Frau Hohlfeld

Frau Hohlfeld, Jakob Fabian’s landlady in Berlin, is both a comic guardian of domestic respectability and a witness to the instability that has entered her house and her lodgers’ lives. Her rooms expose the gap between the respectable household she wants to maintain and the improvised intimacies, financial pressures, and grief that pass through it; in her final appearance, the woman who frets over furniture offers Fabian unfeigned care.

Identity and Household

Frau Hohlfeld is a widow who once had no need to rent rooms, but now lets space to lodgers, including Fabian. Her circumstances are registered through the household itself: the rented bedroom, the sofa, and the furniture she prizes. She is not merely a background landlady. Her repeated entrances bring the private arrangements of the tenants into contact with the rules and anxieties of a shared home.

The rooms also make her a constant presence in Fabian’s Berlin life. When he meets a young woman and walks with her through the city, they discover that she lives in the same building as he does, at number 17 in Schaperstraße. Fabian hides his surprise and asks whether he may see her again. The building that houses his own rented room thus gathers separate lives under one roof, and Hohlfeld’s domestic authority forms part of the setting in which those lives intersect.

Respectability and Comic Surveillance

Hohlfeld’s standards are clearest in her complaints about Tröger, a lodger who has brought women to his room and left the sofa in a state that alarms her. She tells Fabian that she will throw Tröger out if it happens again and worries about what the new subtenant in the other room will think. The incident makes her furniture a practical stake in the household conflict, while the anticipated judgment of another tenant turns private sexual behavior into a question of public respectability.

Fabian answers with a deliberately outrageous suggestion: Tröger should be allowed no more than one woman a night, and otherwise be handed over to the morals police for castration. Hohlfeld does not meet his mockery with a moral lecture. Instead, she announces that customs have changed, that people adapt, and that she understands some things because she is not so old. Her declaration, delivered as she draws closer to him, complicates her role as censor: she polices the household’s disorder while also presenting herself as a woman still touched by the changing sexual manners around her.

Fabian’s private interpretation of her approach is less generous. He imagines her watching Tröger’s late-night excesses through a keyhole and reads her closeness to him as desire; he wonders whether no one will have her. These are Fabian’s conjectures, not confirmed facts about Hohlfeld’s conduct or feelings. His response is to stand up and tell her it is a pity she has no children. She leaves discouraged. The encounter exposes both her loneliness as Fabian imagines it and the limits of his sympathy: he answers an awkward advance, as he perceives it, with a remark that reduces her to an unmet maternal role.

The Lodger’s Practical Ally

Hohlfeld’s concerns about the house do not prevent its rooms from becoming a temporary refuge for people whose circumstances exceed ordinary lodging arrangements. When Fabian and Cornelia bring an old man into the apartment, Fabian explains that the guest is sleeping on her sofa and acknowledges that Hohlfeld would be angered by a stranger bivouacking there all night. He has not yet worked out how to manage the situation by morning, but promises that he will find a solution and wishes the old man good night.

The episode sharpens the contrast between the landlady who guards her furniture and the improvised hospitality the tenants attempt. Fabian recognizes the problem in terms of her attachment to the furnishings, yet the old man is allowed to stay. Hohlfeld’s own response is not recorded in this moment, so the accommodation should not be mistaken for an explicit act of generosity on her part. What is established is that the household she oversees becomes a place where Fabian and Cornelia try to shelter someone, even as they anticipate her displeasure.

Disruption, Departure, and Care

When Fabian’s mother visits, practical signs of disorder mark the household aftermath: the handle of a coat has been sewn back on, and, as she puts it, the room looks human again. She adds that Hohlfeld is offended, though that cannot be helped. The passage confirms that the landlady’s displeasure persists beyond a single comic exchange, while the repaired coat and restored room turn the visit into a small act of putting things back in order. Fabian secretly slips his mother a twenty-mark note, and she asks when he will come home; Hohlfeld’s rooms stand in contrast to the family home he is being invited to return to.

Later, after Cornelia has left, Hohlfeld enters Fabian’s room without his noticing. He says he is catching flies, answering her question about what he is doing with evasive humor. The exchange is brief, but it places her again at the threshold of his private upheaval: she encounters him in the room after the relationship’s rupture, without being told what he has lost.

Her most consequential appearance comes after Labude’s death. Fabian returns in the evening, and Hohlfeld is waiting in the corridor in a dressing gown, intensely agitated. She has left her door open so she could hear him arrive, and tells him that the criminal police came looking for him. The announcement makes her household the point where an official search reaches Fabian, and her vigilance has a concrete purpose: she is the one who can tell him the police have been there.

The next morning, Hohlfeld brings Fabian breakfast while he lies on the sofa with the light still burning. She does not scold him for the unusual state of the room. Instead, she sets down the tray, switches off the light, and follows the customary gestures of tending a sickroom. Having read of Labude’s death in the newspaper, she offers her condolences and acknowledges the blow to Fabian and Labude’s parents. Her tone and sympathy are sincere, but Fabian finds the kindness almost impossible to endure. The scene recasts the house: the sofa that had been a source of dispute and a place for a temporary guest becomes the place where Hohlfeld quietly cares for a bereaved lodger.

Narrative Role

Hohlfeld’s recurring presence gives the apartment a domestic counterpoint to the larger instability of Fabian’s life. She notices damaged furniture, changing manners, a repaired coat, a lodger’s evasions, and the arrival of the police; her attention is practical, rooted in rooms and the people who pass through them. Fabian, by contrast, often experiences the city as something observed from the outside. Their exchanges bring his ironic detachment into collision with the ordinary obligations of shared living.

The book does not resolve Hohlfeld into a simple comic landlady or a secretly knowing confidante. Fabian’s account of her desire remains his own speculative reading, while her worry about the sofa and her later concern for him are directly shown. That difference matters: her private motives are uncertain, but her actions become increasingly legible. She is offended when her household is disrupted, watches for Fabian’s return when police have sought him, and treats his grief with care. The combination makes her small domestic world an important measure of the human attention that persists around him, even when he has difficulty receiving it.