Köln

Köln is the city where the former Auerhaus residents regroup after Harry completes his apprenticeship, carrying their chosen household into a new, rundown home in the middle of the city. The move closes their life at Auerhaus without making it the end of their shared story: from this urban address, the narration shifts into an extended coda about what becomes of them.

From Auerhaus to the City

The residents remain at Auerhaus until Harry has finished his apprenticeship. They then all move to Köln and rent a dilapidated house in the city center. The move is collective, but it follows a specific change in the household’s circumstances: their stay at Auerhaus lasts through Harry’s training, and its completion sets the time for leaving.

Köln is thus presented not as a return to an established home but as the group’s next experiment in living together. The new house is explicitly run-down, and the account offers no suggestion that the move resolves the uncertainties that shaped their earlier life. It gives the group a new setting and a continuation, rather than a polished or permanent conclusion.

A New Meaning of Home

Earlier, the narrator distinguishes between home as family and home as Auerhaus. On December 24, while visiting his family, he explains that in conversation with people outside the household, home means family; among those who also belong to Auerhaus, home means the shared house. The distinction makes belonging depend on the audience and on lived participation, not simply on a fixed address.

The move to Köln follows that account of home as something made by a group. The residents leave Auerhaus together and rent another house, extending their shared domestic life into a new place. The evidence does not say whether the new house becomes home in precisely the same way, but the collective move carries forward the possibility that home can be formed beyond the narrator’s family household.

The Coda and What Follows

The narration calls the move the point at which an ending sequence can begin: the main story is nearly over, and attention turns to what later becomes of its people. Köln therefore functions both as a real destination and as a structural threshold. The shared house gives way to an account of the residents’ subsequent paths, beginning with Harry’s civilian service at an AIDS-support organization and his later studies in fashion design.

The city’s significance rests in that double role. It is where the Auerhaus residents move after the household’s first phase has run its course, and it opens the novel’s long coda, which looks beyond the central story toward the lives that continue afterward.