Alcoholism

Alcoholism is both a pattern of life around the Zum Goldenen Handschuh and, in Fritz Honka’s case, a condition associated with years of physical and personal decline. The narrative moves between drinking as routine, performance, and temporary escape, and the later clinical and legal accounts of its consequences. It does not make alcohol a complete explanation for violence: the court and doctors describe it alongside other dimensions of Honka’s deterioration and conduct.

The bar and the routines of drinking

The Zum Goldenen Handschuh, founded and run by Herbert Nürnberg, has been open around the clock, every day of the year, since 1962. Its front and rear rooms, seven tables, L-shaped bar, and basement toilets make it a place for drinking at almost any hour. That unbroken availability forms the setting for a range of lives shaped by alcohol, though the bar’s owner is described as a former boxing champion and experienced judge of the people who pass through—not as an alcoholic.

For Soldaten-Norbert, drinking is bound up with a precarious working life. After the war he served in the Waffen-SS, was taken prisoner in April 1945, and joined the French Foreign Legion from captivity. He served in Indochina from 1948 to 1953; after leaving the Legion, he failed to establish himself in a succession of jobs, usually losing them because of alcohol. A recent job in refuse collection has made him drink somewhat less, since it requires early starts. But he resents the descent from his former military status to refuse work. To obtain sick leave, he strikes his ankle with an aluminum cane until it swells, a deliberate injury that lets him spend a week drinking without interruption. The episode shows dependence operating not only as consumption but as a motive shaping work, injury, and time.

Drinking as ritual and release

In a meal shared by Fiete Honka, Siggi, and Gerda, Siggi turns drinking into a theory of ordinary life. He gives three reasons for it: to forget something painful, celebrate something good, or make something happen when nothing is happening. Once he asks for spirits, the others are relieved that they can drink too; the meal’s conviviality gives way to repeated rounds of schnapps and beer. As Siggi becomes more uninhibited, he takes up his central subject, women, and speaks about them in crudely objectifying terms. The scene makes alcohol a social permission as well as a substance: it helps sustain a lively gathering while also accompanying speech that treats women as objects of male appetite.

Alcohol also shapes how Fiete understands Erich. After Erich has visited more often, he admits that he is out of work, carefully emphasizing that the situation is temporary. Fiete feels superior to him partly because he has steady employment. Erich has also told Fiete, while drunk, that he has broken his legs three times; the account explains his waddling gait but does not establish that alcohol caused the injuries. Later, alone with Fiete, Helga speaks of her own disappointment and worries about paying off the house on her small wage and Erich’s unemployment benefit. Drinking appears here within a household under financial pressure, but the evidence does not reduce that pressure—or Erich’s injuries—to alcohol alone.

Honka’s deterioration and the court’s account

The court’s account connects years of severe alcohol abuse to personality deterioration and organic after-effects. It also describes a long decline in living conditions and personal functioning, culminating in Honka’s presence in the lowest milieu of St. Pauli. The judgment treats alcohol as part of a wider collapse, not as an isolated cause: it also says that Honka had become subject to his compulsions as if to an addiction. His ability to live in the same apartment as decomposing bodies, amid their smell and the beetles and maggots in them, is cited as evidence of the extent of that deterioration.

The court convicted Honka of murder in one case and manslaughter in three, all committed with diminished criminal responsibility, and sentenced him to a total of fifteen years in prison. It also ordered his placement in a psychiatric hospital. The sentence therefore records a legal consequence of the condition in which the crimes were committed without treating alcoholism as an acquittal or as the only explanation for them.

Treatment, abstinence, and decline

In 1981, a treating doctor reported that Honka had behaved outwardly in an adapted manner since his admission to the closed ward in 1977 and worked carefully, though with limited skill, as a trainee shoemaker in the hospital workshop. The doctor found no recognizable distress and said that Honka’s limited ability to express himself, combined with his persistent defensiveness, had prevented a viable therapeutic relationship. Honka did not engage with his crimes and remained uncritical of them. The report warned that, if free, he would again fall into alcohol and approach older women as he had before; the assessment of his dangerousness remained unchanged.

By 1984, doctors considered that Honka’s diminished vitality no longer presented concrete signs of danger to those around him, but they still judged leave or release unjustified. His notoriety and the difficulties he might face outside the hospital were among the stated concerns. In May 1993 he agreed to a new name, Peter Jensen, and was moved to a care home in Scharbeutz. Alcohol remained forbidden. He adjusted well during the two-month trial period, and his condition visibly brightened, while his activities remained limited and independent travel to nearby towns was beyond him.

In the following years he lived quietly in a single room, leaving it mainly for meals and, in good weather, to go outside. His physical vitality continued to diminish; he often complained of breathing problems, and doctors assessed him as prematurely aged, with limited life expectancy and almost no remaining sexual interest. The account records both the improvement during his initial adjustment to the home and the continued decline that followed. It does not present abstinence as a cure: it shows alcohol barred within institutional care while Honka’s broader physical deterioration persisted.