Frieder's father

Frieder’s father is a largely offstage character whose most consequential appearance comes after Frieder’s death. At the funeral gathering, he approaches the young people who lived with his son and tells them that Frieder’s diary remembered the Auerhaus as the happiest time of his life. He also shares Frieder’s account of cutting down the Christmas tree on Christmas Eve, including the words, “Da war ich ganz da. Alles war gut.” His quiet testimony brings the private record of a dead son into the room and makes the shared house legible as a place where Frieder had felt fully present.

Family and the Auerhaus

The evidence places Frieder’s father within a family and household structure that the novel sets against the chosen domestic life of the Auerhaus. The narrator leaves home partly to escape the F2M2, his mother’s unpleasant boyfriend, and the work and anger that made that home oppressive. The young people’s decision to live with Frieder is framed not only as a move but as a shared responsibility: the narrator considers whether living together would make watching over Frieder less burdensome, and Vera agrees to join. Frieder’s father is not shown participating in the establishment of that household; his significance instead emerges later, when he recognizes what it meant to his son.

The contrast does not make the Auerhaus a simple substitute for biological family. On December 24, the narrator says that “home” means his family when speaking to outsiders, but means the Auerhaus among those who live there. Returning to his family’s house, he finds that his old room has become his sister’s, and she has inherited his portable television. The passage shows how leaving home changes the practical arrangements of family life, while the Auerhaus becomes an additional, inwardly understood home. Frieder’s father’s later use of the name Auerhaus acknowledges that same household from outside it: although it is his house, he names it as his son and the young people did.

The Household and Its Work of Care

The Auerhaus begins with ordinary shared routines rather than a declaration of kinship. On the first evening, the residents sit around the kitchen table while the only cassette immediately available plays loudly enough to prevent conversation. They eat spaghetti, turning it onto their forks and moving their knees to the music. The awkward quiet is not a failure of community; there is little to say yet, and this is only the beginning. Cäcilia suggests that Frieder could learn an instrument, a small practical offer within the new household.

That early scene develops into a more deliberate practice of care. The narrator describes a life of talking at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and says that all this talking means keeping watch over one of them, who had tried to kill himself. He admits that even after weeks he cannot fully understand why someone would want to die—or how someone could actually attempt it. The distinction matters: the household’s care does not depend on the narrator having solved Frieder’s despair. It takes the form of daily presence and shared attention. The father’s later account of Frieder’s diary gives that labor a retrospective meaning, showing that the time lived under this watchfulness was not merely a crisis period but, in Frieder’s own estimation, the best time of his life.

The Funeral and the Father’s Testimony

At the funeral gathering, Frieder’s mother sits several tables away in a corner, rigid and silent. His father sits beside her, staring into the room, one hand clenched on the edge of the tablecloth. The scene presents grief through their stillness and physical gestures rather than through explanation. Later, Frieder’s father comes to the young people’s table but does not sit down. He bends over them and says that he has sorted Frieder’s belongings and found a diary among them.

The diary supplies two distinct memories. First, Frieder’s father quietly reports that Frieder wrote that the time in the Auerhaus had been the happiest of his life. The father looks around at the group as he speaks, making the statement a shared acknowledgment rather than a private report directed at one person. Second, he recalls what Frieder wrote about the Christmas tree he had cut down on Christmas Eve. While trying to shift from his broad dialect into Standard German, he recites Frieder’s words: “Da war ich ganz da. Alles war gut.” The account connects an act that had carried consequences for the household with a moment of complete presence as Frieder remembered it. The father does not explain or interpret the words; he gives them to the people who had been there.

Narrative Significance

The father’s role is brief but structurally important: he carries Frieder’s own written account across the boundary between the family that raised him and the friends who made a home with him. His testimony confirms that the Auerhaus mattered to Frieder in a way the surviving residents could not establish for themselves. Their care had taken place amid uncertainty about his suicide attempt and the possibility of losing him; the diary, as relayed by his father, adds Frieder’s own retrospective judgment without cancelling that uncertainty.

The Christmas-tree memory sharpens the connection between belonging and being fully present. The tree-cutting is not presented by the father as an abstract symbol or as a defense of the act. Instead, he preserves Frieder’s brief written assessment of that particular Christmas Eve. The phrase about being wholly there makes the memory a concentrated counterpart to the long, ordinary work of the household: meals, talk, watching over one another, and the time Frieder later named as his happiest. By speaking where his son’s friends are gathered, Frieder’s father helps the novel hold biological family grief and chosen-family memory in the same scene, without making either one replace the other.