Material poverty and financial hardship

Material poverty and financial hardship are not merely background conditions: they narrow the boys’ sense of what is attainable and make a risky theft appear, for a time, like a shortcut out of scarcity.

Background and Daily Conditions

Lukas encounters deprivation as part of the ordinary landscape around him. Near a playground between high-rise buildings, he hears adults drinking and shouting; they do not look happy, and he worries that he might one day end up sitting there in the same way. The scene links poverty to a future he fears, while showing how little distance there seems to be between the boys’ present and the adults’ precarious lives.

Gino’s household makes that insecurity more immediate. Both his parents are unemployed. His mother shops, sometimes cleans for money, and takes care of tasks connected with Gino’s sick brother; his alcoholic father, by contrast, is described as unable to manage anything beyond drinking and playing slot machines. The family’s circumstances are thus marked not only by a lack of income but also by unequal burdens of care and an unreliable parent.

For Gino, having too little is visible in the clothes he wears and in the money he cannot count on. When Lukas warns him that his father may discover the planned theft, Gino points to the bruises on his face and says that his father beats him regardless. He refuses to let the prospect of more violence outweigh the chance to have money and stop running around in shabby clothes. Poverty and abuse converge here: the theft promises not safety, but a brief possibility of possessing what Gino lacks.

The Theft as an Alternative Economy

The promised computers turn scarcity into a calculation. Sanchez announces that the school will receive fifty new PCs, complete with screens, keyboards, and mice, and proposes stealing them for resale. His imagined returns escalate as he prices a computer at 1,000 euros, a screen at 600, a mouse at 50, and a keyboard at 100, then multiplies the sum across thirty sets and declares that each boy could receive 12,000 euros. The arithmetic is wildly optimistic, but its appeal is concrete: money appears to be available all at once, without the slow, poorly paid work the boys associate with ordinary life.

That fantasy gives the plan different meanings for each of them. Lukas imagines buying new shoes and perhaps a PlayStation, but immediately checks the wish against the risk that his father will ask where the money came from. Sanchez talks instead about buying clothes or cannabis to resell, or taking his mother to Cuba for a few months. Gino’s stated hope is simpler and more urgent: to stop wearing shabby clothes and to have money of his own. The same imagined windfall thus ranges from consumer goods to reinvestment and escape, while exposing how limited each boy’s present choices seem.

The actual proceeds quickly shrink the promise to a more modest sum. After three computers are sold, the boys handle 800 euros in clean, still-warm banknotes. Sanchez compares the single payment favorably with two months of dealing in Hellersdorf; the money is divided into 200 euros apiece, with Gino guaranteed an equal share even though house arrest kept him from joining that sale. The cash is real, but it does not dissolve the danger or establish a stable way out of hardship. Instead, it makes the next decision harder: Sanchez urges Lukas to wait one more day before abandoning the remaining computers, because another sale might bring each of them one or two thousand euros and, in his telling, leave them with no more worries.

Opportunity, Exposure, and the Limits of the Windfall

The promise of quick money depends on more than the boys’ willingness to steal: it depends on access to the school and on finding a buyer. Julius first offers a lock pick, claiming he can open doors, cars, and cellars, but Sanchez produces a large key ring that appears to include keys to the school. On a Saturday night, Sanchez leads the others through the gate and toward the side entrance; Julius reveals that he has also brought a blank-firing gun. The gun turns a scheme imagined as a brief route to cash into a far more dangerous undertaking, while the boys’ fears of a night watchman, cleaners, motion sensors, or cameras expose how little control they have over the risks.

Inside, the promised goods are not immediately where they expect them. After searching and growing frustrated, they spot unopened boxes of computers and monitors on high shelves—about forty in all. Lukas climbs a step stool and passes the equipment down to Sanchez and Julius, handling each carton as the plan shifts from imagined riches to physical work and stolen property. The computers make the boys’ hoped-for money tangible, but their size and visibility also make the theft difficult to conceal and move.

The attempt to convert the goods into cash meets a limit that arithmetic could not account for. When Lukas claims the three boys are twenty, a computer-shop owner points to the recent theft of a large number of computers from a school and challenges the appearance of three students trying to sell brand-new machines. The boys’ access to valuable goods does not make them credible sellers; the very newness that made the computers seem lucrative links them to the crime. Scarcity has drawn them toward an apparently easy source of money, but turning stolen property into a dependable escape proves less simple than Sanchez’s calculations suggest.

Scarcity and the Meaning of the Proceeds

The equal division of the first sale’s proceeds, including a share for Gino despite his absence under house arrest, makes the imagined escape from poverty collective rather than individual. Yet the money remains a one-time return from stolen goods, not a dependable income or a changed household situation. The boys’ calculations give cash the power to promise shoes, investment, or a trip away; the uncertain effort required to sell the computers shows how little that promise can secure. Material hardship therefore shapes the theft both as a motive and as a trap: immediate needs make the risk persuasive, while the hoped-for windfall offers no durable guarantee of relief.