Frau Sommer’s club statutes

Frau Sommer’s club statutes define the Institute for Spiritual Contact as a place for arranging encounters, not sustaining relationships. They promise equal rights to women and men, yet turn intimacy into a temporary, discreet, and paid transaction, with members expected to forget one another as soon as an encounter ends.

The Rules of the Institute

The statutes are presented to Fabian before he enters. Frau Sommer explains that members’ advances toward one another are not merely tolerated but expected, and that women enjoy the same rights as men. The Institute’s existence, address, and customs, however, may be disclosed only to people considered trustworthy. Secrecy protects the establishment even as it facilitates its business.

The rules also insist that consumption costs be paid immediately, whatever the enterprise’s stated ideals. Inside the club, no couple may claim a right to be respected or left undisturbed; anyone who wants privacy together is asked to leave. The premises serve to initiate relationships, Frau Sommer says, not to contain them. Members who have briefly had an opportunity to assess one another are asked to forget the encounter, since forgetting is presented as the way to avoid complications. Fabian confirms that he understands and follows her inside.

A Commercial and Social Setting

The statutes’ logic resonates beyond the Institute. At Haupt’s, two dozen streetwalkers descend from the gallery at ten each evening in brightly colored bathing suits, rolled stockings, and high heels. Undressing earns them free entry and a complimentary schnapps, an inducement described against the backdrop of a depressed trade. Men crowd toward them at the dance master’s urging; the women are selected and the wine alcoves quickly occupied. Here too, access, attention, and pleasure move through a system of exchange.

At the Cousine, a club frequented chiefly by women, guests dance together, sit arm in arm on green sofas, and drink schnapps. Its cigar-smoking proprietor moves from table to table, tells bawdy jokes, and arranges introductions. The place offers its own social world, but the work of brokering encounters echoes the Institute’s stated purpose: bringing people together without promising durable intimacy.

Gender, Vulnerability, and Power

The statutes’ declaration of equal rights does not erase the unequal pressures surrounding intimacy. At Haupt’s, a wealthy married woman in a green silk bathing suit tries to strip a resisting Reichswehr soldier and demands to see his identification. Fabian recognizes her as Irene Moll, whose key he has in his coat. She throws a champagne glass into the hall, interrupting the music and drawing everyone’s attention. The episode exposes a sharp disparity between the rule’s language of mutual freedom and an encounter in which one person resists the other’s advances.

Elsewhere, a young woman tells Fabian that she is twenty-five and has been abandoned by two men. She describes women giving themselves to men they love, only to find that the men regard their gifts as burdens; left alone, the women are treated like objects deliberately forgotten. Fabian answers that young men face a different but related bind: taking responsibility for a woman’s future may prove reckless if they lose their jobs, while declining that responsibility can also bring her to ruin. Their exchange gives the statutes’ prescribed forgetting a social context. What the club presents as a practical way to prevent complications resembles, in the woman’s account, a pattern of abandonment with consequences beyond the club.

Significance

The statutes turn the Institute’s ideals into conditions of commercial access: approach is encouraged, privacy is denied, costs are settled at once, and continuity is actively discouraged. Their calm administrative form makes the contradiction especially visible. Equal rights and mutual encounter are announced alongside rules that limit what an encounter can become and who may know that it occurred. Across the surrounding nightlife, relationships are mediated by money, employment, secrecy, and vulnerability; the Institute’s rules give that broader transactional world a concise institutional code.