Pauline

Pauline first appears as a striking contradiction: a young woman confined for setting a fire, yet introduced through a sharp, comic exchange and a forceful image of someone who would rather destroy herself than harm others. She later becomes part of the Auerhaus household, where the hayloft offers her a place apart and becomes a gallery of her carefully staged, uniformly dark self-portraits. Her story resists both the label of arsonist and any simple account of recovery: a later imagined future shows her with Frieder and children, while the closing news about a fatal fire and a prison sentence leaves her fate unsettled.

Introduction and the locked ward

The narrator meets Pauline while visiting Frieder in the locked ward at Schwarzes Holz. Frieder has been there for several weeks; when the narrator sees him talking with Pauline on a brown couch, his posture is unusually upright and his face is smiling. Pauline is described as exceptionally beautiful, with long, straight, dark-brown hair that she says she oils once a week. Her appearance and the vividness of the encounter distinguish her from the institutional setting around them.

Pauline is in the ward because she set fire to something in a youth home. She minimizes the incident as only a doormat, calling it ridiculous. Her name brings to mind Paulinchen, the child who sets a fire in Struwwelpeter while home alone, a literary echo that links her to fire before the novel has disclosed the larger consequences of her own story. The allusion is not a full explanation of her behavior; it sharpens the gap between her casual dismissal of the incident and the danger attached to the identity of arsonist.

During their first encounter, Pauline calls Frieder a bear who would rather make himself suffer than hurt anyone else. The narrator finds the way she shouts this shrill but funny, and Frieder continues smiling. Her remark gives voice to a compassionate view of him while also naming the self-destructive tendency that shadows his life. Pauline is therefore introduced not merely as a patient in the same institution, but as someone who can address Frieder with startling directness and draw a visible response from him.

Joining Auerhaus

After the narrator meets her again in a hall, he recognizes Pauline despite her shaved head. On Christmas Day, she collects her belongings from a transitional home and moves into the hayloft at Auerhaus. Her arrival brings the household to six. Frieder objects when the narrator reduces her to the category of arsonist, asking whether one act should define her for the rest of her life. He turns the label back on himself by asking whether he, too, is to remain a suicide for life. The exchange makes Pauline’s admission into the household part of a larger resistance to turning a person’s crisis into a permanent identity.

The hayloft is physically and socially apart from the kitchen and bedrooms, which the narrator likens to the mainland while the loft is an island. Pauline leans against one of its beams and makes repeated photographs of herself with a timer, saying she wants to record her current mood. The pictures, however, all register as black, varying only from medium black to dark black. Her stated wish to preserve a changing moment sits beside the visual repetition: the camera records a mood that seems unable, in these images, to move on.

Pauline improvises a way to attend to her hair without a water tap in the loft, collecting saliva in a cup and pouring it over her head before combing her hair backward. She then leans against a beam and arranges her face into an expression as neutral as possible—solemn, severe, and symmetrical. Frieder has taken a ten-pack of small-format film from a drugstore, with processing included in the price, and Pauline pins the resulting poorly lit photographs to the beams and rafters. The narrator sees the loft as a kind of Pauline museum: repeated images resembling Edvard Munch’s The Scream, except that the mouths are pressed shut. The display turns a cramped, makeshift room into a record of self-presentation, but its closed mouths also make the photographs feel like an image of expression held in check.

Companionship, crisis, and uncertainty

Pauline’s place at Auerhaus develops in a household already shaped by uncertainty about Frieder’s suicidal thoughts. When he speaks of the distinction between not wanting to kill himself and not wanting to live, and later says he can be rescued in an unforeseen emergency because he wants to choose for himself, the novel gives no reliable formula for interpreting his moods. One day he says he will ride his bicycle; the narrator and Vera hurry to catch the bus, and the empty place beside the narrator at school brings back the image of Frieder hanging in the hayloft. The possibility that apparent cheer might signal a decision to die rather than safety intensifies the household’s watchfulness.

At one gathering, Frieder leans against the refrigerator while everyone watches, and the narrator cannot tell whether he is about to announce that he will never try to kill himself again or that he has decided to do so that day. Pauline’s life in the shared house therefore unfolds amid a crisis that cannot be made legible from outward behavior alone. The novel does not give her a simple role as Frieder’s caretaker or cure; instead, her earlier remark about the bear who harms himself, the household’s arguments about labels, and her own history of fire place their experiences in uneasy proximity.

The narrator later finds himself sitting with Pauline on the hayloft while she has become frightened by the crowd downstairs. The recorder can be heard faintly through the wall, punctuated by laughter or a shouted voice. He points out that Frieder is dancing, a startling contrast with his usual inability to look people in the eye. The scene locates Pauline at the edge of the gathering, close enough to hear its life but apart from its press of people. The loft’s recurring island image thus describes more than a physical separation: it is also a vantage point from which companionship remains possible without requiring her to join the crowd.

A possible future and a grim return

In a projected future image, Pauline and Frieder appear together with children. They say doctors had warned them about a possible hereditary vulnerability because of the psychological problems they had once experienced. Pauline says that after her first pregnancy she stopped hearing voices; the doctors suspect a hormonal change and describe such a spontaneous recovery as not especially rare. Frieder adds that he is doing well. The scene offers a future in which the histories associated with the locked ward have not prevented intimacy or parenthood, while preserving the characters’ awareness of psychiatric vulnerability. It presents improvement as something reported in a particular life, not as proof that the earlier crises never mattered.

The book’s last movement pulls against that hopeful image. At a table, the police officer Bogatzki says he can tell the others where the woman with brown hair—Pauline—is, then gives the sentence: ten years for arson resulting in death. The narrator silently fuses the words for prison and psychiatric hospital, imagining a combination of incarceration and institutional confinement. The brief report recalls Pauline’s first fire in the youth home but changes its scale and consequence: what once sounded to her like a trivial doormat fire now stands beside a fatal outcome and a substantial prison term. The evidence does not explain the fire, identify its victim, or reconcile the sentence with the earlier future scene of Pauline and Frieder with children. That unresolved contrast is central to her portrayal: Pauline remains more than the identity imposed on her, but neither companionship nor the possibility of recovery erases the consequences attached to fire.