Suicide thoughts and suicide crisis

Suicidal thought and crisis in the novel are not presented as a single, stable wish or a legible sequence of warning signs. Through Frieder’s failed attempt, his later death, and the narrator’s own near-fatal crisis, the story distinguishes wanting not to live from intending to die while showing how difficult that distinction is for friends to act upon. Survival does not settle the meaning of an attempt, and a calm appearance does not make the danger readable.

The First Attempt and Its Ambiguous Meaning

The first crisis begins with means taken from Frieder’s mother: she used sleeping pills every evening, sometimes one or two, and constantly changed the dose without keeping track of how many remained. Frieder quietly accumulated some of them. After school, he drank a two-liter bottle of Imiglykos wine, went down to the cellar, and swallowed the pills with the last of it. He woke with a tube in his throat. The account gives the attempt concrete preparation and circumstance, but does not reduce it to a motive.

Frieder’s father, who was not usually home at that hour because he was in the barn or working at the post office, had received a load of wood and needed to make firewood. Searching for the missing axe, he went down to the cellar and found Frieder instead. The narrator later tells Frieder that the axe saved his life. Frieder answers that it was an axe that was not even there, and calls it a damned axe. The rescue thus turns on accident and an ordinary household search, not on a planned intervention. The missing tool becomes an ironic trace of the contingent circumstances that interrupted the attempt.

Later, when the narrator asks what he had wanted, Frieder draws a distinction that the novel returns to: he had not wanted to kill himself, he says; he had only wanted not to live anymore. The difference is not offered as a tidy resolution. It clarifies that a wish for life to cease and a deliberate act can coexist without being identical, while leaving open how someone else should interpret the act or respond to the person who survived it.

A Crisis Friends Cannot Read

The group’s understanding of suicide is tested in talk as well as in action. In a discussion of Goethe’s Werther, Doktor Turnschuh bluntly asks whether unhappy love is really sufficient reason to take one’s life, then offers the dismissive observation that other mothers have beautiful daughters too. The others say nothing, but the narrator can see that they are thinking seriously. The exchange places a glib explanation beside a room of genuine concern; the narrator’s sense that something is wrong arises from the mismatch between the easy answer and the gravity of the subject.

After Frieder has returned to ordinary routines, the threat remains present in the narrator’s imagination. On a morning when Frieder says he will ride his bicycle anyway, the others hurry to catch the bus. In the third lesson, the seat beside the narrator is still empty. He pictures Frieder hanging from a rope in the hayloft and cannot stop the image. His mind tests other possible methods as well: a pistol is unavailable, Frieder has rejected being hit by a train, there are no suitably tall buildings, and pills seem to the narrator like no escalation after the earlier attempt. These thoughts do not establish what Frieder will do; they reveal the narrator’s effort to make an unthinkable possibility concrete enough to anticipate.

Before the fifth lesson, Vera asks whether Frieder might be in bed at that very moment, dying. Cäcilia thinks he is simply skipping school and asks why he would choose that particular day. The narrator remembers that Frieder looked strange that morning and says someone should go home to check. They all go: none wants to encounter a body alone. An ambulance is already outside the house, its blue lights visible from a distance. Vera and Cäcilia stumble off the bus and run, with the narrator behind them. Frieder is dead. The uncertainty that had divided the friends’ interpretations ends not in confirmation of a clear warning but in an outcome they had feared and could not confidently predict.

Choice, Rescue, and the Limits of Reassurance

Frieder’s account of the earlier attempt also complicates any assumption that suicidal behavior is simply an uninterrupted wish for death. He recalls that as he swallowed the pills he felt wholly present and self-assured, as though everything were all right. He says that if he could always feel that way, he would not have taken them, but that he had to swallow them to reach the feeling. He describes the decision as already settled once the pills were down: the Abitur, moving away, and the possibility of sleeping with a woman no longer seemed to matter. The moment’s calm belongs to his description of a crisis, not to evidence of recovery.

When the narrator asks whether Frieder would want to be rescued if he were suddenly in danger, for instance after falling through ice, Frieder pauses before saying that the narrator can save him: he wants to choose for himself. The answer holds autonomy and openness to rescue together. He does not ask others to treat every danger as a decision already made; nor does he promise that rescue would always be welcome. Asked about imagining life without him, he says that someone who asks such a question will not do it, because the questioner believes their presence matters. His reassurance concerns the person asking, not a dependable rule by which the group can assess Frieder’s own risk.

That limitation becomes explicit when Frieder later pauses in the kitchen with everyone watching, including Harry, who is still lying on the tiles, and the kettle hissing on the stove. The narrator cannot tell whether Frieder is about to announce that he will never attempt suicide again or that he has decided to die that day and wants the others to leave the house. He cannot reliably interpret Frieder’s moods: sadness might mean tiredness, while unexplained good spirits might mean that he has made a decision. Frieder himself has said that when someone who has thought about suicide constantly suddenly becomes cheerful for no reason, that person has decided. The scene makes apparent how little outward behavior can settle the question for those closest to him.

The Narrator’s Near-Fatal Crisis

After Frieder’s death, the narrator’s own crisis gives the distinction between death and the desire to stop living another setting. In the snow, after taking a large swallow of vodka, he confronts the answer he would give to the hypothetical of the naked Russian: he would shoot, but only so long as nobody ordered him to. Without lying, he thinks, that answer would fail him; then he would have to serve in the Bundeswehr, and refusal would mean prison. The imagined alternatives—military service or imprisonment—frame the immediate pressure, but the narrator’s actions carry the scene beyond a thought experiment.

As night deepens, the lights below go out one family at a time. He takes the last swallow. When the wind rises, he initially notices that it ought to be cold but cannot feel it; then he feels the cold less and less. A tunnel seems to move toward him and close over him as darkness gathers. He becomes extremely tired, hears a rumbling, and sees a light at the tunnel’s end. In this altered, near-death perception, he hears Frieder’s voice and concludes that Frieder must already be dead. Frieder takes him by the arm; the narrator stands and seems to float beside him toward the light. Frieder tells him to get in. The remembered friend’s appearance gives the crisis a form of encounter, but the scene does not turn death into a reliable or uncomplicated release.

The narrator later reflects on the unanswered question of why Frieder wanted to die during the first attempt. The more he and Frieder talked about it, the paler the question became, until it seemed to disappear; he never found an answer. He also cannot establish whether Frieder’s reasons during the successful suicide were the same as before. The uncertainty is part of the account rather than a gap it pretends to repair: intimacy and conversation changed the narrator’s relation to the question without giving him access to a final cause.

The Possibility That Remains

The narrator’s eventual reasoning is expressed as a choice between unequal possibilities. If he does not kill himself today, he can still do so tomorrow; if he dies today, he cannot choose not to die tomorrow. He therefore prefers the possibility that leaves more possibilities available. This is not presented as a universal answer to suicidal crisis or as proof that the narrator is simply safe. It is a precarious logic of delay, grounded in the irreversibility of death and in the fact that a future choice exists only if he remains alive.

Across the two crises, the novel keeps intention, action, rescue, and survival distinct. Frieder’s first attempt ends in an accidental discovery; his later death confirms that surviving once did not resolve the danger. The narrator and his friends care enough to watch, ask, and go home together, yet they cannot reliably infer what Frieder’s changing moods mean. By placing the narrator’s own crisis beside Frieder’s history, the story refuses a single explanation for suicidal desire and makes uncertainty itself consequential: another person may want to be rescued, may not know how to explain the wish to die, or may be unable to make that wish visible in time.