Anna

Anna enters the story as a woman with no secure place in the world and ends as one of Fiete Honka’s victims. Their meeting begins with drink and a seat at his usual place in the Zum Goldenen Handschuh; it ends in her murder and the concealment of her body. The intervening days turn Fiete’s initial opportunism into a sequence of exploitation, disgust, rage, and violence, while Anna’s isolation leaves her with almost no means of escape.

At the Zum Goldenen Handschuh

Anna is sitting alone at Fiete Honka’s usual place with a nearly full bottle of Korn that another drinking companion has paid for. When Anus tells her that she is in someone else’s seat, Anna moves as instructed. Fiete signals that she may stay, and she gives him a drink in thanks. They finish the bottle in less than an hour and continue drinking. The encounter begins not with a plan to help her but with an opening that saves Fiete the trouble of approaching a woman himself.

Anna drinks with a capacity that astonishes him. She appears gravely unwell and smells strongly of excrement, but after hours of drinking those signs do not put him off. He wants sex without paying and takes her home. The choice is framed through his convenience and his desire, not through any knowledge of Anna’s circumstances. The bar’s dimness has helped him overlook what daylight will make impossible to ignore.

In Fiete’s apartment

When Fiete wakes in the afternoon, Anna is asleep and one of the two bottles of Korn he had at home is nearly empty. He calculates that she must have consumed close to three bottles, in addition to what she had already drunk. He makes bread with whatever he has available—margarine, sausage, cheese, or jam—but Anna refuses it, saying she has no appetite and might eat later. Her refusal marks the beginning of a stay in which ordinary care is repeatedly imagined by Fiete and then abandoned.

In daylight, he sees her as far more damaged than he had understood at the bar. He compares the sight to a person who has been burned, extinguished, and hastily put back together. He wants her gone immediately, but cannot bring himself to tell her to leave. Instead, he postpones the conversation until the next day and goes out to buy more Korn and cigarettes. He tells himself that a few bottles will be enough to get through Sunday; the drinking keeps the decision, and Anna, in the apartment.

Anna’s own circumstances are presented with starkness: she has no children, relatives, money, or home. She has so little left that even memories seem to have been taken from her. Her body lies half on the sofa and half on the floor, her joints slack, while the apartment’s heat and stale air bear down on her. She is angry that Fiete has left her alone in this squalid room. She drags herself to the toilet, where her body offers another measure of her physical collapse. The narrative does not give her a stable refuge or a network of people who might intervene; within the story, the apartment becomes both her shelter and her trap.

Confinement and escalating violence

Fiete imagines that Anna may die on her own. He leaves her at home while he goes out, thinking she may be dead when he returns. By then, she has been in his apartment for nearly a week. He has not seen her drink water and convinces himself that she must have died of thirst or starvation. He even imagines moving her body to an empty factory site, though he has not yet established that she is dead.

When he comes home, Anna has put on some of the worst scraps of women’s clothing in the apartment. Her appearance, her insults, and her sudden fury confront him as signs of a breakdown he cannot control. She throws glasses against the wall, followed by more glasses, a plate, and a bowl. The scene does not make her violence a threat equal to his: she is physically devastated, and Fiete is the person who has left her without food or care and who controls the conditions of the apartment. He silently gathers the broken pieces, hoping that she will recover or that the police, a doctor, the fire brigade, or his brother Siggi will arrive.

After Anna falls asleep, her body convulses and she soils herself. Fiete fetches water, cloths, a brush, and a dustpan to clean the mess. When he tries to turn her, she knocks the bucket away and rolls in the filth. He goes back to drinking. Later, he becomes sexually aroused despite the scene and tries to approach her while she is asleep. When she presses her legs together, his anger erupts. The sequence makes clear how the prospect of sex, the drinking, and his resentment converge; Anna’s exhaustion and resistance do not stop him.

Murder and concealment

Fiete first pulls Anna’s head up and repeatedly strikes it against the bedside table. She asks him to let go, and blood runs from the back of her head. He takes a hardened, encrusted rag from beneath the bed and forces it around her neck. He loosens his grip when she chokes and gasps, then tightens it again, repeating the act until her body convulses and she dies. The killing is deliberate in its physical sequence: he watches her change colour, pauses, resumes, and uses his hands to feel the transition into death.

At dawn, Fiete takes a knife to her throat, cutting until he believes he has destroyed what enables speech. He covers her eyes with the rag, fearful that the dead may still see, and puts a towel on the floor to catch the blood. The following day he returns to the bedroom in another fit of anger and cuts off Anna’s breasts and part of her genitals. He places the removed parts and her clothes on the body, bends her legs, and ties her thighs with parcel string so that she will fit into the narrow storage space.

The concealment continues after the killing. When the smell of the corpse becomes strong, Fiete seals the hatch with strips of adhesive tape and papers over it. Anna’s brief arrival at the bar has thus led into a hidden death inside his home. Her story is shaped by a devastating contrast: Fiete first treats her as a convenient sexual possibility, then as an unwanted burden, and finally as a body to be silenced and made to fit out of sight. The narrative gives her few resources and little space to act, but her anger and resistance remain visible within the conditions that destroy her.