The Objectification of Women and Sexual Violence

The Objectification of Women and Sexual Violence is a recurring pattern in the novel’s male-dominated world, where women are treated as objects of sexual access, humiliation, and control. Its significance lies in the escalation it traces: degrading talk and public harassment belong to the same order of power as Fiete Honka’s coercion and violence, even as the women’s fear, resistance, and exhaustion expose the human cost of that order.

The Bar’s Masculine Order

The Zum Goldenen Handschuh is not merely a backdrop to this pattern. Its owner, Herbert Nürnberg, is a four-time German and two-time European lightweight boxing champion who remains a public attraction and often stands behind the counter himself. He is depicted as a practiced judge of patrons and can threaten Soldaten-Norbert with exclusion from the bar. That threat matters to Norbert, whose life outside it has narrowed, but the bar’s male hierarchy does not prevent his degrading treatment of women.

Norbert’s sexual harassment extends from the bar into crowded public places. Since women no longer accept his advances after he beat a prostitute, he seeks out the press of crowds in pedestrian zones, department stores, and stations. He cuts a circular hole in his bright yellow raincoat, goes without underwear, and rubs himself against women he finds attractive. The act lasts only seconds; he then imagines their partners, employers, or parents confronting them over clothing stained with his semen. His imagined humiliation of the women is part of the gratification, while his practiced look of harmless surprise helps him avoid being exposed. The episode makes the objectifying gaze physical: women become targets in a public space where he tries to conceal his assault as he carries it out.

Talk, Fantasy, and Male Competition

Siggi’s after-dinner performance turns the objectifying logic into a kind of male entertainment. Over schnapps and beer, he offers a theory of drinking that includes forgetting trouble, celebrating pleasure, or making something happen when nothing is going on, then shifts to women as an inexhaustible source of sexual possibility. He catalogs gestures such as crossing the legs, fastening a blouse, or arranging the hair, treating each as one more variation for male attention. His conclusion that women are at once too numerous and too scarce converts desire into a problem of supply, while Gerda and Fiete nod along and Fiete drinks more. Gerda’s presence does not interrupt the performance: Siggi speaks as if a woman can sit among the listeners without changing the terms of his talk.

Fiete’s interest in Helga takes a quieter but related form. After Erich’s birthday gathering, he interprets Helga’s looks during the games as evidence that she prefers him, although Erich is beside her, and imagines that she is on the verge of leaving her husband. He makes Erich’s unemployment and history of three broken legs into grounds for feeling superior, concluding that Erich does not deserve Helga. The fantasy casts her as the prize in a contest between men rather than as someone whose own circumstances determine her choices. When Helga later confides that she had hoped for a different life and worries about the cost of the house, her concerns are concrete; Fiete instead reads her unhappiness through his imagined romantic opening.

Fantasy, Coercion, and the Staged Body

After Helga rejects him, Fiete’s hopes collapse into heavier drinking, paid sex, and a growing hatred of women. He accepts that he will not find a “normal” woman, while sexual frustration feeds fantasies that reduce women to bodies for his use: he imagines partners with disabilities or illnesses and pictures directing two women to perform for him before taking the remaining woman himself. At the gatekeeper’s booth, dime Westerns about people being shot excite him; he strokes his pistol and rubs himself against it. The shift from imagined sexual access to imagined killing is explicit, not a sudden break from the novel’s earlier pattern of treating women as objects.

In the same passage, Fiete recalls being abducted to a homeless shelter after his attempted murder of Bauer Frerk. Two women and a man took his ten marks, made him drink vermouth until he lost consciousness, stripped him, tied his hands behind his back with a stocking, and held his legs while the man raped him. Fiete now wants revenge for that assault and for everything else he believes has been done to him. His fantasies of revenge take the form of a woman blown apart while he imagines blood spreading across the floor and falling like rain. He chews raw meat to taste blood, wonders whether blood can be made colorless, and performs invasive acts on his own body. The remembered rape gives the revenge fantasy a specific history, but the narrative does not present it as an excuse: Fiete turns his experience into a script of domination directed at women.

A 65-mark sex doll makes that script tangible. The doll is 150 centimeters tall; Fiete gives it different wigs and dresses it in underwear and clothes, mostly obtained from clothing collections. He loops a rope around its neck and hangs it on a wall, imagining a helpless woman struggling against strangulation. His response shifts between pleasure in the imagined victim’s terror and pity for her. The doll cannot speak or resist, and the scene’s oscillation does not undo the violence of the fantasy; instead, it shows how Fiete stages control while anticipating that his own trajectory is heading toward disaster.

Coercion and Women’s Resistance

Fiete’s fantasies become physical coercion when he brings Inge and Herta to his home. Herta repeatedly collapses on the way, and Fiete insults her and insists she must arrive alive because he still expects to watch her perform sexually with Inge. He takes her by the arm in a police hold; Inge helps keep her upright, even as Herta’s confusion and exhaustion make the journey seem less like consent than forced transport. At the apartment, Fiete gathers improvised objects for the scene he has imagined, including a wooden penis and a cooking spoon. The women are not participants in a shared erotic fantasy: he is arranging their bodies to serve his own.

When Fiete orders Inge to begin, she refuses. He strikes her, tears off her clothes until she is left in her bra and underwear, and repeats that she has no will of her own because she is not doing what he says. Her insistence that she does have a will is met with another blow. The episode turns his earlier rule of written consent into its brutal inverse: paperwork and declarations of obedience do not establish freely chosen agreement, and his claim to have erased a woman’s will is enforced through violence. Inge’s refusal remains audible even as he tries to make her body comply.

The pattern also governs Fiete’s treatment of Frida Roblick. He recognizes her from the place where older, discarded prostitutes gather and knows that she once had a reputation as one of Hamburg’s most beautiful sex workers. Their first days together are peaceful only in comparison with what follows: Fiete behaves violently during sex, and the more he drinks, the more furious he becomes. Frida tries to get through it quickly, drawing on her experience of both voluntary and forced sex. That history includes her forced prostitution in a concentration camp from 1937 until the end of the war, and the seven-centimeter scar on her right wrist remains a bodily trace of that past.

Frida hopes Fiete’s sexual appetite will diminish, but it does not. He becomes more intent on breaking her resistance as she grows bruised and sore; she drinks to manage the pain and calm herself. When he lies unconscious beside her, she tries to retaliate by squeezing mustard from a tube onto him, imagining that it will burn and injure him. He wakes, hits her so hard that she strikes the wall and falls motionless, then tells her to be quiet when she begins to whimper and gives her something to drink. Her act is a desperate attempt to answer the violence with which he has treated her, but it does not free her from his control. Across these encounters, the novel sets male fantasies of access and command against women’s refusals, endurance, and attempts to resist; the gap between the imagined performance and the bodily cost is the point.