Kaufhof

Kaufhof is a department store in the novel whose goods figure in the Auerhaus residents’ improvised household economy. It is both a source of necessities taken without payment and the setting for Frieder’s weekly exception to the group’s shared accounting rule: expensive food he treats as a gift for everyone.

Goods and Household Economy

The residents’ kitchen is sustained by several kinds of provision. The narrator’s mother brings food from the supermarket, including partly filled crates of rejected apples and peppers and yogurt cups just past their expiration date. Frieder obtains a large loaf of bread each Friday, paid for by his parents with grain. He also steals coffee, wine, and other expensive goods at Penny, an idea Vera had suggested. The narrator contributes wages from work at a chicken farm and a half-orphan’s pension, but the kitchen fund still runs low quickly. Cäcilia refuses money from her parents; the refusal protects her pride but leaves less money for the household.

Kaufhof’s role in this economy is made explicit when Frieder proposes that anything obtained for free should be credited to the shared kitchen fund. The narrator understands that “free” is Frieder’s euphemism for stealing. Under the proposed rule, a packet of coffee worth ten marks in the shop would count as five marks in the communal account. Vera explains the intended bargain: each resident keeps more private money while the shared household still benefits, so collective prosperity rises alongside individual means. The scheme turns theft into an accounting practice, giving the household a way to redistribute goods without pretending that their market value and their contribution to the group are identical.

The Food Hall Exception

Frieder sets one limit to the arrangement: once a week he goes to Kaufhof’s food hall, and whatever he gets there for free does not count toward the household account; it is a gift. The distinction preserves a space for generosity outside the scheme’s calculation. Shared resources are usually measured and credited, but Frieder reserves these food-hall acquisitions from the ledger rather than treating them as another contribution to be tallied.

The exception takes material form in a costly confection he brings home. After emptying his bicycle bags, Frieder places a colorful lump on the table and describes it as a kind of chocolate stollen from Kaufhof’s delicatessen, ordinarily extremely expensive. Its small label identifies it as a 300-gram Prosecco-apricot cream truffle with pistachio pieces in fine milk chocolate. Frieder unwraps it and cuts it into thin slices. The narrator initially has no desire for sweets, but tries a piece; the contrast between the firm chocolate, the soft, cold, sour filling, and the crunchy pistachio makes it, in his judgment, the most delicious thing he has ever eaten.

Narrative Significance

Kaufhof connects the impersonal price of luxury goods to a household living on limited and uneven resources. In the shared economy, coffee can be translated into a half-price credit; the delicatessen confection, by contrast, is explicitly exempted from accounting and offered as a gift. The episode does not erase the household’s scarcity—the kitchen fund remains quick to empty—but lets a stolen or freely obtained luxury become a collective pleasure rather than a private possession. Its vivid taste and weight give the group’s improvised rules a concrete object around which exchange, generosity, and enjoyment briefly meet.