The narrator's mother

The narrator’s mother is a supermarket worker and parent whose brief appearances place the novel’s two competing meanings of home side by side: the family household, marked by exhausting work and the hostility of her boyfriend, and Auerhaus, the shared home the narrator chooses with Frieder and Vera. She offers practical help when Frieder is hospitalized, but the narrator’s move into the shared house also becomes a way to escape the atmosphere her partner has created.

Identity and Family Life

The mother is shown in the middle of work rather than in a settled domestic scene. At the supermarket, she kneels on the tiled floor to price cans, rising by pulling herself up on a shelving support. When the narrator appears, she asks whether he is back and then asks what happened. Her movements continue as she talks: she pulls empty cartons from the shelves and folds them while the narrator follows. The scene presents a parent whose working day and care for her family occupy the same practical, unceremonious space.

Her work is particularly punishing on Christmas Eve. She gets up at five, reaches the shop at six to restock and process orders, and faces a rush of customers beginning at seven. She runs between the aisles, works behind the cheese counter, and sits at the register without a break until two. She arrives home shortly after three and sits at the kitchen table. The detail of that schedule makes her brief presence at home consequential: the family’s holiday takes place after a day when the shop has demanded nearly all her time and energy.

The household is also changing as the narrator leaves. On December 24, he calls himself at home when he means his family’s house, while privately understanding Auerhaus as the place where he is truly at home. His old room has become his sister’s room; the sisters, who used to share, now each have one of their own. The older sister has inherited his portable television. The mother’s family remains part of his life, but the changed room makes his absence visible and sharpens the difference between family residence and chosen belonging.

Care for Frieder

After the narrator learns that Frieder is no longer in the hospital, he assumes the hospital must have sent him home and wonders where else he could be. His mother explains that Mrs. Wittlinger told her he is no longer there. She does not have an answer to where Frieder has gone, but she responds to the narrator’s determination to visit with a concrete offer: she buys butter cookies and a net of mandarins for him to take along. The food is a small, practical gesture, not a solution to the uncertainty surrounding Frieder.

The hospital itself is described as a psychiatric institution on the edge of town, an old building with plaster ornamentation that makes it resemble a small castle; when it was built, woods surrounded it. The mother’s simple provision of something to bring there connects ordinary domestic care to a place the narrator associates with frightening public warnings. Her help does not erase that fear, but it gives the visit a familiar, material form.

Conflict at Home and the Move to Auerhaus

Moving in with Frieder offers the narrator a chance to get away from his mother’s boyfriend, whom he calls F2M2. He expects to be free of the labor the boyfriend demands: paving the driveway, painting the façade, and covering the ceilings of the rooms with ugly boards. He also hopes to escape the boyfriend’s constant complaints about the narrator’s silence and apparent superiority. The move is therefore not only an act of friendship or care for Frieder; it is also a route out of a household in which the narrator feels burdened and belittled.

The mother’s relationship with her son is constrained by the boyfriend’s reactions. If she speaks with the narrator for more than five minutes, F2M2 takes offense and punishes her by refusing to speak to her for three days. He then drinks six or eight beers and explodes. The mother is not described as causing this hostility, but it shapes the conditions under which she can relate to her son. The narrator’s decision to leave unfolds within this household pressure, rather than as a simple rejection of his mother.

The sisters’ different positions in that home also matter to the narrator’s understanding of it. They still like F2M2: the older one is just entering puberty, while the younger receives dolls and sweets from him. The narrator predicts that the older sister will hate him once she notices the way he stares at her, and that the younger will reach that point years later. These observations are the narrator’s anticipations, not events the account confirms. They reveal how unsafe and uneasy he believes the household may become as the girls grow older.

Auerhaus, Care, and the Meaning of Home

The narrator initially worries that moving in with Frieder will leave him with too much responsibility. He considers whether someone else should share the task of looking after Frieder, so the burden will not fall on him alone. Vera agrees to move in. That decision turns the proposed household into a shared arrangement, in contrast to the narrator’s experience of obligations at his family home, where the boyfriend assigns labor and punishes conversation between mother and son.

The first evening in the house gives that new arrangement a deliberately ordinary beginning. The group sits around the kitchen table while the only cassette immediately available plays loudly; the other tapes are somewhere among the boxes. They eat spaghetti, turn it onto their forks, and bounce their knees to the music. They cannot talk over it, and at this early stage there is not much to say. The scene does not present care as a grand declaration. It begins in shared space, food, music, and the fact of being together.

That everyday life develops around the awareness that Frieder has tried to kill himself. The narrator says that their abundant conversation—at breakfast, lunch, and dinner—means keeping watch over one of them. He cannot understand why someone would want to die, even after weeks together; he can partly comprehend the thought, but struggles to accept that anyone would act on it. The shared household thus carries both ordinary companionship and the continuing responsibility of attending to a friend in danger.

The mother remains attached to the family meaning of home, while the narrator’s language shifts according to whom he is speaking with: among people outside Auerhaus, home means his family; among those who live there, it means Auerhaus. This distinction does not make his mother irrelevant. Instead, her scenes establish the circumstances from which his chosen household offers an alternative: not an uncomplicated escape from family ties, but a place where responsibility is shared and belonging is made through daily life.