Alcohol dependence

Alcohol dependence in the book is not a single diagnosis or a single trajectory: it is a bodily destruction, an appetite that others try to regulate, and, for Karl von Lützow, a source of startlingly reliable relief. Its consequences range from drooling and lost teeth to ulcers, exhaustion, and drinking through an awareness of lost control. The recurring detail is not simply that people drink, but that alcohol reorganizes what their bodies can endure and what they expect from the next day.

Physical Deterioration

The prisoner known as Leiche embodies dependence as prolonged disintegration. His first ten years in prison pass relatively well, but then his condition turns sharply: a day seems to stretch to fifty hours, and he appears to waste away in front of the observer. His face and body sink inward; his hair thins, his nails become brittle, and he loses almost all his teeth. Even his interest in the world drains away by degrees. The account gives that decline a physical rhythm, as if life itself were leaking out of him.

The damage becomes still more concrete when Leiche ruins his stomach with denatured alcohol. He develops stomach ulcers and what the narration calls satellite ulcers. The phrase about mortal remains seems almost applicable to a person still alive, and the passage links his bodily ruin to a state of profound weariness with life. Dependence here is not framed as an isolated habit: it has consumed his appearance, appetite for the world, and capacity to inhabit time.

Gerda’s deterioration is made visible in a different, public setting. Her sunken mouth works against a flood of saliva, a condition associated in the narrative with the label Säberalma. The explanation connects uncontrolled drooling to alcohol’s destruction of the brain and nerves. Around Gerda, other women still use lipstick, eyeshadow, or rouge, however worn down they may be; Gerda uses none. The contrast makes her neglect legible without turning it into a simple matter of appearance: the account presents bodily damage and the loss of ordinary self-presentation together.

Dependence and Control

Gerda’s drinking is also subject to control by Fiete. When he returns home drunk, she is sober because he has locked away the Korn in the only intact compartment. He presents this arrangement as a safeguard against temptation, saying that she cannot look after herself and that he will do it for her. The arrangement may have been agreed, but the scene makes its unequal terms plain: Gerda has done work in the apartment and thinks she has earned a drink, while Fiete counts what she has cost him, insists that her labor counts as lodging rather than food, and reminds himself that he can put her out whenever he chooses.

His control extends beyond access to liquor. He imagines that Gerda must be made thinner and cleaned up, turning her body into a project he can manage. Then, as a reward, he gives her a large glass of Fako. She drains it in three or four swallows, with such urgency that she spills some. Fiete responds with irritation and uncertainty about whether to be angry or sad. The scene holds two facts together: Gerda’s drinking is described as uncontrolled, and the person deciding when she may drink is himself using that power to dominate her.

The surrounding episode shows how that domination can become physical deprivation rather than care. After Fiete has struck Gerda and broken her dentures, she spends the next day trying to mend them, first with Uhu and Pattex, then with a tube of cement glue she finds hidden among the room spray. There is no food in the apartment; she cannot find even a tin, a potato, an onion, or a crust of bread, and she cannot remember when she last ate. The account does not attribute this hunger or the foul, confusing atmosphere of the overheated apartment to alcohol. Instead, it shows the coercive conditions in which her dependence is managed: the promised care does not protect her from violence, hunger, or confinement.

Relief, Routine, and Loss of Control

Karl von Lützow’s experience supplies a sharp contrast to the visible collapse of Leiche and Gerda. Sitting alone on the terrace beneath a sky that briefly clears, he feels tired but at peace with his inner emptiness. He considers drinking a portion of a bottle of wine, sleeping until evening, and deciding what to do afterward. The first glass makes him feel exactly one hundred percent better. That precise, absolute answer echoes a question from an alcohol questionnaire, turning the scene’s momentary comfort into evidence of how directly he associates drinking with relief.

The surrounding questionnaire answers extend that evidence. Karl von Lützow acknowledges envying people who can drink without getting into trouble and having experienced a blackout while drinking. The form’s plain questions and his affirmative answers puncture the ease of the terrace scene: what feels like a dependable switch toward feeling better exists beside consequences he recognizes. His drinking is not presented as an uncomplicated pleasure, even when the first glass brings immediate improvement.

Elsewhere, Karl von Lützow’s life is marked by an exhausting pattern of availability and excess. He can call on about half a dozen mistresses at short notice; the previous week he had three appointments, and by Friday he was running on empty. The narrative calls this compulsive and contrasts it with the ordinary evening with friends he could have had but does not choose. Instead, after talking all day for work, he wants silence and sex. These details do not establish that alcohol causes his sexual behavior. Placed beside his questionnaire answers, however, they broaden the portrait of a life organized around repeated forms of appetite and depletion, while his diary becomes the place where he entrusts his thoughts.

Social and Emotional Setting

Alcohol dependence is set against ordinary loneliness as well as bodily crisis. On a difficult Wednesday, Fiete feels wretched and alone; no one knows whether any of the bars will be lively or empty, and even Herbert, who usually seems to know everything, cannot predict it. The music cabinet plays Salvatore Adamo’s Es geht eine Träne auf Reisen, Fiete’s favorite song. The episode does not say that he drinks at that moment, and its importance lies instead in the emotional setting it establishes: the bar’s uncertainty and the song’s travelling tear give loneliness a place and a sound without offering a cure.

Taken together, these scenes refuse a single moral or physical image of dependence. Leiche’s decline is slow enough to be watched; Gerda’s damaged body becomes part of a relationship in which access to drink and basic necessities is controlled by another person; Karl von Lützow recognizes the immediate reward of alcohol while also acknowledging trouble and blackouts. Their circumstances are distinct, but the recurring pattern is clear: relief, habit, and bodily consequence do not cancel one another. The book makes that contradiction visible in the small particulars—a glass finished in a few swallows, a first glass that seems to restore a hundred percent, a body losing its teeth and interest in the world.