The Auerhaus household disbands and moves out after its residents have treated their shared house as a lasting home, even while knowing that this life could not continue indefinitely. The departure is both practical and emotional: the residents leave the farmhouse for a rundown house in Cologne, carrying with them the habits and attachments formed around its kitchen table, and confronting the gap between a refuge that felt permanent and the temporary life it actually was.

The household as home

The move has roots in the way the household was created. When Frieder first received permission to leave the psychiatric ward, his outing was restricted to the park and required an escort. The narrator accompanied him, uneasy about being responsible for someone whose intentions he did not fully understand. At the park exit, Frieder announced that he wanted to go into town; the narrator panicked. The outing thus began as a carefully limited transition beyond the ward, but it also opened the possibility of life outside it.

For the narrator, moving in with Frieder would also mean escaping his mother’s unpleasant boyfriend. He would no longer have to help pave the driveway, paint the facade, or endure the man’s complaining and explosive drinking. The proposed shared house therefore answered two needs at once: Frieder would not be left alone, and the narrator could leave a hostile home. He worried that caring for Frieder would place too much responsibility on one person, and asked himself whether there could be two people watching over him. Vera agreed to move in, turning an individual obligation into a shared undertaking.

The household’s sense of home was built through daily practice rather than a formal claim. On the first evening, the residents sat around the kitchen table while the only cassette currently unpacked played too loudly for conversation. They ate spaghetti and moved their knees to the music; there was not much to discuss yet. Later, the narrator understood that the word home changed according to whom they were speaking with: on December 24, home meant his biological family when addressing outsiders, but meant Auerhaus among those who lived there. That shifting usage captures the household’s double reality. Auerhaus did not erase family ties, but it had become a home in its own right.

Making a temporary life feel permanent

The residents knew for a long time that the Auerhaus period would have to end, yet were afraid that talking about its end might make it arrive sooner. They behaved as though their shared life were their real life, lasting forever. That pretense was not simply a failure to plan; it allowed a makeshift household to be experienced as an inhabitable present rather than a temporary arrangement always measured against its loss.

Frieder gives that feeling the image of floating on an air mattress in a South Sea lagoon. With eyes closed, a person can imagine living there for the rest of life; opening them reveals only an afternoon at a gravel pit, already nearly over. The image holds both the pleasure and the limit of the Auerhaus years in one movement: the imagined permanence is real as an experience, but it cannot make the afternoon endless. His comparison makes the eventual move feel less like an unexpected reversal than a moment when the residents must open their eyes to a limit they had known and avoided naming.

The departure and its threshold

By the time the household was preparing to move, the narrator, Frieder, Vera, and Pauline were spending the week before departure working in the basement kitchen of a retirement home. From six in the morning they buttered pretzels, arranged individual portions of margarine, jam, and honey on plates, and wrapped each plate in plastic film. This labor places the approaching change amid unromantic routine: the future is not announced by a grand farewell, but arrives alongside work, food, and the effort to get through a week.

The physical departure is narrated with a small load: the narrator and Frieder set off with a mattress and a few boxes in Gluckgluck, which Harry had lent them because he was not allowed to drive. They stop near the pedestrian zone because they need a street map. In a bookshop, Frieder scans the maps and points to Crete, proposing it as their destination; when the narrator asks whether they are going in Gluckgluck, Frieder answers with the car’s burbling sound. The exchange is playful, but it does not cancel the actual move. It momentarily opens a world of possible destinations at the very point when their shared life is becoming an address, a vehicle, and a few belongings on the road.

A new house and an unfinished future

The residents remain in Auerhaus until Harry finishes his apprenticeship. Then they all move to Cologne and rent a rundown house in the middle of the city. The change is not a return to the earlier family homes: the group carries its shared form of living into a new place, though the text marks the old story as nearly over. The narrator calls what follows a long end-credit sequence, a stretch concerned with what becomes of the people after the central story has passed its turning point.

That framing makes the move a threshold rather than a neat resolution. The Cologne house establishes that the residents continue together beyond Auerhaus, while the rundown setting refuses any suggestion that the transition delivers a perfected home. The story’s ending remains open to later lives and changes; leaving the farmhouse closes one period, not the relationships or futures that extend beyond it.

What the move leaves behind

The narrator’s treatment of the conscription postcard offers a quieter measure of change. During the move, he retrieves the card from his jacket lining, where it has slipped through a cut in the fabric. He regrets that he cannot keep it as the third card for the Bummbumm folder, but crosses out the address, writes “Retour! Unbek. verz.!” beside it, and drops it into a mailbox. The return is a concrete refusal to keep the summons in circulation, set against the larger movement of packing and relocation. A house can be left by carrying a mattress and boxes away; an unwanted claim on the future can be rejected with a line through an address and a card sent back.

The move’s significance lies in the contrast between the residents’ intense experience of Auerhaus as home and their recognition that the arrangement had an end. Their shared life had begun in acts of practical care and escape, and had been sustained by ordinary routines; it could therefore feel lasting without being permanent. Cologne does not undo what Auerhaus gave them. It marks the point at which the household has to carry that life beyond the place that first held it.