Goldmund Kills the Man Attacking Lene

Goldmund Kills the Man Attacking Lene is a turning point in Goldmund and Lene’s life in the heath: Goldmund stops an attack on her and kills her assailant, but the rescue brings neither uncomplicated triumph nor lasting security. Instead, it recalls the death of Viktor, troubles Goldmund’s view of himself, and anticipates the wider violence he witnesses during the plague. The episode also returns later in his account to Narcissus, where it forms part of a broader confrontation with human cruelty and the limits of intervention.

Circumstances and Rescue

As summer wanes, Goldmund and Lene are living in a hut, where food has become scarce. Lene has spoken of the future and believes she may be pregnant; Goldmund, meanwhile, is already imagining leaving when the cold comes and eventually visiting Narcissus at Mariabronn. While he is away from Lene, he hears her distressed cries and follows them. He finds her being attacked by a stranger and intervenes, driven by anger and concern for her.

Goldmund kills the attacker during the struggle. When the danger has passed, Lene is shaken and injured, and Goldmund helps her back to the hut and tends to her. The rescue temporarily restores their immediate safety, but it does not make the episode an uncomplicated victory. Its violence, and Lene’s response to it, remain with Goldmund after they have returned home.

Aftermath and Goldmund’s Response

Robert responds to the killing with excitement and admiration, pressing Goldmund for details and calling him terrifying. Goldmund does not want to dwell on the fight. As he walks away from the dead man, he remembers Viktor, the earlier person who died at his hands. He tells Robert to deal with the corpse, but Robert refuses, fearing it may carry plague. The exchange leaves Goldmund alone with the consequences of the killing rather than allowing the event to settle into a boastful tale of combat.

Lene recovers enough to get up, make a fire, and prepare the evening milk, while Goldmund remains somber. Later, as she sleeps, he recalls her expression as she watched him kill the attacker. It had combined pride and triumph with horror and delight, and Goldmund understands that the look has made an indelible impression on him. For months he has seen nothing that stirred in him the wish to draw it; now the image does so, while also frightening him. The event becomes at once a remembered act of violence and a possible subject for art.

Recurrence, Violence, and the Plague

The killing sharpens Goldmund’s unease about the life he has made. Awake outside the hut, he thinks of Viktor and of the man killed that day, and grieves over what he calls the loss of innocence and the childlike quality of his soul. He questions whether leaving the cloister, Narcissus, Master Niklaus, and Lisbeth was worth ending up in the heath, tracking stray cattle, and killing another person. The episode thus marks the failure of the hut to provide a settled refuge: Goldmund’s thoughts turn again toward departure, and his sense of meaning gives way to self-reproach.

During the plague, Goldmund encounters violence on a far larger scale. He sees a town’s ghetto burned and its fleeing residents driven back by a mob; across the region, fear and blame turn into persecution and murder. His private act of lethal force and the public violence he witnesses are not identical, but the novel places them within a world where death recurs and innocence seems increasingly difficult to preserve. Goldmund’s later encounter with Rebekka makes the human cost of that collective violence particular: her father has been burned with fourteen other Jews by order of the town authorities, and she asks Goldmund to help gather and bury the remains.

Retelling and Significance

When Narcissus later questions Goldmund about whether he had ever witnessed the burning of Jews, Goldmund says that he had. He recounts the story of Rebekka in detail and concludes by asking whether the world in which people must live is hell. Narcissus agrees that the world is as Goldmund describes it. The return to the persecution does not erase the earlier killing of Lene’s attacker; rather, it places Goldmund’s experience of violence within the larger crisis of suffering, complicity, and limited power that he has encountered on the road.

The episode’s significance lies in this unresolved aftermath. Goldmund acts to protect Lene, yet the act recalls his earlier killing and leaves him grieving over what violence has done to his sense of innocence. At the same time, Lene’s unforgettable expression turns the moment into an image he wants to draw. The rescue therefore joins action, memory, and artistic perception without making them equivalent: Goldmund can preserve the look in imagination, but neither art nor the immediate rescue can undo the death or the suffering that surrounds it.