Gerda Voss’s Confinement and Abuse by Honka

Gerda Voss’s confinement by Fiete Honka turns an apparently voluntary journey home into a regime of captivity, deprivation, and coercion. Its decisive instruments are ordinary things: an identity card taken as supposed security, a locked apartment door, a glass of alcohol withheld or granted, and a written declaration made to speak in Gerda’s place. The episode follows how control tightens through daily routines until her labor and eventual disappearance become part of the same grim trajectory.

From the bar to confinement

At the Zum Goldenen Handschuh, Fiete Honka asks Gerda Voss to come home with him. She agrees readily. He tells her to wait outside, then buys two double Korn before joining her. Gerda has only a thin coat and a work smock against the bitter cold. When she is not where he expects, Fiete searches for her and finds her near a sausage stand, where the smell of hot food reaches her when the wind shifts. She is exhausted and angry by the time they set off together.

Their walk through the winter darkness is not a straightforward return. At four in the morning, Gerda stumbles on broken asphalt; Fiete drags one leg, while she pushes herself onward with numb, heavy feet. He thinks that if she falls he will leave her there. They eventually reach the fish auction hall, with no money to go into a nearby pub. Watching a freighter travel up the Elbe, Gerda imagines vanishing with it, dissolving into the dusk and disappearing from the world. The ship passes out of sight; she remains beside Fiete.

Back at the apartment, drinking becomes the night’s governing activity. Fiete takes Gerda’s identity card, telling her it is for safekeeping and as a pledge because she has no money. The card is not returned. Before leaving for work the next morning, he locks her inside and takes the document with him, adding the lock to the control already established through her poverty and exhaustion. There is no food in the apartment, although Gerda is hungry. Fiete alternates two records, Es hängt ein Pferdehalfter an der Wand and Es geht eine Träne auf Reisen, as she sits without the means or confidence to ask for anything to eat.

Deprivation and bodily control

Gerda tries to make the apartment more tolerable by cleaning it. The effort seems almost impossible in the filthy, decaying rooms, but Fiete is moved by the difference when he returns. He rewards her by taking her out to the Zum Goldenen Handschuh. There, they drink a bottle of Korn and a great deal of beer in less than an hour. Fiete interprets her drinking not as a sign of shared dependence but as a cost that she must repay. He decides she must work and begins to imagine that her body, too, should be remade under his direction.

He locks the remaining Korn away and declares that she cannot be trusted to control herself. Although Gerda has worked on the apartment, he counts that labor as her rent rather than as a contribution that entitles her to food or drink. He reminds himself that he can put her out whenever he chooses and regards her as someone whose will can be ruled. His proposed improvements are presented as another task for him to manage: she should lose weight, tend to her lips and hair, and clean her nails and feet. When he gives her a large glass of Fako, he demands that she drink slowly. Her eager drinking irritates him; her later, careful sips please him because they appear to confirm his authority.

That authority becomes physical when Gerda pours herself another drink without asking. As Fiete tries to wipe the glass from her mouth, he strikes her; the blow breaks her dentures. Gerda crawls about collecting the scattered teeth and pleads for them. Fiete makes her repeat the word for teeth properly before he allows her to continue, then spends several attempts trying to mend the dentures with Uhu. When the glue fails, he throws them down and says she will have to eat only what she can manage without teeth. He strikes her again when her tears upset him. Gerda gathers the teeth into a cup while Fiete withdraws into the bedroom and locks himself inside.

The next day she tries to repair the dentures herself, first with Uhu and then with Pattex, before finding a tube of cement glue hidden among the room’s air fresheners. Several attempts eventually hold the pieces together. The improvised repair does not solve the immediate deprivation: she searches the apartment and finds no tin, potato, onion, or piece of bread. The account leaves the duration of her hunger uncertain, but makes clear that she has gone without food for an extended period. The apartment’s persistent stench and the stove’s unrelenting heat further unsettle her thoughts.

A coerced declaration

Fiete’s control is also made to look like consent. One evening he brings fruit and a box of Sarotti chocolates, placing the pralines on the table one by one and instructing Gerda to savor them. While she eats, he laboriously writes a declaration for her. It states that she has never been better cared for, that Fiete knows better than she does what is good for her, and that she agrees in advance to whatever he does. It also makes her renounce having or expressing an opinion of her own and promise to bring him her daughter, Rosi, so that he may sexually exploit her. The document asserts that Gerda signs freely and is of sound mind, but the surrounding circumstances expose the coercion behind that claim: she is dependent on Fiete for food, shelter, alcohol, and permission to leave.

Gerda signs without adding anything. Fiete folds the paper repeatedly and locks it in a cupboard, treating the written statement as proof that the control he has imposed is legitimate. Yet the promise concerning Rosi cannot be carried out. Gerda later tells him in tears that she does not know where her daughter is; Rosi disappeared without warning, and Gerda can only speculate whether she moved away, entered an institution, or died. Fiete accepts that she is telling the truth. His imagined access to Rosi, which had been the declaration’s central purpose, remains unrealized.

Labor, dependence, and disappearance

Over time, Fiete loses sexual interest in Gerda. He sometimes uses sausages, cooking spoons, and a wooden penis in sexualized experiments, but eventually leaves her alone. The declaration’s promise of obedience does not produce the relationship or the access to Rosi he had imagined. Instead, the confinement continues in a diminished, repetitive form: days pass in what the narrative calls Schmiersuff, and Fiete sends Gerda to work in a fish factory.

Gerda adapts to the factory’s heavy labor, finding reserves of physical strength she had not expected. Every Friday she hands over her earnings and receives a small reward, such as a scented brush, sweets, or filter cigarettes. The arrangement gives her a work routine but does not give her control over her wages or her living situation; Fiete remains the person who decides what she receives in return.

When Fiete suffers another work accident, sustaining a double fracture of the nose, a broken pelvis, and a badly torn left thumb, he spends six weeks in hospital. Gerda goes to the Elbschlosskeller after work, as she had before. One night an older man offers her ten marks to take him home. Soon she stops going to the factory and goes only to the bar. Her apartment becomes a makeshift brothel, with elderly men coming and going while Gerda’s life there becomes harder to manage. She fears that Fiete may beat her to death and doubts that she can endure until retirement. When a visitor from Hannover comes to Hamburg, she asks whether she can leave with him. He agrees, and her trail is lost.

The violence behind the domestic scene

The episode’s private captivity sits beside an earlier history of coercion in Fiete Honka’s life. In 1951, at sixteen, he fled East Germany and found work with Bauer Frerk in Billwerder. Bauer Frerk beat him repeatedly, returned him to the farm after his first escape, confined him in a wet room, tied him to his bed, and fed him spoiled food. Fiete tried to hang himself; on a later escape attempt he again risked being caught. His younger brother Siggi had previously saved his life after a suicide attempt in an apprentice dormitory. These details establish a history of violence and confinement around Fiete, but do not lessen his responsibility for imposing a new captivity on Gerda.

The narrative makes that repetition concrete rather than abstract. Gerda’s identity card is removed, her movement is blocked by a lock, her food and drink are controlled, her body is subjected to punishment and forced labor, and her own written words are made to certify her submission. When firefighters discover human remains in the attic recesses of Zeißstraße 74 in July 1975, Fiete Honka is soon suspected and later confesses to murders. Gerda’s own fate in this episode is different: she leaves with the visitor from Hannover, after which the narrative loses her trail. Her disappearance closes the account not with proof of safety, but with the abrupt end of the record of her life.