Rolli

Rolli is a paraplegic regular at the Zum Goldenen Handschuh whose severe physical suffering becomes the focus of a violent confrontation there. His nickname, a shortened form that avoids the less fitting “Rollstuhl-Rolf,” turns his wheelchair into an everyday part of how the bar identifies him; behind that shorthand, the narrative sets out the particular and worsening afflictions with which he lives.

Identity and Physical Condition

Rolli is actually named Rolf. After an accident, he gets around in a wheelchair, which the narration calls a hand-powered taxi. He also has hepatitis, and his skin is described as markedly yellow. The name Rolli carries the visible fact of his mobility impairment, but the text does not leave that impairment as a simple label: it places it alongside the other, severe bodily conditions that shape his presence among the bar’s regulars.

His most tormenting symptom is an abnormal itch that began when he was thirty and grows worse each year. It starts low on the left side of his body and spreads outward in a fan-shaped pattern, provoking uncontrollable scratching from his feet to his head. His backside and scalp are particularly affected: he scratches inflamed skin until it is bloody, leaving his scalp scabbed and badly damaged. At the height of an attack, the itch briefly turns into pain, which feels almost like relief. The account’s precise, repetitive progression makes the affliction a lived ordeal rather than a passing mark of grotesquerie.

The attacks also govern how Rolli behaves in the crowded bar. He scratches without restraint, even reaching into his trousers to get at the itch, and the narration describes him as unable to stop. When drunk, he shouts orders at other patrons. They do not protest, partly because he is paraplegic and is regarded as helpless. That apparent deference does not protect him from hostility: his dependence on the wheelchair is visible to everyone, but it does not make his pain or his place among the regulars secure.

Conflict and Social Position

Rolli’s place among the bar’s regulars is marked by a contradiction: when drunk, he can shout orders at other patrons, yet they let him do so because they see him as helpless in his wheelchair. The Schwangere responds not with patience or pity but with a hatred that has been building around his presence. She wants him to stop coming and imagines leaving him at home to starve or dehydrate, or to scratch himself to death. She has also pictured tipping him out of his chair and kicking him until he is reduced to pulp. Her resentment turns his dependence on the chair into the focus of an imagined and then actual attack.

The confrontation begins when Wolfgang goes to the back to fetch beer. The Schwangere kicks Rolli’s wheelchair with full force, sending him rolling from one end of the Zum Goldenen Handschuh to the other. She insults him; he answers with a crude threat to clean her between her breasts with a toilet brush. She threatens to kick him in the mouth until he wants to die, and he taunts her to try. The exchange is vicious on both sides, but the physical balance is not: she can strike the chair, while his body rocks in it like a rag doll. The shouting of the people around them makes the episode a public spectacle, not a private dispute.

The Schwangere flees before the bar can impose a ban. Rolli, visibly shaken, seems almost to merge with his chair, the two becoming difficult to distinguish. Afraid she may be waiting for him outside, he asks Soldaten-Norbert to watch over him as he leaves. He says he will not return and imagines going down into the mud to be swallowed by it. The threat of disappearance gives the quarrel a stark ending: the bar that has been his setting and social world is now somewhere he fears to go back to.

A Place in the Bar’s Social Order

Rolli’s confrontation with the Schwangere takes place on a night when the bar’s usual order is already fraying. Herbert is off duty and has come in as a customer; unlike when he works behind the counter, he has been buying drinks, and he leaves drunk. Wolfgang takes his place behind the bar, while the patrons are themselves drunk, aggressive, and short of money at the end of the month. The Schwangere is talking with Soldaten-Norbert when the tension around Rolli breaks into violence. The episode therefore unfolds not in a neutral public space but in a crowded drinking place whose ordinary restraints have weakened.

The Schwangere’s hostility toward Rolli fits a pattern of volatility that the narrative has already established. When WH 2 once refused her a cigarette, she poured several partly filled glasses of Jägermeister across the counter, splashing his suit; although furious, he held back because she was considered unpredictable. Rolli, too, becomes the object of an anger that has accumulated before it erupts. His wheelchair is not merely a means of getting around in this setting: it makes his vulnerability conspicuous, while the regulars’ failure to object when he shouts at them shows how they accommodate him without necessarily treating him as an equal. The bar offers him a place among its patrons, but that belonging proves precarious when the Schwangere turns resentment into physical force.

The Nickname and the Bar’s Taxonomy

Rolli’s name exposes the way the bar turns bodily difference into social shorthand. The narration explains that he is really Rolf, but that Rollstuhl-Rolf would not work; Rolli is the name by which he is known among the patrons. The smaller, more familiar-sounding nickname does not erase the wheelchair that defines his public presence, but it does make that presence easier to fold into the bar’s everyday vocabulary. Naming grants recognition, though not necessarily dignity or protection.

Elsewhere, the book shows how such names function as a hierarchy. When Fiete Honka is given his new nickname, he feels proud: even a second-class nickname seems like an honorific in a place where patrons are distinguished by labels such as Ritzen-Schorsch, Glatzen-Dieter, and Nasen-Erni. That context sharpens the ambiguity of Rolli’s name. The bar’s nicknames can confer belonging, but they also reduce people to a visible trait or an in-joke. Rolli is admitted into the regulars’ social world, yet the same world allows his severe bodily distress to become spectacle and leaves him exposed when another patron turns contempt into violence.