Fiete’s One-Sided Hostility toward Erich over Helga

Fiete Honka’s hostility toward Erich Denningsen is driven by his desire for Helga Denningsen and by a rivalry that Fiete largely invents. He interprets ordinary attention as evidence that Helga is preparing to leave her husband, reduces Erich to an obstacle, and eventually imagines killing him as a way to claim Helga for himself.

The Rivalry Fiete Imagines

As Erich begins visiting more often, Fiete measures the two men against each other. He has steady work; Erich admits that he is temporarily unemployed, a qualification Fiete thinks Erich repeats too insistently. Fiete also learns that Erich has broken his legs three times and treats his resulting waddling gait as further proof of foolishness. From these details he concludes that Erich is inferior and does not deserve Helga. During their dice games, Fiete reads the looks Helga gives him as signs that she is already turning toward him, while dismissing Erich as too stupid to notice. The confidence is his own construction: the evidence shows Fiete converting his contempt and attraction into a story in which Helga’s marriage is about to end and he is her inevitable replacement.

Helga’s Confidence and Fiete’s Escalating Fixation

When Helga is alone with Fiete, she asks for a Korn, then another, and finally explains what is weighing on her: she had imagined a different life from cleaning offices, and fears that her small wage and Erich’s unemployment benefit will not cover the mortgage on their house. Fiete cannot tell whether she wants advice or simply someone to listen. He drinks with her in silence, meanwhile dwelling on her body and longing to touch her. He treats her confidence as a promising step toward intimacy, persuading himself that the rest will follow without his having to force it.

Helga then asks what brought Fiete to Hamburg and what he had done before. The personal question moves him because it has been so long since anyone asked him about his own life. He speaks, becomes exhausted, and cannot hold back his tears. Helga strokes his back gently and understandingly. For Fiete, the touch is more precious than sex; it lasts only five or ten minutes before Helga leaves with good wishes, but he experiences it as a rare tenderness. Once alone, he recasts the encounter as a failed opportunity, imagining that she had been waiting for him to make a move and blaming himself for not responding. Her compassion, which does not establish any romantic intention, becomes further material for his certainty that she wants him.

The next day, Erich’s return sharpens Fiete’s resentment. He sees the man’s damaged legs and knees, his waddling arrival, and the food he brings but has not paid for as evidence that Erich is an undeserving burden. Fiete contrasts Erich’s unemployment with his own steady job and pictures Helga as trapped by a marriage she is too kind to end. He imagines that Erich may even have some leverage over her, though the evidence offers no basis for this suspicion. In Fiete’s account, Erich eats, drinks, lounges, and exploits Helga; Fiete recasts his own sexual jealousy as a duty to rescue her, telling himself that without his intervention she will remain buried alive in the house at Tonndorf.

The convivial dice evenings consequently cease to feel convivial to him. Fiete’s gaze fixes on Helga’s clothes and body, and a glimpse of her pale-blue underwear intensifies his sense of desire frustrated by an imagined nearness. At work he is often already drunk; alone in his office, he pulls down his trousers and indulges in an explicit fantasy involving Helga. The scene marks a collapse of the distinction he has been pretending to respect: his declared love and his sexual appetite become inseparable, while Helga’s own wishes disappear from his imagining. Fiete tells himself that being with her would end his aggression and relieve his sexual pressure. His hostility toward Erich thus grows not from a disclosed plan by Helga, but from Fiete’s insistence that possession of her would cure him.

From Murder Plan to Assault

Fiete’s imagined rescue of Helga turns explicitly murderous. He decides that Erich must be removed and works through a plan: follow him to the toilet, kick the backs of his knees so he falls, then shoot him in the back of the head with the gas pistol. Because it is not a real firearm, Fiete reckons that three or four shots might be needed. He imagines telling Helga that Erich has gone to buy cigarettes or more food and drink, then using the time before she goes looking for him to dispose of the body. The detail of the fantasy gives his jealousy the shape of practical preparation, but it remains Fiete’s plan, not an action he carries out.

He also convinces himself that Erich is preparing to get rid of him. Fiete imagines his rival’s thoughts and fears that Erich’s plans are already further advanced than his own; the suspicion intensifies his panic rather than resting on anything Helga has said. When Erich leaves to fetch shashlik and fries from a nearby snack bar, Fiete experiences his absence as an opening. Helga mentions that her sister Erika will visit at the weekend because she is often lonely after separating from her husband. Fiete misreads this disclosure as a coded promise that Helga, too, intends to separate and is encouraging him to act.

As Erich stays away longer than Fiete expects, Fiete wishes that he has been killed in traffic and sets himself a deadline: he counts to sixty, deciding that if Erich has not returned by then, he will make his move. At sixty, however, he turns not to the imagined killing but to Helga. He tells her he loves her and wants sex, then tears at her blouse until its buttons come off and her bra is damaged. His handling of her breasts is forceful; Helga cries out in fear and pain and strikes him until he lets go. She breaks free and runs away. The assault exposes the gap between Fiete’s supposed devotion and Helga’s actual wishes: he has taken her financial worries, kindness, and ordinary conversation as permission, while his own desire determines what happens next.

Too drunk to pursue her, Fiete worries that she will go to the police and that he will lose his job and be sent to prison. He locks the door from inside and drinks again, turning the immediate aftermath into what the narration calls a bout of drinking to obliteration. Erich is not killed, Helga has not chosen Fiete, and the plan he had dressed up as her rescue ends in violence against her.

The Asymmetry of the Conflict

The conflict remains one-sided even as Fiete’s imagined contest grows more elaborate. Erich’s unemployment, injuries, and presence beside Helga become evidence in a case Fiete constructs against him; nothing in these episodes shows Erich plotting against Fiete or Helga promising to leave her husband. The narration stays close to Fiete’s perceptions while making their distortions visible, so his certainty cannot be mistaken for shared understanding. Most sharply, the violence he rehearses for Erich is not carried out: when the moment comes, Fiete acts against Helga herself. That reversal strips the supposed rivalry of its rescue-story disguise. Erich is the enemy Fiete invents, but Helga bears the consequences of his conviction that desire entitles him to decide what she wants.