The Establishment of the Auerhaus Shared House

The Establishment of the Auerhaus Shared House marks the shift from worrying about Frieder at a distance to building a household around him. What begins as a practical arrangement—he cannot live alone, and his friends can share the responsibility—becomes a chosen home whose daily life is shaped by companionship, care, and uncertainty about whether Frieder is safe.

The plan to live together

Frieder tells the narrator that his doctor thinks it would be good for him to stop living with his parents. His grandfather’s house stands empty after his death the previous year, and Frieder’s parents are willing for him to move there, provided he does not live alone. The proposed household is therefore not simply a move to a new address: from the outset, it is tied to the expectation that other people will be present with Frieder.

The narrator recognizes another reason to accept the arrangement. Moving in with Frieder would let him escape his mother’s boyfriend, whose home-improvement demands had included laying the driveway, painting the facade, and covering ceilings with ugly boards. His resentment is not only about chores. The boyfriend complains that the narrator acts superior because he attends secondary school and does not answer his endless talk; when the narrator’s mother speaks with her son for more than a few minutes, the boyfriend sulks for days, then drinks six or eight beers before erupting. The shared house offers the narrator a way out of that tense domestic pattern at the same time that it offers Frieder company.

The narrator wonders whether someone else should join them, so that responsibility for looking after Frieder would not rest on just one person. Vera agrees to move in. She makes the decision emphatically, first looking up at the narrator, then climbing onto a low wall and looking down at him as she says she will join. Her assent gives the plan a shared basis: this is not one friend taking on Frieder alone, but a small group accepting a common responsibility.

Making the empty house a home

The house’s small windows shape the first decisions about its rooms. The group paints them orange so that, as Vera puts it, it will always seem sunny. Frieder dislikes the idea and paints his room white and pale blue: white walls, blue trim, door, and window frames, with even his bed, table, and chair painted blue. The contrast establishes the new home through distinct choices rather than a single imposed style. The narrator connects Frieder’s fondness for Greece to seeing Alexis Sorbas at the cinema; he admired Sorbas for living in the moment and not thinking too much, an attitude that appealed to Frieder.

Frieder comes to collect the narrator’s belongings on a tractor with a trailer. The narrator leaves his small television behind, hoping his sisters will not need it as much as he did. They drive on to Vera’s village, carrying mattresses side by side, boxes, and a floor lamp; the trailer is mostly empty, with old hay caught in its cracks, and the lamp falls over at the first bend. The move is modest and makeshift, assembled from what they can carry rather than from a fully equipped household.

Cäcilia joins at the last stop. Vera’s parents will not let her live with two boys unless another girl is there, so Cäcilia moves in too. The narrator cannot understand why she would leave the comforts of her parents’ home: she has a large room, can watch television in the living room without being bothered, and, according to Vera, there is even a swimming pool in the basement. Cäcilia’s mother, involved in a Rotary club that raises money for local causes, initially complicates the move. Cäcilia argues that without her help Frieder has no chance of getting out of the psychiatric hospital, and her mother eventually lets her go.

The departure is a small confrontation over what counts as necessary. Cäcilia’s mother talks first to her daughter and then to the furniture mover, who puts a chest of drawers on the truck before returning to the house. Cäcilia shouts that she does not need any of it, wheels her bicycle out of the garage, lifts it onto the trailer, and climbs onto the tractor with the others. Her mother runs after them and hands her a long black case. Vera jokes that it is a submachine gun; Frieder calls it a baby’s coffin. Cäcilia gives no answer or expression. The group takes her anyway, with her parents’ formal permission but without turning her departure into a sentimental farewell.

Frieder knows a shortcut along the farm tracks, but when the group reaches his grandfather’s house, the furniture truck is already there. That evening, they sit around the kitchen table for the first time. The recorder plays the only cassette they have unpacked; the music is too loud for conversation, which does not matter because there is not yet much to discuss. They wind spaghetti onto their forks and move their knees to the music. Cäcilia suggests that Frieder could learn an instrument. The first shared evening does not resolve the purpose or future of the household; it gives them a table, a meal, and time in one another’s company.

A household built around care

The house’s everyday life takes on an explicit protective purpose. The narrator describes a proper life as one with a great deal of talking—at breakfast, at lunch, and at dinner—and says that all this conversation means keeping watch over one of them, someone who had tried to kill himself. The company is not presented as a cure or as proof that the danger has passed. It is a practical form of attention: the others live together, talk, and remain near someone whose crisis they cannot fully understand.

The narrator admits that, even after weeks, he cannot understand how someone could attempt suicide. He can partly grasp not wanting to live, but still finds the act of trying difficult to comprehend. Frieder gives that distinction words when he says he did not want to kill himself; he only did not want to live anymore, and thinks the two are different. His account complicates the household’s task. The friends are not simply guarding against a clearly stated, settled intention; they are trying to share life with a person whose wish to disappear does not fit neatly into a single explanation.

Their care takes the form of repeated conversation and attention to changing circumstances, but it cannot make Frieder’s state transparent. At one point the narrator cannot tell whether Frieder is about to announce that he has decided never to try again or that he has decided to die that day and would like everyone to leave the house. A sad appearance might mean only tiredness; a cheerful one might mean that Frieder is already preparing to act. The household is thus organized around both closeness and uncertainty: living together makes attention possible without giving the friends reliable access to what Frieder has decided.

The meaning of home changes

The narrator’s account of Christmas makes clear that the shared house has become a home distinct from the family household. On December 24, he says he is at home, meaning with his family; in truth, he thinks of the Auerhaus as home. The word shifts according to the listener: among people who live in the Auerhaus, home means the shared house, while in conversation with outsiders it means family. This is not merely a change of address. The narrator has entered a new domestic community, even as he continues to return to his family’s house.

That change has a concrete sign in his old room. His sister is lying on the bed watching television on the portable set he left behind. He had not realized that the room now belonged to her; the two sisters had shared until he moved out, and now each has her own room. The television he could not bring to the Auerhaus has become part of his sister’s new space. The move redistributes ordinary domestic things and reshapes both households, rather than simply severing the narrator’s ties to his family.

The shared house under pressure

The Auerhaus’s communal life remains bound to the danger that first prompted the move. On a morning when the others hurry to catch the bus into town, Frieder says he will ride his bicycle instead. By the third period, the narrator is still looking at the empty place beside him and imagining Frieder hanging from a rope in the hayloft. The shared home has not removed the possibility of suicide from the narrator’s mind; separation, even for an ordinary day of school, can revive the fear that Frieder might be dead.

The group’s vigilance is also challenged by a crisis involving the police. Afterward, Cäcilia’s father comes to collect her by car. He says nothing and does not look at the others, while Frieder, Vera, Pauline, and the narrator walk home together. Vera remarks that if they ever really shot a politician or a factory owner, the police could identify them immediately. The moment exposes the household’s vulnerability to outside scrutiny and separates Cäcilia from the others, at least for that departure.

Later, the narrator asks Frieder whether he would want to be rescued if he were suddenly in mortal danger, such as falling through ice. After a long pause, Frieder says the narrator may rescue him; he wants to decide for himself. This answer makes the relationship between care and autonomy central to their life together. Frieder does not give his friends a simple rule that resolves every crisis. He permits intervention while insisting that the choice of whether to live belongs to him, leaving the others to act within a responsibility whose limits remain painful.

When the narrator eventually asks what happened in the police crisis, Frieder admits that he deliberately tried to make the officer shoot him. The admission precipitates the narrator’s physical attack: he slaps Frieder, hits him in the body, knocks him from his chair, and continues beating him while accusing him of putting the others in danger. Frieder turns aside and tries to throw the narrator off but does not fight back. The household’s protective commitment has reached a breaking point: the narrator’s fear and anger erupt as violence against the person he has been trying to keep alive.

Much later, the narrator can no longer recover a clear answer to why Frieder wanted to die the first time. The question has faded through their conversations, even though it was never answered. After Frieder’s successful suicide, the narrator wonders whether the reasons were the same, but cannot know. He prefers the possibility that leaves more possibilities open: if someone does not die today, tomorrow remains available; if they die today, the option of choosing otherwise tomorrow is gone. The beginning of the Auerhaus therefore carries its unresolved question to the end. The friends can offer a place, company, meals, and rescue, but shared life cannot guarantee either an explanation for Frieder’s despair or a way to keep him there.