Longing for an Ordinary, Normal Life

Longing for an Ordinary, Normal Life is the hope that Fiete Honka might exchange the disorder of drinking and life on the margins for work, routine, and modest, commonplace pleasures. It becomes unusually specific when he is hired as a night guard: he imagines less drinking, planned outings, and even a dentist’s appointment as steps toward becoming ordinary. Yet the novel keeps that hope in view beside Gerda Voss’s wish for basic security, the coercion disguised as care in her life with Fiete, and the violence that finally makes his imagined reform seem painfully precarious.

Work as a Possible Turning Point

In June, Fiete is hired by Shell to guard a factory site and office buildings at night in City Nord, a place he has never visited. He had not expected his application to succeed; the interviewer, like him, comes from Leipzig, a coincidence Fiete treats as a possible explanation. The job offers more than wages in his imagination. Its hours will keep him from going out, and he expects that restriction to make him drink far less.

He pictures a sober routine that would be unremarkable to other workers: after a shift, one or two beers and the same number of schnapps, then bed, tired from honest work. The narration sets this small schedule against his former life around St. Pauli, which he associates with dirt, noise, cold, humiliation, beatings, and exhausting labor. He imagines that a socially recognized job will remove him from the ranks of the lost and despised. That confidence is not proof that his life has been transformed; it shows how urgently he needs the new job to mean that transformation is possible.

Learning How to Spend a Day

Employment leaves Fiete with a new problem: what to do on a day off without alcohol, bars, or the women he disparages. Sport is ruled out because of his impairments; he does not dare go to the theatre or opera; he has no friends, and the only relative he can readily name is his brother Siggi, whom he sees on Wednesdays. After brooding, he devises an itinerary in stages. First comes a harbor tour, for the first time in his life despite having worked at the Port of Hamburg for more than ten years. If that goes well, the following weekend might bring a meal at the television tower restaurant, followed by a visit to Hagenbeck’s zoo, close to home.

The plan has the tentative quality of training. Fiete has never been on holiday either, but postpones that challenge until the next year, or the year after, when he hopes to be ready. He wants what he calls an utterly ordinary life, without great highs and, especially, without plunging lows. The novelty is striking: these are activities many people in Germany have known since childhood, yet for him each requires forethought and courage. He even measures his possible future in ordinary repetitions, wondering how many more times he might brush his teeth if illness or an accident does not intervene. The calculation turns routine into something finite rather than automatic.

A visit to Hamburg Landungsbrücken gives the aspiration a concrete first outing. Walking there on a fine Saturday, Fiete pauses at an abandoned swimming pool. He notices its cracked concrete, broken kiosk, empty moss-covered basin, and littered lawn, and finds himself drawn to these signs of decay. By the Elbe, he watches a man without arms or legs paint a portrait of the Port of Hamburg with a brush held in his mouth. Fiete recognizes that he notices more while sober than when hungover or drunk. The outing is not an uncomplicated picture of renewal: the ruined pool attracts him, and his attention briefly turns cruel toward a little girl who sticks out her tongue. Still, the walk makes sobriety tangible as a change in what he can see.

Security, Care, and Dependence

Gerda Voss’s own image of a normal future is materially modest. She hopes to live long enough for the state to provide her with a flat and a small pension: warmth, enough food, a bed, a wardrobe, a table, and a chair. She imagines these necessities as sufficient for rich and poor alike, while observing that the rich are less accustomed to having anything taken from them. Her hope is not for adventure or advancement but for a life in which she no longer has to endure hunger and insecurity. She prays for better times and falls asleep before she can finish asking forgiveness.

That hope stands in sharp contrast to the written declaration Fiete has Gerda sign. It presents her as grateful, says he knows better than she does what is good for her, and renounces her right to an opinion; it also promises that she will bring him her daughter, Rosi, for his sexual use. Gerda signs, and Fiete folds the paper and locks it in a cupboard, treating the document as a guarantee that she has surrendered too much freedom. The language of provision and consent thus becomes part of her confinement, not a path to the safe, self-directed life she wants.

A different form of everyday care appears in Gisela’s work with people on the Reeperbahn. A Salvation Army major who once fled East Germany shortly before the Berlin Wall was built, she approaches Agnes carefully rather than pressing religion on her. When Agnes does not know where she will sleep that night, Gisela offers to take her somewhere she can sleep properly and eat her fill. The scene gives practical meaning to support: a place to rest and food, offered without demanding that Agnes first display certainty or obedience. Set against Gerda’s coerced declaration, Gisela’s patience makes assistance look less like possession and more like a way of protecting another person’s room to decide.

The Limits of the Promise

Fiete’s plans depend on the belief that a job and a new schedule can make the rest of his life straighten itself out. The novel does not treat that belief as wholly empty: for a time, work limits his opportunities to go drinking, and he begins to imagine activities beyond the bar. But the gap between a desired ordinary life and a changed character remains. Even his ambitions are arranged as cautious trials, while illness, accident, and the question of how much time remains shadow the routine he hopes to acquire.

The later murder and concealment of a woman’s body expose a far darker limit. Fiete kills her, then tries to mutilate himself; the next morning, finding the recess full, he ties a rope around the body and suspends it from a roof beam while cleaning away traces. As he works, he repeats a plea that God should recognize he did not want what happened and that he is innocent before God, his mother, and Christ. The contrast is severe: the ordinary life once imagined through work, a harbor tour, and dental care gives way to violence, concealment, and an appeal for absolution. The longing remains revealing not because it achieves a settled redemption, but because the novel shows how insistently Fiete can picture normality even as his actions destroy its conditions.