside.

The exchange gives their relationship an unresolved edge. Frieder describes Pauline through an idealizing image of perfection, but his explanation also separates admiration from sexual intimacy. The narrator’s reflection pushes against the idea that a person’s value depends on flawless appearance or on visible signs of experience. Pauline herself is not reduced to either man’s account: the earlier scene has already shown her speaking loudly, joking, and unsettling the ward’s solemnity. The contrast between Frieder’s polished image of her and her vivid presence keeps the relationship from settling into a simple story of idealized love.

Closeness in Action

At Auerhaus, Frieder and Pauline’s bond becomes especially legible through shared work. While the group splits wood, Pauline takes the axe and brings it down hard enough to lodge it in a log beside Frieder’s fingers. Frieder lets go; she swings again, and the log breaks apart. The moment begins with risk and a held breath, but it turns into coordination. Frieder steadies the wood while Pauline chops, and they keep looking at each other, as if they are playing a contest in which the first person to blink loses. Neither blinks.

Pauline soon removes her hat and jacket and stands in a T-shirt, wiping sweat from her eyes as the pile of fresh logs grows. The group stacks the split wood against the house wall. There is more than they can burn that winter, and another winter together seems unlikely. The thought of that impending limit is placed beside their persistence: Pauline and Frieder continue working anyway. Their intimacy is not explained in a confession; it appears in the shared task, in the danger managed together, and in their sustained gaze while the others watch.

That scene also places their closeness within the household’s precarious future. The wood comes from an anthill, now nearly gone, with only dust and crumbs left. The group’s labor produces a tangible reserve, but not a promise that they will remain together long enough to use it all. Pauline and Frieder keep splitting logs despite that mismatch between what they make and the time they may have. Their relationship is therefore intertwined with Auerhaus’s communal life: care is practical, visible, and temporary, while the possibility of loss is never far away.

Care and Uncertainty

The relationship develops under a persistent uncertainty about Frieder’s safety. When the narrator escorts him from the hospital, he worries that Frieder might run away and is unsure whether he is supposed to catch him. Later, Frieder’s tired grin does not reassure the narrator: on a school morning, Frieder says he will cycle, while the others hurry to catch the bus. In the third period, the seat beside the narrator is still empty, and the narrator imagines Frieder hanging in the hayloft. He knows Frieder is repelled by the idea of throwing himself in front of a train, but that knowledge does not remove the fear. Pauline’s earlier request to bring Frieder back safely acquires weight in this longer pattern of vigilance.

Frieder gives the narrator a partial principle for responding to danger. Asked whether he should be rescued if he suddenly fell through ice, Frieder thinks for a long time and says the narrator may rescue him, because he wants to choose for himself. That answer does not make his risk easy to read; it preserves both the possibility of intervention and his insistence on agency. The narrator later recalls Frieder saying that a person who has thought continually about suicide and suddenly becomes cheerful without reason has made a decision. In the kitchen, when Frieder pauses with everyone watching him, the narrator cannot tell whether he is about to announce that he will never try again or that he intends to die that day. He cannot reliably distinguish tiredness from sadness, or happiness from imminent danger.

The uncertainty intensifies the significance of Pauline’s care without allowing it to become a solution. Frieder’s long goodbye to her on the ward, her request that he return safely, and their later work together all show attachment; none gives the narrator a secure way to predict what Frieder will do. After Frieder’s eventual successful suicide, the narrator finds no answer to why he had wanted to die during the earlier attempt. The question fades rather than resolves. That retrospective limit matters to the relationship: Pauline and Frieder’s closeness can be remembered in gestures and shared scenes, but it cannot be made into an explanation for either his earlier crisis or his death.