Höppner and Pauline’s Brief Intimate Relationship

Höppner and Pauline’s Brief Intimate Relationship is a short-lived, emotionally charged intimacy between Höppner and Pauline, shaped by attraction, hesitation, and the precarious circumstances of life at Auerhaus. It begins with recognition rather than courtship: Höppner sees Pauline again with her head shaved, is struck by her appearance, and later shares a brief kiss and tentative touch with her. The relationship remains unresolved, but its force is clear when Frieder, in Höppner’s imagined passage through the afterlife, asks whether he came to the snow because he had fallen in love with Pauline.

Recognition and Attraction

At a gathering, Höppner notices a young, bald woman listening to a homeless man’s story. Her eyes, eyelashes, and mouth seem familiar, and he recognizes her as Pauline. When he asks what happened to her hair, she answers that she set it on fire. The explanation makes her altered appearance part of the reunion itself: the shaved head is not a style or an accident but the result of an act of self-damage.

Höppner looks at Pauline with extraordinary intensity. He finds her even more beautiful with her head shaved, describing the rounded shape of her head, the delicate skin, and the greater visibility of her eyes and ears. His attention settles on the details that her former hair concealed, even catching on the clinical-sounding word for the cartilage in her ears before he pushes the word away. The scene makes attraction immediate and bodily, while Pauline’s answer about setting her hair alight introduces a destructive edge that Höppner cannot ignore. He asks whether she would rather destroy herself than anything else.

A Tentative Encounter at Auerhaus

At a later gathering in Auerhaus, Pauline becomes frightened by the crowd and sits with Höppner in the hayloft. The party continues audibly beyond their private space: a recorder plays faintly through the wall, punctuated by voices when someone laughs or calls out. Höppner points out that Frieder is dancing, a striking change for someone who otherwise cannot look people in the eye. Their conversation and the party’s noise place their closeness within the shared household rather than outside it, but the hayloft gives them a temporary refuge from the crowd.

Pauline speaks about emotions as chemistry produced by the brain: sadness, happiness, boredom, desire, and love all arise from one’s own internal chemical mixture. As she talks, her face comes close to Höppner’s. He imagines their eyes as brown lakes of chemistry, then interrupts the image with a playful correction about the number and color of their eyes. The scene moves from talk about feelings as bodily processes to physical intimacy; the language of chemistry becomes the bridge between an abstract explanation and the sensation of being close.

Their first kiss surprises Höppner with its taste: Pauline seems to taste like water. He finds that simplicity no distraction from the pleasure of her lips. They kiss and caress one another for what may have been a minute or a week, the uncertain duration conveying how completely the moment absorbs him. Pauline then takes his hand, and, while they continue kissing, Höppner understands her invitation and slowly slides his fingers under her sweater. Her warning, “Wehe,” checks the advance. The encounter is mutual but bounded: Pauline initiates the hand-taking, while the single word establishes a clear limit rather than granting Höppner unrestricted intimacy.

Desire, Ambivalence, and the Ending

Höppner’s fascination with Pauline is not presented as a secure romantic commitment. He envies people capable of acting in an all-or-nothing way without thinking through the consequences, and he reflects on Pauline’s apparent rightness about the unreliability of what people say. His attraction coexists with uncertainty about how to interpret her and how far their encounter can go. The relationship’s brevity is therefore not simply a matter of time; it is also marked by hesitation, an invitation followed by a boundary, and feelings Höppner cannot confidently place.

That attraction resurfaces in the novel’s near-death sequence. As Höppner imagines himself dead and traveling through the afterlife with Frieder, Frieder asks whether he has come up there because he fell in love with Pauline. Höppner answers that he came because of everything, not just her, and insists that she is perfect. Frieder replies with one word, “Symmetrisch,” recalling Höppner’s earlier admiration of Pauline’s balanced features. The exchange neither dismisses the relationship nor makes it the sole explanation for Höppner’s crisis: Pauline is one part of the accumulated burden expressed in his answer. The echo of symmetry turns his first, intensely visual impression of her into a final measure of what remains vivid to him, even as the imagined journey carries him toward death.