Seidel

Seidel, the farmer who lives opposite Auerhaus, is a recurring village presence whose brief appearances connect the house to the routines and tensions of its neighborhood. He returns an old family axe, watches from across the street, and later strikes his teenage son during the New Year gathering. Through these scenes, Seidel links everyday acts of obligation and observation with a sudden, unmistakable display of domestic violence.

Identity and Place in the Village

Seidel is introduced as the farmer from across the road, an older man who arrives at Auerhaus looking distinctly ill-tempered. His entrance comes while the residents are eating spaghetti to music so loud that conversation is impossible. He does not enter as part of their emerging household, but as a neighbor carrying a piece of its history: an axe borrowed from Frieder’s grandfather.

The distance between Seidel’s farm and Auerhaus remains part of his presence. During a heavy rain, the narrator watches water running down the window in broad waves; with each wave, Seidel’s house seems to pulse, growing and stretching before ducking back again. The house is not merely a backdrop in this image. It marks the physical nearness of the neighbors and the boundary between their lives and the unconventional household across the street.

The Axe and an Inherited Obligation

Seidel explains that Frieder’s grandfather lent him the axe, then became ill and died. Seidel says he had not forgotten it and brings it back sharpened. The return gives a simple object a long history: the loan survived the lender’s illness and death, and Seidel has preserved both the memory of the debt and the axe itself.

Frieder replies that his father had already been looking for it. That detail makes the return more than a courteous gesture between neighbors. Seidel’s act reconnects the tool to the family that had been missing it, while the grandfather’s death remains embedded in the ordinary transaction. The scene takes place as the recorder plays “Our House,” so the song’s title accompanies a moment in which an object from the older household’s past is brought back into the new one.

A Neighbor at the Window

During the rain, Harry says that his father would beat him to death. Frieder answers, “Trotzdem.” He pours coffee into a large cup until it is almost overflowing, then leans forward and slurps at the black mound. Seidel’s house is visible opposite them as the rain makes it seem to swell and retreat.

The scene does not establish that Seidel is Harry’s father or explain the specific circumstances of Harry’s fear. Instead, it places that fear inside a village landscape where another household can be watched from across a street, while the people in Auerhaus talk and drink coffee indoors. Seidel’s visible proximity sharpens the contrast between the shelter of the shared house and the violence Harry anticipates elsewhere.

The New Year Gathering

At New Year, a large crowd gathers outside Auerhaus in the middle of the village: students from Gymnasium Am Stadtrand, patients from Schwarzes Holz who have permission to leave, and gay people from far beyond the village. The neighbors watch; women come over to toast the new year, and children run races with the patients to the main road and back. The scene briefly turns the street into a shared public space, filled with embraces and celebration.

Seidel emerges from his farm entrance and calls for his son, who is perhaps fifteen. He slaps the boy hard enough for the blow to crack, then sends him into the house. The violence interrupts the gathering’s open, communal mood with a private command enforced in public. Seidel does not join the celebration; his intervention instead shows how quickly the neighbors’ street can become a place of discipline and exclusion.

The narrator’s retrospective note that he was no longer in the village the following New Year gives the scene a quiet finality. Seidel remains part of the remembered village through a few sharply defined actions: returning what was borrowed, standing across the road, and asserting authority over his son. Those actions make him neither a member of the Auerhaus household nor a mere piece of local scenery, but a neighboring presence against which the house’s fragile communal life can be seen.