Harry

Harry, also identified as Harald Calabrese, is an old friend of Frieder who arrives in the Auerhaus household already partway through the conventional life sequence the narrator calls birth, school, work, and death. A trainee electrician in Stuttgart, he brings practical confidence, a dryly comic manner, and a life beyond the house’s familiar circle. When he tells his father that he is gay and comes to Auerhaus with bruises on his face, that wider life becomes a crisis of belonging: he does not go home, but makes a room for himself in the slaughterhouse kitchen. Later, his hidden drug stock brings the police into the household, while a final conversation in Berlin hints at a future in which he will make clothes that can make music.

Identity and Introduction

Harry first appears as a stranger sitting in the Auerhaus kitchen, a room where the front door is open and unfamiliar visitors sometimes come in to wait. He is already rolling a joint when the narrator greets him; Harry offers to share and introduces himself. His casual welcome makes a newcomer part of the room before anyone has explained why he is there. The narrator notices that the marijuana tastes sweet and soft, and says it tastes like honey. That taste is a small but apt introduction to Harry’s mixture of easy sociability and an unconventional, slightly surprising presence.

The household soon learns that Harry is no stranger to Frieder. The two have known each other since kindergarten, even though Harry now goes to Stuttgart for an electrical apprenticeship. Their connection gives Harry a history with Frieder that predates the shared house and its effort to keep watch over a friend who once tried to kill himself. Harry’s professional self-image is emphatic: he describes electricians as an elite whose work demands more competence than bricklaying or painting, because a careless mistake by an electrician can cost the worker his life. The boast is comic, but it also establishes him as someone who takes pride in a skilled trade and speaks with unembarrassed certainty about his place in it.

Auerhaus as Home

Harry becomes part of a household whose sense of home does not simply match the boundaries of family. The narrator explains that, when speaking to outsiders, home means his family’s home; among people who also live at Auerhaus, it means the shared house. Harry’s arrival belongs to this second meaning: he is not merely a visitor passing through an open door, but someone who will make a place there. In a scene of the household’s first evening around the kitchen table, the residents eat spaghetti to the loud music of the only cassette they can find among the boxes. They cannot talk over it, and do not need to; the shared meal and the rhythm of their knees make the beginning of communal life tangible before there is much to say.

Harry’s own move into that life follows a public rupture at home. He appears in the kitchen with red and blue marks on his face, a brown crust beneath his nose, and two black eyes that resemble a pair of purple glasses. He tells the household that he has told his father. The narrator’s joke about a “purple gay glasses” image turns the bruises into a visual emblem of the cost of the disclosure, without making the moment’s consequence disappear. Harry no longer goes home. He spreads Styrofoam sheets on the tiles of the slaughterhouse kitchen, lays down a blanket, and makes that improvised space his bedroom.

The household expands around such decisions. On Christmas Day, Pauline retrieves her belongings from the transitional home and settles into the hayloft; with Harry and Pauline included, the narrator counts six residents. The number is rendered through playful measures—half a dozen, half a shilling, a small pack of eggs—so that new members become at once a change in the household’s practical arrangements and a joke about how a group can be counted. Harry’s room in the kitchen and Pauline’s room in the hayloft are not formal accommodations; they are the group’s resourceful answer to the need to make space for one another.

The Household, Care, and Labels

Auerhaus’s shared life is shaped by concern for Frieder after his suicide attempt. The narrator remembers that a “real life” of talking at breakfast, lunch, and dinner meant keeping watch over one of their own who had tried to kill himself. The household’s joking economies and crowded rooms coexist with this serious responsibility. Harry joins a home in which care is not confined to a single conversation or a formal promise; it is built into the ordinary fact of being together through the day.

That care does not prevent the residents from struggling with the labels attached to crisis. When the narrator calls Pauline an arsonist because she once set a fire, Frieder objects to the idea that one act must define her for the rest of her life. He turns the question back on himself: would he be a suicide for the rest of his life? The narrator thinks that, in some sense, he would be, and Frieder recognizes the thought. The exchange exposes the tension between a person’s history and the identity other people attach to it. Harry’s own decision to leave his father’s home and live among friends similarly cannot be reduced to the bruises that mark the disclosure: those marks matter, but they do not exhaust who he is in the house.

Police Scrutiny and Harry’s Ingenuity

The Auerhaus household’s exposure to the police gives Harry’s resourcefulness a more dangerous setting. During an investigation, he is stopped by officers as he leaves work and is arrested after they check his identity. At the police station he is photographed and fingerprinted, as the others have been, and then released. When he returns to the house, he asks about the chicken coop. The question points to his concealed store: he keeps there what he does not intend to smoke soon, meaning the stock he plans to sell, and the amount is considerable.

Harry has hidden it behind an improvised camouflage device. He has built a chicken-dropping disguise from old manure spread over a small board, which can be attached to the coop door with an electromagnet so that the door appears not to have been opened for years. The detail is both comic and exact: a homemade trick that turns the chickens’ mess into concealment. The police have not found the stash—or may not have searched for it—but their failure to discover it does not make the household’s exposure imaginary. Harry has been arrested, and his concealed business exists alongside the group’s shared home, bringing the risks of his private activity into the setting where its members live together.

Harry explains that a dispute with a junkie led to the police’s attention. The man did not believe Harry’s denial that he sold heroin, shouted and struck out, and then allowed himself to be arrested. Harry says that a junkie will tell the police what they want to hear, and that merely mentioning heroin can escalate the response. Vera questions whether twenty grams of marijuana would bring in an armed police unit; Harry’s account supplies the accusation that could make the investigation larger than the quantity she names. The episode distinguishes what the officers have done from what Harry says prompted them, while leaving his concealed stock as a real source of legal danger.

Berlin and a Life Beyond the Apprenticeship

In a later conversation in Berlin, Harry asks the narrator what he is doing, then says that he is making clothes that people can make music with. He asks whether the narrator knows Laurie Anderson. The answer is no, leaving Harry’s reference as a glimpse of an interest rather than an explained career. The exchange nonetheless marks a striking change of direction from the electrician who once claimed his trade as an elite profession. He is now describing work that joins clothing and music, a creative undertaking that does not fit the straightforward sequence of school and employment that frames the narrator’s observations.

Harry also jokes that Berlin is both a prison and a psychiatric hospital, so someone there need not join the army. The remark connects institutional confinement with exemption from conscription, treating two very different forms of being kept from the outside world as a darkly practical comparison. It also carries the novel’s recurring resistance to a single prescribed route through adult life. Harry first entered the story already at work, in Stuttgart, and later appears pursuing a different kind of making in Berlin. His movement through these settings does not resolve into a complete account of his later life; instead, the novel leaves him in motion, still inventing ways to live beyond the expectations that had once seemed settled.