Anus

Anus is a woman who serves drinks and cleans up at Zum Goldenen Handschuh, a small but revealing presence in the bar’s crowded social world. The narrative shows her moving between routine service, a sharp joke at Fiete Honka’s expense, and the practical work of mopping up after a violent fight. Her scenes make the bar’s order visible: customers are addressed through degrading nicknames, women’s choices may be controlled by men, and the mess left by violence still has to be cleared away.

Identity and Position

Anus appears as one of the people who keep the bar functioning. When WH 3 enters Zum Goldenen Handschuh for the first time, she comes over to ask what he wants to drink. He orders a Coca-Cola after using a school slang term she does not recognize. She collects payment immediately; the passage also notes that nobody asks him for identification. The scene gives Anus a practical role in the room without supplying a biography or explaining how she came to work there.

Her name belongs to the bar’s culture of nicknames, which turns bodies and personal characteristics into public labels. The narrative offers a related example when Agnes is called Akne, a name compared to Anus; Agnes does not understand the insult. That comparison places Anus within a world where degrading names are familiar currency, but it does not make the two women the same person. Elsewhere, Fiete Honka takes pride in having acquired his own nickname, treating even a second-class label as a mark of distinction. Together, these details show that naming can confer a crude form of belonging while also reducing people to jokes they may not understand or control.

Service and the Bar’s Social Order

Anus’s work puts her close to the shifting hierarchies among customers. At one encounter, Fiete Honka arrives with Herta, who has recently signed a declaration that she no longer has an independent will. When Anus asks Herta what she wants to drink, Herta cannot decide what she is permitted to order. Anus answers that they do not have the drink Herta names, then points out Fiete Honka as the person who knows what Herta is allowed to have. Fiete Honka is only a short distance away, but Herta’s uncertainty makes that distance feel like a boundary: even a drink order has become subject to his permission.

Anus does not resolve that constraint by choosing on Herta’s behalf. Instead, she redirects the decision to Fiete Honka, who orders Korn and soda for the women present and for Herta. The exchange shows the limits of Anus’s authority in the scene. She can take an order and respond to Herta’s hesitation, but she does not challenge the rule Fiete Honka has imposed. The ordinary procedure of ordering drinks thus exposes a more consequential arrangement of control without turning Anus into its author.

Wit and Conflict with Fiete Honka

Her service does not make Anus merely silent or passive. When Fiete Honka orders drinks for the group, she makes a pointed joke warning him not to put his eel in the woman. Its sexual implication cuts across the apparent routine of the order: she recognizes what Fiete Honka’s company and intentions might mean for Herta, and answers with a line that briefly puts him on the defensive. The joke is especially pointed beside Herta’s inability to choose her own drink, because it names the sexual threat implicit in a situation otherwise conducted through bar service and banter.

Fiete Honka responds with an insult directed at Anus and tells her to hurry. He recalls a saying he learned from his brother Siggi about not putting an eel in a woman, then uses it as material for his own crude taunt. The sequence distinguishes Anus’s joke from Fiete Honka’s reply: her remark warns against his sexual use of Herta, while his comeback turns the exchange into an opportunity to demean Anus. The bar’s verbal sparring is therefore not an equal contest. Anus gets a moment of wit, but Fiete Honka can answer by asserting the entitlement and contempt that shape his dealings with the women around him.

Violence and the Work of Cleanup

Anus also appears after a fight has left a grotesque tangle of bodies, blood, broken teeth, and excrement on the floor. She arrives with a cloth and a bucket to clean the mess, but the stated reason is practical: she does not want anyone to slip. The detail is small and unsentimental. It gives her a task rather than a speech, and places routine maintenance directly beside the scene’s physical violence.

That cleanup completes the picture of her position at Zum Goldenen Handschuh. She serves customers, handles an uncertain request from a woman under Fiete Honka’s control, trades barbed words with him, and then deals with the aftermath of violence. The narrative does not provide an ending or a larger personal arc for Anus. Instead, her significance lies in these brief, concrete appearances: through them, the bar emerges as a place where degrading labels and coercive behavior are ordinary features of social life, while someone still has to take up the bucket and make the floor safe.