Stuttgart is a destination that gathers two different passages into adult life: Harry travels there for his apprenticeship, while the narrator is driven there to undergo a military examination he has been trying to avoid. The city is not described as a place to settle or explore. Instead, it is approached through the daily train, the road, and, finally, the drab institutional space of the district military replacement office.

Work and the Daily Journey

Harry already knows Frieder from kindergarten, but by the time he enters the story’s household routine, he is commuting to Stuttgart for an electrical apprenticeship. The journey is built into the rhythm of his days: he boards a train at half past five in the morning, works in Stuttgart, and returns at five in the afternoon. Then, still in his red overalls, he comes by the kitchen and smokes cannabis with the others. Stuttgart is thus linked not to a dramatic transformation in Harry’s life but to a schedule repeated day after day, with the shared kitchen serving as the place where work gives way to company.

Harry’s talk about his trade lends the commute a brash occupational pride. He calls electricians an elite, arguing that a badly laid wall or poorly diluted paint is one thing, but a foolish electrician might not survive his apprenticeship. The boast makes the training sound both prestigious and dangerous, and it contrasts Harry’s practical, paid route into working life with the narrator’s uncertain future. Harry also talks about buying a car, insisting that it should not be small and should consume plenty of fuel. Against that fantasy of motorized freedom, the early train remains the concrete fact of his present: Stuttgart is where he goes to work, and the kitchen is where he returns.

The Military Examination

Later, Stuttgart becomes the destination of the narrator’s impending conscription examination. The narrator weighs the consequences of being examined: an induction notice might arrive the next day, disrupting plans to go to Berlin and raising the possibility of service, refusal, or prison. He also wonders what the examination entails, including providing a urine sample, undressing, doing knee bends, and having his blood pressure taken. These questions make the trip feel less like ordinary travel than a threshold into an institution whose decisions may narrow his choices.

The narrator considers whether to undergo the examination at all. Bogatzki offers to drive him to Stuttgart and may also bring him back; the narrator wonders whether Vera can accompany them as emotional support. He has another option: he can choose handcuffs and be taken straight to prison, where perhaps he could finish his Abitur if he behaved and could write in handcuffs. When the choice is put to him, he says he will take the handcuffs. The decision is bleakly comic, but it gives concrete form to his resistance: even arrest seems preferable to accepting the examination without protest.

Vera is allowed to accompany him. She speaks briefly with Frieder before climbing into the back seat. At the town hall, Bogatzki stops, goes inside, and returns half an hour later with the key to the handcuffs. The journey then passes through the countryside: a few villages farther on, the car overtakes Frieder, who is speeding toward Stuttgart on his bicycle. That brief sight of Frieder places the friends on parallel routes toward the same city, one under police escort and the other pedaling independently.

The District Office

The destination is the district military replacement office, not a recognizable civic landmark. Its appearance is described through an insistent single color: the facade, stairwell, corridors, floor, waiting benches, and employees’ uniforms are all brown-gray. The staff are easy to overlook because their uniforms seem to sink into the background. When the narrator half-closes his eyes, pale circles appear to move across the walls; they are the faces of the people waiting there. The description turns an administrative building into an environment that visually absorbs both officials and visitors.

Inside, boys of the narrator’s age—or men, as he hesitates to call them—sit waiting. Vera is the only woman. As she and the narrator pass toward registration, the young men stare, but none makes a crude remark or whistles after her. The narrator later asks why they did not behave as men in a group, and soldiers in particular, might be expected to behave. Vera answers that they are not yet a group: they do not know one another, and each has arrived alone, just as the narrator has. Her explanation shifts the scene’s emphasis from a presumed collective masculinity to isolated individuals assembled by the same official process.

What Stuttgart Connects

Across these episodes, Stuttgart connects ordinary labor with institutional compulsion. Harry’s early train and return to the kitchen make the city part of a stable work routine; the narrator’s drive there turns it into the setting of uncertainty about military service, refusal, and confinement. The routes also sharpen a contrast between kinds of movement: Harry follows a daily timetable, the narrator is transported by Bogatzki, and Frieder approaches on a bicycle. Stuttgart matters less as a fully depicted city than as a destination where different forms of adulthood—apprenticeship and conscription—become tangible.