Alcohol Dependence and Self-Erosion

Alcohol Dependence and Self-Erosion names a recurring pattern in which drinking promises immediate relief but progressively narrows a person’s choices, time, and sense of a future. The book shows this pattern in sharply different circumstances: Karl von Lützow measures how much better a drink makes him feel, Gerda Voss devises a schedule for secretly drinking while confined at home, and Fiete Honka imagines that a new job will put his drinking behind him. Alongside these scenes, the rapid physical decline of a prisoner makes erosion almost literal. Together, they present dependence not as a single dramatic collapse but as repeated bargains whose momentary comfort carries its own costs.

Relief, Measurement, and Compulsion

After a draining encounter, Karl von Lützow sits on a terrace as the sky clears in the west. The sun seems weak and decorative; he is cold beneath a blanket and opens a bottle of good white wine. One glass makes him feel completely better. The precise figure that follows—one hundred percent, not a fraction less—recalls the wording of an alcoholism questionnaire. The scene makes the answer vivid before the questionnaire supplies its blunt confirmation: alcohol has become a reliable measure of relief.

The questionnaire’s other answers sharpen the pattern. Asked whether he can let a celebration pass, Karl says no; asked whether he envies people who drink without getting into trouble, he says yes. When asked whether he can stop once he has started, his response begins with denial and turns into recognition. That small verbal reversal condenses the gap between the self-image of a person who can decide and the experience of a decision already overtaken. The questions lend the passage the shape of an assessment, but the surrounding scenes show what a series of yes-or-no answers cannot contain: the habits, consequences, and evasions that give those answers their weight.

Alcohol’s brief pleasure also has consequences Karl finds unwelcome. After a pleasant half-hour, he expects to wake half drunk and badly hungover with sexual urges he experiences as intrusive and exhausting. He imagines being able to switch off sexual desire altogether, then turns back toward another drink. The sequence links temporary ease not to lasting calm but to a renewed cycle of discomfort and attempted relief. Later, already badly drunk, he struggles to rise from the toilet and breaks the toilet-paper holder while using it for support. He drinks another small glass anyway. The broken fixture is a concrete measure of impairment; the decision to continue makes the loss of control unmistakable.

Drinking Under Confinement

Gerda Voss’s drinking unfolds in a different setting: the monotony of a home where there is little left to clean and nothing to read. Fiete Honka has forgotten to lock away the Korn. Gerda feels she needs a drink immediately, but does not simply pour and swallow. She fills a water glass exactly halfway and watches it, waiting. Her attention fixes on the liquor’s grain origins and on distinctions between kinds of schnapps; this extended concentration gives the wait a task-like form without diminishing the urgency behind it.

She has worked out a timetable: one glass until half past one, a second between half past one and half past two, then sleep until six. At one o’clock she has half an hour to wait before the first glass. She carefully drips Fanta onto the Korn, drop by drop, trying to keep the liquids separate and forming a cap on top. The small procedure turns drinking into a project she can regulate minute by minute. But the precision also exposes how much of the day is organized around access to alcohol. She plans to use cough pastilles before Fiete gets home to disguise the smell, and expects him no earlier than half past six. Her calculations provide a narrow interval of concealment, not freedom from the need that structures them.

The Body’s Deterioration

A separate portrait makes self-erosion physical. The man called Leiche does not respond; his eyes have sunk deep into their sockets. He had endured his first ten years in prison reasonably well, but then his decline accelerated. A day seemed to last fifty hours, and he appeared to waste away in front of those around him. His face and body fell in, his hair thinned, his nails became brittle, and he lost almost all his teeth. Interest in the world drained from him drop by drop.

The account gives alcohol a specific part in this bodily damage: he further ruined his stomach with Spiritus. He developed stomach ulcers and additional ulcers described with a grim, almost comic image as satellite ulcers. The comparison between his condition and the phrase “mortal remains” pushes the description toward death without claiming that he has died. The final word, “weariness of life,” extends the physical inventory into a condition of exhaustion. Here, unlike the careful measurements of Karl or Gerda, erosion is visible as the progressive loss of bodily substance and engagement with the world.

The Promise of a New Routine

At thirty-eight, Fiete Honka is already living with chronic rheumatism, increasingly frequent attacks of pain around his temples and forehead, and shortness of breath after smoking sixty Sheffield cigarettes a day. He has suffered a severe bout of bronchitis and a middle-ear infection within six months. In June, unexpectedly, he gets a job as a night watchman for Shell in City Nord, where he has never been. The change appears to offer a route out of the drinking life associated with going out at night.

Night shifts keep Fiete from going out, and he drinks much less. After work, he has one or two beers and the same number of schnapps, then goes to bed tired. The narration casts the job as a turn toward respectable work, discipline, and a useful task, in sharp contrast to the degradation he associates with his former life. Yet the improvement is relative: the described routine still includes beer and schnapps, and its change comes from work hours rather than an expressed decision to stop drinking.

Fiete treats the new job as if it might resolve more than his schedule can actually settle. He expects his life to improve and imagines that matters at home will somehow work themselves out, though he cannot say how. The contrast between a concrete change—he can no longer spend his nights out—and this vague confidence is central to the book’s treatment of self-erosion. Work briefly narrows the opportunity to drink, and he experiences that restriction as a possible clean break. The narrative leaves the hope in place while showing its limits: reduced consumption is not the same as release, and a new routine cannot by itself erase what has accumulated.