Domination and Enslavement

From fantasy to a plan

Fiete decides that he wants to take things further than before: he wants to enslave Gerda. He imagines her working, handing over her earnings, putting the apartment in order, and anticipating his wishes. The breadth of the plan matters. He does not picture a single task or temporary exchange, but a household organized around his demands and her compliance. The thought itself excites him, so domination is presented from the outset as both an intended arrangement and a source of personal gratification.

The plan develops amid heavy drinking. Back at the apartment, Fiete and Gerda drink Fako repeatedly, and the narration identifies the hours as Gerda’s last ones of freedom. That same evening, he requires her to hand over her identity card, presenting the seizure as security and a pledge because she has no money at all. The document gives his claim over her a practical form: her poverty is made to justify taking something that helps establish her identity, while the language of security disguises the coercion. There is no food, though Gerda is hungry; as a guest without money, she does not feel able to object. Fiete alternates two records, Es hängt ein Pferdehalfter an der Wand and Es geht eine Träne auf Reisen, while the immediate conditions of dependence take shape around them.

Confinement and the household economy

The next morning, before leaving for work, Fiete locks Gerda inside the apartment and takes her identity card with him. His reasoning is expressed through the idea that an additional safeguard is better: the lock and the document work together to restrict her ability to leave. When Gerda is later allowed out, Fiete is moved by his own supposed generosity. He regards food and lodging as provision and the opportunity to go outside as a favor, although those terms exist within a relationship he has already made coercive.

The outing also sharpens his calculation of what Gerda costs him. At the counter, they consume a bottle of Korn and a quantity of beer in less than an hour, and Gerda keeps pace. Fiete worries that her drinking will exhaust his money and concludes that she must work properly rather than simply drink at his expense. His demand for labor is thus framed as household accounting: her needs become costs, while the work she performs is treated not as a contribution deserving payment but as rent for lodging. When he comes home the following day, Gerda is sober because he has locked away the remaining Korn. She believes she has earned a drink after the work she has done to clear the apartment; he disagrees, counting the more than twenty marks she has already cost him and saying she has earned nothing. The cleaning, in his account, pays only for lodging, not food.

Control presented as care

Fiete’s language repeatedly recasts restriction as protection or provision. He explains the removal of the Korn by saying Gerda cannot look after herself and that he will do it for her; the rule had, in principle, been agreed. But the arrangement does not give Gerda meaningful control over the conditions of her stay. Fiete determines when she may drink, whether her work counts as payment, and whether she can remain in the apartment at all. He reminds himself that he can put her out whenever he chooses. The apparent exchange of shelter for work is therefore radically unequal: he sets the terms and retains the power to change them, while Gerda has no money with which to negotiate.

His private reasoning makes the structure more explicit. Fiete thinks that everyone needs another person or an animal to control, and he distinguishes people with their own will from people he regards as will-less, placing Gerda in the latter group. This is his judgment, not an objective account of her character. Gerda’s dependence is turned into an excuse for denying her agency: because he sees her as incapable of governing herself, he claims the right to govern her. The rule that sounds like care consequently serves as a rationale for domination.

Rosi and the escalation of the scheme

The idea expands when Gerda speaks about her daughter, Rosi, who has just turned thirty. Gerda tells stories from Rosi’s childhood and describes her affectionately, while leaving out that she has not seen her for years. Fiete listens closely once he learns that Gerda has a daughter. Instead of treating this disclosure as a personal confidence, he turns it into a new possibility for his plan. He decides that Rosi, too, must be brought under his control.

Fiete intends Gerda to bring Rosi to him at the next opportunity and decides that a spoken promise will not suffice: he wants the arrangement recorded in writing. His proposed paper would extend the reach of his control beyond the woman already living in his apartment, making Gerda the means through which he hopes to secure access to her daughter. The episode stops at the plan, not its fulfillment. Even so, the intention reveals the direction of the escalation: what began as a demand for Gerda’s labor becomes an effort to reproduce the same relation through her family connection.

Breakdown and the limits of his power

The arrangement ends this sequence in a scene of severe coercion. Gerda speaks without her teeth, and Fiete retreats to the bedroom and locks the door from inside. He has struck her and damaged her dentures; she has also been given no food. Gerda gathers the teeth and puts them in a cup. The small, practical gesture stands against Fiete’s imagined mastery: he can restrict and harm her, but the narrative still records her response and the material consequences of his actions. His control is real, yet it is not the mutual agreement or benevolent care he claims it to be.

Across the episode, domination works through connected forms of leverage rather than a single command: a document taken as collateral, a locked door, unpaid cleaning, rationed access to alcohol, withheld food, and the threat of being turned out. The repeated contrast between Fiete’s account of himself as provider and the conditions Gerda experiences exposes the arrangement’s central deception. What he calls generosity is inseparable from control, and what he describes as Gerda’s inability to care for herself becomes the justification for taking choices away from her.