Winter

Winter in Auerhaus is more than a point in the calendar: it gives shape to a remembered world of improvised warmth, communal celebration, and isolation. In the house, heat and light depend on fragile practical arrangements; outside, snow transforms the landscape into a luminous, almost protective space. The season holds these opposing experiences together without resolving them.

Domestic Winter

When Auerhaus needed water for washing or bathing, its residents heated it on the kitchen stove, the only working heater in the house. During winter, a pot holding about thirty liters of hot water stood there constantly. Looking back, the narrator remembers the kitchen filled with steam and condensation running down the window. The recollection makes winter tangible through shared labor and ordinary household objects: warmth is made, not taken for granted, and the kitchen becomes the house’s essential center.

That domestic routine sits beside more makeshift ways of preserving food and comfort. The residents put their homemade zaziki into plastic bags and froze it. Later, Vera leaned out of a window, pulled in another bag crusted with snow, and added the frozen block to the bowl. The practical detail gives the cold a place inside the household: winter is not merely weather outside, but something handled, stored, and brought into the kitchen.

Celebration and Disruption

The house’s winter gatherings create a sharp contrast between its constrained domestic life and the numbers of people it can accommodate. For New Year’s Eve, nearly the entire upper school arrived despite the school holidays. Frieder had invited half the psychiatric hospital, and Pauline the other half; both had leave until one o’clock. Cars came in small convoys and filled the lane before spreading into neighboring streets. Their guests brought sparkling wine and bowls of chocolate cream, and Harry had evidently invited gay men from across a vast region, from Munich to Paris.

The gathering’s scale makes the shared house a temporary meeting place for people whose lives otherwise remain divided among school, hospital, and town. Yet winter does not turn the occasion into uncomplicated ease. In another moment, the narrator turns up the cassette music, and the light goes out at the same time. The music stops, and the house is plunged into darkness. The failed recorder and sudden blackout expose how precarious the household’s comforts are: a crowded, lively home can still be made vulnerable by the loss of a single working light.

Landscape and Solitude

Beyond the house, winter gives the Alb the appearance of a wall overgrown with vegetation. The narrator distinguishes its seasonal colors: green in summer, yellow and brown in autumn, and black-and-white in winter. Along the ridge, individual trees stand out as dark spikes against a pale gray sky. This image turns the familiar landscape into a stark boundary, both recognizable and altered by the season.

One winter afternoon, as the sky darkens to gray, the narrator puts a bottle of vodka in a plastic bag and walks to the foot of the slope. He climbs through the snow, among bare beeches and uncut Christmas trees. Their branches brush his cheeks, and snow falls down the back of his neck. The climb carries him away from the house and its communal life into a landscape that feels dense and intact, a contrast sharpened by his solitude.

In the dark, the snow seems to glow, as though it had absorbed light during the day and were now slowly giving it back. The narrator imagines himself walking up through that radiance. The image gives the winter landscape a quiet, self-contained beauty, but it does not erase the loneliness of the scene. Near the top, he speaks aloud about Vera and Harry, then revises the crude wording in his thoughts to a less certain possibility. The moment places private jealousy and uncertainty within the same wintry landscape that appears to offer shelter.

Memory and Seasonal Contrast

The narrator’s remembered winter is assembled from recurring sensory images rather than presented as a neutral seasonal backdrop: steam clouding the kitchen window, the cassette falling silent, snow on a frozen bag, and light lingering in the snow after dark. Together, these details connect the house’s ordinary routines to the more exposed emotional moments beyond it. Warmth is collective and laborious; the snow-lit hillside is solitary and still.

The seasonal contrast is made explicit by the changing appearance of the Alb across summer, autumn, and winter. Winter’s black-and-white pattern does not simply complete a cycle; it gives the landscape a severe, almost dreamlike clarity. In retrospect, the season gathers the book’s uneven forms of togetherness into one atmosphere: the house can fill with visitors, yet the narrator can still walk alone into the dark, carrying feelings that the gathering cannot settle.