Xiaoshu Ye

New Year’s Eve at Auerhaus is a celebration that briefly gathers an unlikely community in the village street, while the narrator hears in the countdown the possibility that their shared life may already be nearing its end. Frieder proposes the party as both a New Year’s celebration and a housewarming for Harry and Pauline. The gathering brings students, psychiatric patients on leave, neighbours, and gay guests together; its exuberance is inseparable from the narrator’s dread that this may be their first and last New Year as a household.

A house becoming home

The party belongs to a larger story about making a home beyond the narrator’s family household. Moving in with Frieder offered him a way out of the demands and anger of his mother’s unpleasant boyfriend. But the idea of living with Frieder also carried a burden: the narrator wondered whether he could manage responsibility for someone who had tried to kill himself. He hoped the responsibility might be shared, and Vera agreed to move in too. The household’s later life would make that care ordinary and continuous, built into meals and conversation rather than confined to a single crisis.

The distinction between family home and chosen home becomes especially clear on December 24, when the narrator is at his family’s house. In conversation with people outside Auerhaus, home means the family home; among the people who live at Auerhaus, home means Auerhaus. Returning to the family house, he finds that his former room now belongs to his sister, who has inherited his portable television. The holiday thus marks not a simple return to where he came from, but a change in where he belongs.

Frieder calls for a party

Frieder’s New Year’s plan surprises the narrator. He had thought that he and Frieder disliked parties: when they went to one, they generally sat somewhere, drank, talked, or watched the people around them. Frieder even treated dancing and kissing as sinful, with that as his reason for going to parties. His insistence on celebrating is therefore a reversal of their familiar pattern, not a routine social invitation. He wants the evening to mark two things at once: the turn of the year and Harry and Pauline’s arrival in the household.

The invitation reaches well beyond the people already living at Auerhaus. Although the schools are on holiday, practically the whole upper school turns up. Frieder has invited half the psychiatric hospital, Pauline the other half; the guests from the hospital have permission to be out until one in the morning. Cars arrive in small convoys and fill the road, with number plates from Stuttgart and Ulm, one from Augsburg, and even one from France. Guests bring sparkling wine and bowls of chocolate dessert. Harry, the narrator observes, has apparently invited gay people from between Munich and Paris.

Midnight in the village street

Shortly before midnight, the crowded house empties into the street. Students leave first, followed by the partygoers in mesh shirts, who bring the psychiatric patients with them. Those arriving late cannot get inside because so many people are going out; they remain outside with their bottles and chocolate dessert. Axel has opened the doors of his car and turned up the radio. The fanfare of “The Final Countdown” sounds from its speakers, then a presenter begins counting down.

The whole street joins in the last seconds: “Three! Two! One! New Year!” Fireworks shoot from sparkling-wine bottles set on the asphalt, and bangs sound everywhere. In front of Auerhaus, in the middle of the village, the upper school, the patients with permission to leave the hospital, and the far-flung gay guests form a crowd in which everyone embraces everyone else. Neighbours watch; some of the men remain rooted in place, while women come over to toast the new year with the mesh-shirted guests. Neighbourhood children race with the psychiatric patients to the main road and back. The celebration temporarily loosens the divisions between school and hospital, village insiders and visitors, conventional neighbours and the people gathered at the shared house.

That openness does not erase the village’s boundaries. Seidel comes out of his driveway and calls his son, who is about fifteen. He slaps the boy and sends him inside. The same street that has become a place of embraces and shared festivities remains a place where a father can abruptly reassert authority. The contrast gives the party’s communal warmth a sharper edge: its temporary togetherness is real, but it has not transformed the world around it.

A countdown shadowed by departure

As “The Final Countdown” plays, the narrator gets gooseflesh and feels sick. He wonders whether the song’s implication might be true: perhaps this really is their first and last New Year together. His fear attaches to what the party has assembled. The crowd is not simply celebrating a date; it is making visible, for a few hours, the precarious household and the wider circle of people who have found their way to it.

The novel later confirms that the narrator will not be in the village at the next New Year. The Auerhaus group will also be thrown out after Frieder’s parents learn about the shoplifting. The celebration therefore stands between a brief moment of expansion and the household’s eventual disruption. The narrative’s later movement gives that anticipation a longer arc: the residents stay at Auerhaus until Harry finishes his apprenticeship, then move together to a run-down house in Cologne. New Year’s Eve does not itself cause that departure, but its countdown makes the coming separation imaginable before it arrives.

The holiday’s significance also rests on its contrast with the group’s other thresholds. Frieder’s first permitted exit from the psychiatric hospital takes place in autumn, under escort and initially only into the park; later, in a scene distinct from the New Year party, police paperwork summons the narrator for conscription. Still later, at Frieder’s burial on Maundy Thursday, boards are laid across the grave and the coffin is lowered on ropes. These moments are not part of the New Year celebration, but they frame the novel’s recurrent movement between institutions, homes, and departures. Against those more restrictive or final transitions, the crowded street at midnight offers a temporary form of belonging: many separate lives gathered together, with no guarantee that they will remain so.