The trial and verdict in the Auerhaus case mark the point at which the household’s shared life is formally divided into individual legal identities. The proceedings end not with a single judgment on the group, but with sharply different outcomes: Cäcilia is cleared, three residents receive community service, Frieder receives a longer sentence, and Harry receives a suspended prison sentence and a driving ban. The verdict makes the Auerhaus’s playful inventions legible as offenses, while showing how representation and the details of each person’s conduct shape the consequences.

From investigation to trial

The case arrives after officers and a prosecutor have searched the house. In the kitchen, the residents are made to stay while the prosecutor presents a document bearing an official stamp. The charges named during the search include violations of the narcotics law. When Frieder produces the narrator’s conscription file, the prosecutor identifies further allegations: theft and suppression of documents. The file’s pages carry federal eagles, each marked through by Frieder; beneath them he has drawn small campfires. The official description of the drawings and altered papers converts a household prank into a list of prosecutable acts.

The prosecutor adds charges of denigrating the state and its symbols, forgery, and property damage. The accusations attach formal legal names to what the house had treated as irreverent play. The shift is especially pointed in the case of the terrorist poster over the kitchen sink. Its portraits include the residents who had failed to wash dishes, along with disliked public figures cut from newspapers and crossed out. Cäcilia is the only member of the household not pictured there. That absence, once part of the group’s domestic joke, becomes consequential in court.

Cäcilia’s defense and acquittal

The trial proceeds as Cäcilia had predicted. Her parents’ lawyer argues that she had fallen under the bad influence of a few socially marginal young people. The narrator registers the euphemism behind the argument: the lawyer does not call them “asocial freaks,” but “marginalized youths.” The language tries to isolate Cäcilia from the others, recasting a shared household as a corrupting environment and her as someone acted upon by it.

The defense also points to the terrorist poster and to the fact that Cäcilia’s picture is not on it. The detail gives the household’s dishwashing joke an unexpected legal function: what had been an informal record of who had failed to do chores becomes evidence that distinguishes her from the others. The case against Cäcilia is dismissed on every count. The narrator compresses the result into the sardonic phrase “acquittal by dishwashing,” linking her legal escape to the very domestic routine the poster had mocked.

Individual sentences

Vera, Pauline, and the narrator are convicted of theft and of denigrating the memory of the dead. Each receives forty hours of community service. Their shared sentence reflects the collective nature of some of the household’s conduct, but the court does not treat all the residents alike. Frieder receives fifty hours, with the wooden pistol added to the case against him. The extra ten hours make visible how one specific object, treated within the house as part of its defiant play, changes the legal accounting.

Harry’s outcome is different again. He receives a one-year suspended prison sentence for drug dealing and possession, as well as a two-year driving ban because of the car chase. His penalties connect the household’s legal trouble to allegations and events beyond the shared jokes around the poster or the marked conscription papers. The verdict therefore breaks the group into distinct cases: the same domestic setting produces acquittal, community service, a longer service requirement, and suspended imprisonment, depending on the conduct attributed to each person.

Consequences and significance

The proceedings expose the distance between the residents’ own meanings and the state’s classifications. In the house, the poster turns chores into a mock terrorist roll call, and the marked federal emblems become part of Frieder’s irreverence. In court, those same things are examined as evidence and named through statutes. The group’s joke does not cancel the consequences; nor does the legal process erase the differences between its members. Cäcilia’s absence from the poster helps secure her dismissal, while Frieder’s wooden pistol and Harry’s drug charges carry separate penalties.

The verdict also makes social resources part of the story’s legal outcome. Cäcilia has a lawyer acting for her parents, and his strategy presents her as distinct from the household and uses the poster’s missing portrait to support that distinction. The others receive punishments rather than a collective acquittal. This contrast does not make the verdict a simple measure of innocence or guilt; it shows how a shared life can be disassembled through legal argument into unequal personal consequences.

After the judgment, the household’s days together are numbered. The residents remain at the Auerhaus until Harry finishes his apprenticeship, then move together to Cologne and rent a run-down house in the city. The move follows the trial rather than resolving it: their communal life continues, but under the pressure of sentences, separation, and an approaching change of place. The case is thus both a legal turning point and a transition in the group’s history, translating its improvised household order into a set of records and penalties even as its members carry their shared life onward.