Schöneberg District is more than a Berlin setting in Agneta’s story: it is bound to a song she carries from girlhood into adulthood, and to the beginning of her intimacy with Adrián. Its refrain gives private meaning to May, love, and the choices that will unsettle her marriage to Johannes Grunwald.

The song and its private meaning

Agneta repeatedly sings a song about Schöneberg, to Johannes’s irritation. He complains that hearing it constantly will make his head burst, but she turns away and continues singing to herself. The narrator links the melody to her former childhood bedroom on Winterfeldtstrasse and to the intimate smile the song brings to her lips. For Agneta, the song is not merely a tune associated with a neighborhood: it becomes the refrain of her life.

The song’s May setting also becomes a playful language between Agneta and Adrián. When he says that the song describes what happened in May, he uses its lyrics to frame their closeness without insisting that the present must match the song’s calendar. Schöneberg thus functions both as a real district and as a place made emotionally vivid by memory, music, and desire.

A gift in May 1948

On the penultimate day of May 1948, Adrián gives Agneta a birthday present he has made from a broken necklace bought from an elderly street vendor outside a subway station. He has dismantled the necklace and fashioned its small pieces of golden brass into a linked bracelet. Agneta is delighted and promises to wear it every day. That afternoon, when they embrace, she feels a renewed curiosity about whether she chose the wrong man; the realization unsettles her, and she resolves to resist pursuing the question.

The bracelet follows her through the summer at Wannsee, where Johannes has rented a small house jointly with his police colleague. She wears it every day and repeatedly looks at it. After the couple return to Berlin, Adrián misses a Sunday meal because he has to finish a job, and Agneta’s disappointment is strong enough to take away her appetite. As his visits grow less frequent, her anxiety grows. Schöneberg’s emotional significance therefore extends beyond the song: the handmade object becomes a continuing reminder of a relationship she is trying not to name.

The Christmas tree and the affair

The relationship becomes more explicit during a late-November Sunday at the Grunwald home. Johannes has gone out to buy bread and returns much later, drunk and empty-handed. Adrián goes down the stairs and brings back a loaf, but his help cannot prevent the argument that follows. Johannes leaves after telling Agneta that if she wants their son to have a Christmas tree, she can go and buy one herself; he will not spend his only Sunday working.

Agneta cries on the living-room sofa, leaving the dirty dishes on the table. Adrián sets them carefully in the sink, sits beside her, and comforts her. When she says that fathers are the ones who should bring a Christmas tree home, he does not answer. The following Thursday he arrives with a large fir tree, having taken the afternoon off to help decorate it. As he puts the tree into a pot, he hums the Schöneberg song. Agneta offers to translate the lyrics, only to discover he already knows them and wants to kiss a girl in Schöneberg. The song that had been her private refrain becomes a shared expression of their relationship.

After their first intimate encounter, Adrián tells Agneta that when he met her, he promised himself he would not die before being with her. She calls his words romantic and contrasts them with Johannes’s failure to bring home a tree for their son. The tree is both a practical act of care and a pointed contrast between the two men’s roles in her life.

Departure and the limits of the setting

Adrián eventually leaves Berlin in flight, without saying goodbye to anyone, including Agneta. She believes she is expecting his child and had meant to tell him with joy. He is frightened by the possibility that he has made his best friend’s wife pregnant and by Agneta’s plan to let the child be born and raised happily without revealing who its father is. She believes that, for the time being, their life should remain as it is; Adrián concludes that although he loves her, he cannot submit to that plan.

His departure reveals the limits of the intimate world the song had made possible. Schöneberg had held the bracelet, the Christmas tree, and the imagined promise of a life with Adrián, but it cannot protect their relationship from secrecy, divided loyalties, or flight. The district’s refrain endures as a personal motif even as the future it seemed to promise remains unresolved.