Ottensen, also known as Mottenburg, is presented as a working-class district where bodily hardship and material decay shape everyday life. As Fiete Honka and Gerda move through its streets, the district’s history and housing conditions turn their walk into an encounter with a landscape marked by illness, poverty, and neglect.

Setting and Local History

The name Mottenburg is linked in the narrative to the workers who once laboured in Ottensen’s glassworks. Many contracted tuberculosis, then also called “Motten”; the cavities left in the lungs were likened to cloth eaten through by moths. The district’s nickname thus preserves a history in which work, disease, and the body’s deterioration are closely joined.

That history continues in the account of “dry-dwelling”: poor, large families are temporarily placed in damp flats in houses undergoing renovation, where they remain until the rooms have dried enough for regular tenants. The narrative compares their position to that of test subjects exposed to treatments not yet approved. The comparison emphasizes that the costs of preparing housing for others fall on people with little power to refuse it.

Streets and Housing

On the walk through Ottensen, the surroundings are described as broken and worn: ruined motorcycles and bicycles, damaged utility lines, dirty walls with peeling surfaces, shattered windows, rusting enamel signs, crumbling paint, and unfinished masonry. Several houses on Zeißstraße are being comprehensively renovated, while the provisional residents occupy the damp interiors until they are dry enough for those who will follow.

The street itself offers no shelter from the cold. On a Sunday afternoon, after a period of unseasonable warmth, temperatures have fallen below freezing and heavy, slushy snow is falling. Crows call from bare treetops above the decayed lanes. At one point the asphalt has split; Gerda stumbles over it and struggles to stay upright. The damaged pavement becomes part of the physical burden of the walk rather than merely a detail of the scenery.

The Walk Through Mottenburg

Fiete and Gerda cross the district in silence. Fiete wears only his jacket and seems resistant to the cold, while Gerda is so chilled that her teeth chatter and she draws her lips into her mouth. He drags his left leg slightly; she advances on numb, cold feet, more by pushing and hauling herself forward than by walking. Fiete thinks that if she falls, he will leave her there, while Gerda anxiously tries to follow what she believes are the rules of a proper walk. Their differing physical states and expectations make the same streets an ordeal for her and an imposed route for him.

They wander without a clear destination, reaching the fish auction hall after about half an hour. Fiete has no money to take her into one of the nearby pubs, so they look toward the Elbe River and the low, opaque winter sky. A freighter moves upriver and disappears around the bend. Gerda imagines vanishing with it, dissolving into the dusk or being swallowed by the earth. The district’s bleak streets lead into this moment of imagined disappearance, connecting the city’s physical desolation with her wish to be gone.

Narrative Significance

Ottensen is defined not by a single landmark but by the accumulation of its conditions: industrial illness in its past, damp housing in its present, and streets where cold and disrepair wear down those who must cross them. The contrast between renovation and deprivation is especially sharp: the flats are being prepared for regular tenants, while poor families bear the dampness in the meantime. In this setting, the walk’s ordinary purpose gives way to exhaustion, and the district’s damage registers both as social circumstance and as immediate bodily hardship.