Höppner–Frieder Wittlinger friendship

Höppner–Frieder Wittlinger friendship is the relationship at the heart of Höppner’s years at Auerhaus: it starts in a plan to leave an oppressive home, grows into a shared effort to watch over Frieder after his suicide attempt, and continues after their communal household has ended. Its final form is both intimate and painfully limited. Höppner remains beside Frieder, talking through entire weekends, but companionship cannot restore the life they once shared.

Origins and Shared Life

For Höppner, moving in with Frieder offered a way out of his mother’s boyfriend’s home. He would no longer have to help with the paving, painting, and boarding up of rooms, or endure the boyfriend’s constant complaints and angry drinking. The move was not simply a change of address: it meant escaping a household in which silence was treated as arrogance and his mother’s boyfriend could punish her with days of silence before drinking and exploding.

Höppner worried about the responsibility of watching over Frieder alone. The prospect of sharing that responsibility made the move seem possible, and Vera agreed to join them. The friendship therefore began within a larger act of care: Frieder needed company, while Höppner needed somewhere else to live. Neither need cancels the other; their life together is built from both.

When the group first gathered around the kitchen table, their belongings were still packed in boxes and the recorder played the only cassette immediately available. The music was too loud for conversation, so they ate spaghetti, turning it around their forks and moving their knees to the rhythm. The scene makes their closeness concrete without presenting it as a grand declaration. They were beginning a shared life before they had much to say about what that life would become.

Care as a Daily Practice

At Auerhaus, ordinary talk became part of the work of keeping Frieder safe. Höppner describes a life filled with conversation at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with all that talking serving as a way to watch over someone who had tried to kill himself. He admits that he could not fully understand how a person might want to die, even after weeks of living beside Frieder. He could grasp the feeling in some sense, but could not accept that someone would actually attempt it.

That gap between understanding and incomprehension gives the friendship its tension. Höppner stays close without claiming that closeness makes Frieder’s suffering transparent. Their shared household offers company and attention, but it does not amount to a cure, and the need for vigilance remains embedded in their everyday life.

The meaning of home shifts with the audience. On Christmas Eve, Höppner visits his family and recognizes that he calls his family’s house home when speaking to people outside Auerhaus, while Auerhaus is home when he speaks with those who belong there. Back in his old room, he finds his sister using his portable television; the girls now have separate rooms, and the sister old enough to dislike their mother’s boyfriend has inherited the set. The domestic details mark the distance opened by moving out, while showing that Höppner’s new home does not erase his ties to his family of origin.

After Auerhaus

After the shared household ended, Frieder began an apprenticeship as a bicycle mechanic in a small town in Hesse and moved into a furnished room. When Höppner visited him, the room was small and bare, furnished with a particleboard chest of drawers and a bed; the town did not even have a pedestrian zone. The change in setting is stark beside the communal kitchen and crowded life they had shared. Frieder had work and a place to stay, but the new arrangement did not give him the companionship of Auerhaus.

More often, Frieder came to visit Höppner in Berlin. His employer’s brother drove there every Friday afternoon and regularly gave him a ride. At Höppner’s small kitchen table, the two friends talked until they were tired, then resumed on Saturday morning where Friday night’s conversation had stopped. The repetition shows how conversation had become the chief form their friendship could take across distance: a continuing thread held between visits.

Conversation and Its Limits

Frieder was afraid to go among people. He was alone, felt paralyzed, wanted to be different, and felt unable to become different. When Höppner left for his job cleaning stairwells or went shopping for cheese, bread, and Imiglykos, Frieder remained sitting exactly as he had been that morning. He said that things had always been this way and would never change. Höppner answered that they had once been different, though Frieder had forgotten.

Their weekends together became an effort to keep that possibility of change in view. They talked through Saturday and continued on Sunday morning; Höppner understood that they were talking for Frieder’s life. He no longer dared to say, or even think, that their conversations went in circles. When they fell silent, they sat and followed the conversation’s spiral in their minds, a movement toward the center so slow that an ordinary observer might not notice it. The image holds both the value and the strain of their bond: the talk does not move quickly toward a solution, yet abandoning it feels unthinkable.

Frieder’s eventual return journey on Sunday evening underlines the boundary of what Höppner can provide. Auerhaus was over, and Frieder was as alone as before, but now he knew the difference. That knowledge is the friendship’s lasting gift and its painful measure: their shared life showed Frieder another way of being with people, even though it could not prevent his isolation from returning once the household had dispersed.