Höppner and Frieder’s Friendship

Höppner and Frieder’s Friendship is the novel’s central bond of companionship and care: it grows from years of school familiarity into a shared household shaped by Frieder’s suicide attempt, while exposing the limits of what friendship can know or prevent. Höppner helps make a home with Frieder, keeps returning to difficult conversations, and tries to understand the difference between wanting to die and no longer wanting to live. The friendship gives both boys a way to be present in one another’s lives, but not a reliable answer to Frieder’s crisis.

From Schoolmates to Friends

Höppner and Frieder had been in the same class for a long time without anything particularly dramatic happening between them. They had known each other since fifth grade and, from about ninth grade onward, had become friends in the practical, unceremonious ways of adolescence: cycling together to the quarry pond in summer, going to a cinema twenty kilometers away and cycling home at night, and meeting to study before exams. Frieder could explain even the most difficult physics material so clearly that Höppner understood it. Their intimacy was built from repeated time together rather than a single declaration or dramatic beginning.

That everyday closeness had limits. Before Frieder’s suicide attempt, they had never talked about sex, or even about not having sex. When Frieder later says he had nearly died without ever having slept with a woman, Höppner cannot answer honestly without embarrassment. The silence is not evidence that the friendship is shallow; it shows how much remains unspoken between two boys who have shared classes, journeys, and study sessions. The crisis forces them into subjects their earlier friendship had not yet made speakable.

Care During and After the Hospitalization

After Frieder swallows sleeping pills taken from his mother’s supply, he is admitted to the locked psychiatric ward and is not allowed to leave. Höppner visits every other day. They do homework together, and Höppner tells Frieder what has happened at school; even a teacher’s outburst becomes material carried from ordinary school life into the ward. These visits preserve a thread of shared routine when Frieder’s freedom has been sharply restricted.

The possibility of living together later becomes inseparable from care. Höppner sees moving in with Frieder as a way to escape his mother’s unpleasant boyfriend, F2M2, and the work and abuse that make home intolerable. But he also understands the proposed move as a responsibility: he would leave home to keep Frieder from killing himself. This double motive matters. The shared house is not simply an act of rescue, nor merely an escape from family conflict; it gives Höppner a place to live while placing Frieder’s safety in the center of his new daily life.

Höppner does not consider that responsibility without hesitation. He recognizes that living with Frieder could mean fearing, whenever he went out, that he might return to find a corpse, and losing the freedom to stay overnight with Vera. He also considers the alternative of Frieder remaining in the hospital, where a regular school-day routine, meals, and professional staff might provide structure and supervision. The decision to share a home therefore emerges not from confidence that friendship can replace care, but from weighing the security of institutional routine against the possibility of building a life together outside it.

A Shared Home and Its Daily Work

The decision becomes collective when Höppner wonders whether he should move in alone or whether someone else could share the responsibility. Vera agrees to move in too. When the household begins, its first evening is almost wordless: the group sits around the kitchen table, eating spaghetti while the only cassette immediately available plays too loudly for conversation. The scene gives the friendship a new setting. Instead of meeting for school, the boys now inhabit a home whose routines and responsibilities they share with others.

The house makes care an everyday practice rather than a single solemn intervention. Its residents talk over breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and Höppner understands all that talking as a way of keeping watch over someone who has tried to kill himself. He also admits that even after weeks of living this way he does not understand why anyone would want to die. He can grasp the idea in some sense, but cannot comprehend someone actually attempting it. The gap between intellectual recognition and lived understanding remains part of the friendship’s daily life.

Their sense of home also changes with the company they keep. On December 24, Höppner is at his family’s house, but he thinks of the Auerhaus as home in the deeper sense. When speaking with people who do not belong to the shared household, home means his family; among those who live in the Auerhaus, it means the Auerhaus. The distinction marks how friendship has become more than a school connection: it has made a second domestic belonging. At the same time, Höppner’s old family life has not vanished. His sister is in his former room, watching television on the portable set he left behind, and the household has rearranged itself around his departure.

Conversations About Living and Dying

Frieder’s reflections come to Höppner in fragments. Frieder thinks throughout the day, then looks at him as though waiting for an invitation to speak. Höppner supplies the prompt, and Frieder tells him what he has worked out. This small conversational ritual turns attention into a form of care: Höppner does not claim to produce answers for Frieder, but makes room for him to state them.

One of Frieder’s clearest distinctions is that he did not want to kill himself so much as stop living. He believes those are different things. The difference complicates any simple account of his attempt and helps explain why Höppner keeps asking rather than treating the earlier crisis as a solved problem. Yet explanation does not make Frieder’s state easier to read. Höppner worries that if Frieder is sad, he may only be tired, while if he is cheerful, he may already have made a decision to die. A sudden good mood, Frieder has said, can mean that someone who has constantly thought about suicide has decided what to do. In their shared life, ordinary changes in expression can carry an alarming uncertainty.

Höppner tests the boundary between respecting Frieder’s choices and intervening to save him. He asks whether, if Frieder were suddenly in mortal danger—for example, if he fell through ice—he should rescue him, or whether Frieder would be angry. After thinking for a long time, Frieder says Höppner may rescue him, because he wants to choose for himself. He then offers a thought about the person who imagines what will happen without them: someone who asks that question believes their presence matters. The exchange gives Höppner neither a general rule nor certainty about a future emergency. It makes room, instead, for both Frieder’s claim to self-determination and his recognition that other people’s lives depend on his presence.

Conflict, Limits, and the Friendship’s Aftermath

The conversations circle the question of who is responsible if Frieder attempts suicide again. At one point, Frieder tells Höppner that if he does it again, Höppner cannot be blamed. The statement sounds like an effort to release his friend from responsibility, but it cannot remove the fear attached to living together. Their discussions may feel repetitive to Höppner; Frieder calls them a spiral rather than a circle, insisting that they are moving closer to a center. The image captures a friendship in which returning to the same question is not necessarily failure, even when no final answer appears.

The bond also breaks into anger. After Frieder tells Höppner that he deliberately provoked a police officer into shooting him, Höppner hits him, knocks him from a chair, and continues beating him while telling him to kill himself if that is what he wants, but to stop dragging the others into it. Frieder tries to throw him off but does not fight back. This is not a resolution of their conflict or a cure for Frieder’s despair. It is an eruption of fear and rage from a friend who has been made to feel implicated in the danger and powerless to control it. Their intimacy contains tenderness and attention, but also the damage that can follow when care is burdened with impossible responsibility.

As time passes, Höppner finds that the question of why Frieder first wanted to die has faded. The more they talked about it, the less vivid the question became, until it had almost disappeared; he never found an answer. After Frieder’s successful suicide, Höppner wonders whether Frieder had the same reasons as during the earlier, failed attempt. The uncertainty remains, and the friendship cannot be made into a neat story of discovery, rescue, or explanation. Its significance lies instead in the years of ordinary companionship, the shared home built around vigilance, and the limits of even sustained closeness: Höppner can listen, ask, and stay, but he cannot finally know Frieder’s reasons or guarantee his survival.