Fiete’s Sexual Abuse and Murder of Frida

Fiete’s relationship with Frida is a brutal progression from apparent companionship to sexual abuse, physical struggle, and murder. Their brief life together repeats the pattern of his earlier relationship with Gerda, but Frida’s attempts to resist make the violence an open contest before Fiete kills her.

Encounter and Background

After Helga rejects him and leaves her job, Fiete’s hopes collapse further. He drinks heavily, spends his wages on alcohol and prostitutes, and grows consumed by resentment toward women. His sexual fantasies become increasingly violent and controlling; alongside them, he carries a grievance rooted in an earlier assault, when he was drugged, bound, and raped. The book places this history beside his later appetite for revenge, but his past does not make the harm he inflicts on Frida less deliberate.

When Frida enters the Zum Goldenen Handschuh, Fiete reads the scene as a reprise of his encounter with Gerda: Frida, too, carries a bag and appears to be wearing little more than a smock beneath her coat. He recognizes her from the place known as the Gichtecke, where older, discarded prostitutes gather. Once regarded as one of Hamburg’s most beautiful prostitutes, she still retains traces of that appearance and has twenty-seven prior convictions for theft. Although Fiete anticipates how the encounter may end, he follows his familiar routine, asks Anus to set a Fako before her, and takes her home after she asks to go with him.

Frida’s past makes the apparent bargain of shelter for sex anything but simple. From 1937 until the end of the war, she was forced into prostitution in a concentration camp; the seven-centimeter scar on her right wrist dates from that period. The narrative gives this history alongside the sexual violence in Fiete’s home, where her experience does not protect her from another man’s demands.

The first days pass comparatively peacefully, but that description is qualified at once: Fiete behaves like a wild animal during sex, and the more he drinks, the more violently he rages. Frida tries to get through the encounters quickly, drawing on her knowledge of both coerced and relatively voluntary sex. She hopes his appetite will subside after a few days. Instead, the repeated nightly assaults leave her frightened, bruised, and sore; she drinks to blunt the pain and settle herself, while Fiete’s demands continue.

Retaliation and a Fragile Truce

Frida’s hope that Fiete’s sexual appetite might diminish gives way to fear as the nightly assaults continue. Bruised and sore, she drinks to dull the pain and quiet herself; watching Fiete lie naked and unconscious beside her, she grows furious at the man whose demands have made shelter conditional on sex. She takes a tube of mustard from the kitchen and squeezes it over him, intending the burning paste to injure his genitals and end his ability to rape her.

Fiete wakes before the mustard can do what Frida intends. He strikes her hard enough to send her against the wall, where she slides down and lies motionless. Her attempt to retaliate has become another episode of his violence: he cleans himself, returns to her whimpering, and gives her something to drink while ordering her to be quiet. They drink together and eventually forget what happened. The reset is not reconciliation; it is one more consequence of their shared drunkenness, which repeatedly blurs the line between a violent incident and its aftermath.

In the uneasy quiet that follows, Frida tells Fiete an eccentric story about a man who wore white sheets like a guru, walked barefoot in every season, and fascinated women with his long fingers and strange eyes. Her account wanders into claims about having three kidneys and a medical condition that makes her pass gas; she continues despite Fiete asking her to stop. He accepts the explanation because, in his drunken state, he assumes a doctor must know. Their conversation gives the household a grotesquely ordinary interlude, but the bodily damage and disorientation surrounding it make clear how little safety or stability that ordinary talk can offer.

Escalation and Frida’s Death

After two relatively quiet days, Fiete begins another prolonged sexual assault, worse than the earlier ones. Frida believes he will eventually kill her through the repeated violence and decides that she must act before she is too exhausted to do so. She grabs a potato peeler lying beside the bed and stabs toward him; he twists aside in time to avoid a blow to the chest. She then kicks him in the testicles with her pointed sandal, and the pain makes him lose consciousness. Although she could try to escape, she does not know where to go and is too battered to manage the stairs. She stays where she is until he wakes two hours later.

Fiete’s injury is severe: the scrotum is swollen and discolored, and he puts his testicles in cold water for what seems an interminable time. When he returns to the living room, he sees that Frida is wearing a bra and tears it off. In its right cup she has hidden 400 marks—his money, which she may have seen as the starting capital for a new life and as payment for sex and pain. He reaches for a cloth. Frida recognizes the deadly hatred in his face and tries to throw him off, but he manages to hold on to the bedside table, loop the cloth around her neck, and strangle her.

After Frida is dead, Fiete turns her face down so she cannot look at him, then drinks. He takes a kitchen knife and cuts at his own testicles, imagining that he could remove the source of what he regards as his curse, but he cannot bring himself to finish the act. The gesture does not undo the violence against Frida; it follows it, turning his self-directed fury into another part of the aftermath.

The next morning, the storage space is full, so Fiete wraps a rope around Frida’s body and fastens it to a roof beam. As he cleans up, he repeats to himself that when he stands before God, his mother, and Christ, he will be able to say that he did not mean it and is innocent. The repeated self-exculpation stands against the deliberate concealment of the body and the traces of the killing: his relationship with Frida ends not in remorseful repair, but in murder, concealment, and a story he tells himself to escape responsibility.

The Domestic Setting and the Repeated Pattern

The earlier arrival of Gerda Voss at Fiete Honka’s apartment establishes the material setting behind the later relationship with Frida Roblick. On that journey, Gerda carries her own bag while he does not think to help; by the time they reach his rooms, she is exhausted. The apartment measures only eighteen square meters, divided into two rooms by a kitchenette, and its disorder is not incidental: rows of liquor bottles crowd the kitchen floor, pin-up photographs cover the walls, and a mirror is streaked with tiny spots of blood. In this confined space, women brought home by Fiete enter a world already shaped by sexual display, heavy drinking, and violence.

The comparison with Gerda is not a claim that the two relationships unfold identically. It clarifies the recurrence in Fiete’s conduct: a woman he encounters in the bar is brought into his home, where the apparent arrangement gives way to coercion and harm. Frida’s resistance makes that pattern more visibly contested—first with mustard, then with a knife and a kick—but does not create a safe way out. The apartment’s squalor and confinement frame the relationship without excusing Fiete’s choices; its domestic routines, including drinking and sleeping, become the setting in which assault, temporary forgetting, and further violence recur.