Shweqinggen

Schwetzingen is the destination of Hanna Schmitz’s early-morning streetcar route and the setting of a journey that turns a romantic surprise into an experience of rejection for Michael Berg. On the first day of Easter vacation, Michael gets up before dawn to ride with her to work, but his choice to board a different car and Hanna’s decision to remain with the driver produce a painful misunderstanding. He gets off before reaching Schwetzingen; the argument that follows makes clear that both have read the other’s actions as a refusal of intimacy.

Route and Setting

Hanna rides her bicycle to the streetcar depot at a quarter past four and boards the four-thirty car toward Schwetzingen, where she is working the early shift. She has told Michael that the car is often empty on the outward journey and fills on its return. That detail gives his Easter-vacation plan a practical opening: expecting privacy and a greeting, he boards at the second stop, choosing the empty second car while Hanna stands near the driver in the first.

The route’s measured progress gives the episode its unusual pressure. The streetcar passes empty stops beneath a colorless, pre-sunrise sky, moving slowly because its schedule accounts for time between stops as well as for stops themselves. After Eppelheim, its rails leave the road and run along a graveled embankment; the car accelerates with the clatter of a train on the way toward Schwetzingen. The open countryside and the trainlike stretch make the journey feel less like a brief ride than a passage from which Michael cannot escape.

The Abandoned Journey

Michael expects Hanna to come into the second car, where he imagines a private embrace and kiss. She does not. He takes her continued conversation and joking with the driver as evidence that she has noticed him and is choosing to ignore him. He watches her from the empty car, then stands on the front platform and tries to make her feel his stare. When she turns to glance at him and resumes talking, the distance between them seems deliberate and final.

At a stop in open country, Michael pulls the conductor’s signal cord and gets off. Neither Hanna nor the driver looks back when the bell sounds. He thinks they may be looking at him and laughing, though he cannot be sure. He watches the streetcar descend into a dip and disappear behind a hill, left beside the embankment, road, fields, fruit trees, and a nursery with greenhouses. The pale sky has turned pink above the mountains, and birdsong accompanies his walk home in tears. The sunrise does not console him: the narrator recalls it as an awakening that makes the horror of the preceding experience, and the truth he senses in it, more rather than less apparent. When the streetcar later passes him, full on its return journey, he does not see Hanna.

Misunderstanding and Reconciliation

At noon Michael waits on the landing outside Hanna’s apartment, miserable, anxious, and furious. Their exchange overturns his assumption that she had simply disregarded him. Hanna says that he was the one who acted as if he did not know her: he saw her in the first car and chose the second. Michael explains that he had risen at four-thirty on the first day of his vacation to surprise her because he thought she would be happy to see him. Each had interpreted the other’s position as a choice to withhold recognition.

The dispute deepens when Michael apologizes but Hanna insists that he does not have the power to upset her and asks him to leave so she can bathe and have peace. She turns away, runs the bath, and undresses while he remains seated. Michael eventually leaves, believing the separation final. Yet half an hour later he returns, takes responsibility for behaving thoughtlessly, inconsiderately, and without love, and recognizes that Hanna’s claim to be unmoved does not mean his conduct was acceptable to her. His apology ends in relief when she admits that he hurt her. Her admission reveals that she is neither as detached nor as uninvolved as she had made herself appear.

Narrative Significance

The episode converts a small practical choice—boarding the second car—into a crisis of recognition. Michael experiences Hanna’s position beside the driver as rejection, while Hanna experiences his separate car as rejection of her. The journey’s slow schedule stretches that misreading across successive stops, and Michael’s eventual decision to pull the cord makes his withdrawal physical: rather than reach the destination with Hanna, he steps off alone and watches the car disappear.

Schwetzingen thus matters less as a place of arrival than as the destination Michael fails to reach. The scene’s emotional turn continues after the ride, through his walk home, confrontation, departure, and return. By coming back to apologize, he moves from treating his hurt as proof that Hanna is indifferent to acknowledging his own part in the injury. Her admission that he hurt her does not erase the conflict, but it restores a measure of reciprocity to a relationship in which each had feared being the one who cared more.