Hildegart

Hildegart is a woman in the orbit of the Zum Goldenen Handschuh whose fall in its ladies’ toilet leaves her injured, unable to call for help, and facing the possibility of dying alone. Her episode is defined by a stark contrast: while the bar continues to fill and empty around ordinary drinking and conversation, she lies unseen among the filth, reduced to the effort of making herself heard and staying alive.

Identity and Introduction

Hildegart appears in Fiete Honka’s view as part of the procession of women moving through the bar. When Inge rises to go to the toilet, Hildegart follows in her wake. Fiete’s attention is distorted by contempt and sexual fantasy: he fixates on Inge’s body, imagines an extravagant assault in the women’s restroom, and remains seated. Hildegart is initially little more than a figure behind Inge in this scene, seen through a gaze that turns women into grotesque bodies rather than individuals.

That brief appearance also establishes the imbalance between what Fiete notices and what is happening. He watches Inge’s movements and indulges his own fantasies, but Hildegart disappears from his awareness. When Inge later returns to her stool, he wonders where Hildegart has gone, imagining that she has vanished as if flushed away. The narration immediately supplies the grim literal fact behind his careless speculation: Hildegart has fallen and broken one or more of her already partly crumbled bones.

The Fall and Its Immediate Consequences

The injury leaves Hildegart on the floor of the ladies’ toilet. She tries to call for help, but her throat produces only a faint squeak and gasps, like a cat. The body that has brought her to the floor cannot make a voice strong enough to bring anyone to her. The surrounding toilets remain in use, with people coming and going in the stalls on either side, but this traffic does not become assistance. Other people are physically close; Hildegart is nevertheless alone in the place where she has fallen.

The narrative makes the setting materially degrading rather than merely private. She lies among puddles, small pools, excrement, and glistening scraps of mess. Her fear is not abstract: she is afraid of dying there, in the refuse, while the restroom carries on around her. The contrast with the bar’s continued activity sharpens the scene’s cruelty. A busy room and a nearby flow of people do not guarantee that anyone will notice a person in danger.

A Private Struggle Against Death

Hildegart’s consciousness contracts around a single sentence: “Dies ist kein Albtraum, dies ist ein Todeskampf.” The wording recurs as both recognition and refrain. She is not dreaming that she has been abandoned in an impossible place; she understands that her body is in peril. The sentence returns while she imagines the cleaner finding the door locked, cleaning the other toilets, and leaving without discovering her. In her experience, even the possibility of routine cleaning offers no dependable rescue: she has never seen the toilets cleaned, despite having been there often at different times.

Her struggle is not presented as a sudden attachment to a life she has always cherished. She does not particularly value the little life she has had, but she does not want to die on the toilet at the Handschuh, like a rat. She insists inwardly that she does not want to die and that she has not deserved such an end; at the very end, a few good weeks, days, or hours would still have mattered to her. These thoughts hold two truths together: her life has little apparent comfort to offer, and the prospect of its ending in this place remains intolerable.

The narrative’s close attention to her failed voice and narrowing thought gives the scene its form. The repeated sentence does not resolve her danger or summon help; it is what remains available to her when speech fails. Around her, the toilets continue to function as a public place, but her experience has become intensely private. The ordinary passage of other people and the possibility that the cleaner will not look behind the locked door make time feel suspended over an outcome she cannot control.

Narrative Role and Unresolved Outcome

Hildegart’s fall interrupts the bar’s coarse, crowded routine with a scene of bodily vulnerability that Fiete neither sees nor understands. His fanciful idea that she has been flushed away is grotesquely close to the truth only in its image of disappearance: in reality, she has fallen out of sight, injured and unable to call out. The gap between his speculation and her actual condition exposes how easily a person can become invisible even in a place full of people.

The episode leaves Hildegart’s immediate fate unresolved. The evidence shows her still fighting alone in the restroom and thinking of the hours she wishes she could have had, but it does not establish that she is found, rescued, or dies. That uncertainty matters: the passage ends not with an account of what happens to her, but with the continuing force of her repeated recognition that this is a death struggle.