Berlin is the novel’s defining urban setting: a place where school rules, neighborhood violence, public transport, and family life meet at close quarters. The episodes grounded in the city make its institutions and public spaces part of the characters’ daily pressures, while contrasting moments of indifference and small acts of help show how uncertain protection can be.

Family and Neighborhood

The novel situates its central childhood in Berlin’s Neukölln district. Felix Lobrecht was born in 1988 and grew up there with two siblings and a single father; his mother died in 1993. This brief family history places the city not merely on a map but within the conditions of an upbringing shaped by a household with one parent and an early loss.

Neukölln also emerges through the gap between generations. When the narrator’s father objects to a school burglary, the narrator counters that fights happen at school every day and complains about people bringing knives. His father appears unable to answer and insists that he knows the area because he grew up there too. Their exchange makes Berlin a contested inheritance: shared residence and history do not guarantee agreement about how much the neighborhood has changed or how its dangers should be understood.

School and the City's Boundaries

At school, urban insecurity has produced visible controls: security guards stand at the entrances and in the schoolyard under a new rule. When the narrator arrives without his student ID, a guard refuses to let him in, even after he insists that he is an enrolled student. The narrator is already late for third period, worries about his many absences and the possibility of repeating ninth grade, and looks unsuccessfully for a teacher who can vouch for him. As the bell rings and the yard empties, the access rule meant to keep danger out also excludes a student who belongs there. He gives up and heads toward Wutzkyallee to meet Gino, turning a denied school entrance into another episode of skipping class.

The school is also a place where authority struggles to hold attention. A substitute teacher spends ten minutes looking for chalk and the class register while students ignore and insult him. The narrator initially finds the disorder amusing, then feels sorry for the teacher, whom he guesses may have only recently finished university and moved to Berlin. The scene gives the city an institutional dimension: the school is not simply a refuge from the streets, and the adult presence inside it can appear as vulnerable and ineffective as the safeguards at its gate.

Public Space and Uneven Protection

After an attack leaves the narrator with a bleeding nose, he notices two adults sitting on a lawn, smoking a water pipe, talking, and laughing as if they had not witnessed what happened. He resents their failure to call out or intervene. A bottle collector, by contrast, silently offers him a tissue, which he accepts; he then uses his phone as a mirror to inspect his face. In this sequence, public space holds both abandonment and a modest gesture of care. The contrast sharpens the narrator’s anger at a city where witnesses may remain passive while help arrives from someone with no stated obligation to provide it.

The narrator also fears being seen injured by his father, who is away for the day. He believes his father does not understand that being beaten is not his fault, and dismisses the maxim that the wiser person gives way because, in his view, the conditions have changed since his father grew up there. The city thus enters the family relationship as a source of disagreement about what violence demands and whether avoiding a fight is still a workable form of protection.

Transport, Crime, and the City's Scale

When police brief the class about a weekend break-in, their account maps the theft onto familiar urban routes. They say that computers and monitors worth several thousand euros were taken from the school, apparently by three men in black hooded jackets who carried the stolen goods in a shopping cart toward U-Bahnhof Zwickauer Damm. Residents also reported hearing gunshots near the station that same evening, though police cannot yet say whether the shots were connected to the burglary or whether the thieves were armed. The journey from school toward a transport node links an institutional crime scene to the wider neighborhood without resolving what happened on the route.

The police ask students to provide information, and the narrator considers whether to confess, reasoning that investigators already know a great deal and that surrender might bring a lighter punishment. His unease turns the city's connected spaces into a source of exposure: school, nearby streets, and the station are not isolated settings but points along an investigative trail. Across these episodes, Berlin is rendered through specific thresholds and routes, while the characters' sense of safety depends less on the mere presence of adults or authorities than on whether anyone actually intervenes.