Sophie

Sophie is Michael Berg’s classmate and friend in his new, coeducational class, and later a brief sexual partner whose response reveals the cost of his emotional withdrawal. Her story is marked by a contrast: the ease of a new friendship gives way to illness and loneliness, while Michael’s apparent intimacy with her proves unable to overcome his inward distance.

Identity and Introduction

When the school began admitting girls, they were initially concentrated in a few classes rather than distributed evenly. Michael’s former class was an all-boys parallel, and it was the one dissolved and reassigned when the school reorganized its classes. In the new classroom, Sophie sat beside Michael. He noticed her brown hair and eyes, summer-browned skin, and the tiny golden hairs on her bare arms; after he looked around, she smiled, and he smiled back.

Michael felt excited by the new start and believed he could be comfortable and friendly with girls, unlike boys who avoided them, showed off, or treated them with exaggerated admiration. He expected to get along with the girls and, through them, with the boys as well. The first summer in the new class thus opens with Sophie’s smile as an uncomplicated sign of welcome, set against the instability of Michael’s confidence in himself.

Friendship and Michael’s Silence

Friendships formed during summer afternoons at the swimming pool. Sophie lived a few blocks behind Michael’s house, and she and Michael often traveled to and from the pool with Holger Schlüter, another classmate with whom Michael felt at ease. Sophie’s place in this small circle made her part of the ordinary, shared life Michael was building with his classmates.

That ease did not make Michael more open about Hanna. He first told himself he was not yet close enough to his friends to disclose the relationship; later, he waited for the right moment and words, until the delay itself made disclosure seem misleading. He understood that he was betraying Hanna by acting as if he shared everything important with his friends while keeping her entirely out of view. Their awareness that he was not fully open only intensified the strain.

One evening, Sophie and Michael were caught in a thunderstorm on their way home and took shelter beneath the overhang of a garden shed in Neuenheimer Feld, then still fields and gardens rather than university buildings. Thunder, crackling lightning, gusting wind, and heavy rain came with a sharp drop in temperature. Freezing, Michael put his arm around Sophie. She looked out at the rain and began, “You know . . .” The scene brings their closeness to a threshold, but it also takes place under the pressure of what Michael has withheld.

Illness and Reunion

Not long after Hanna left the city, Sophie was diagnosed with tuberculosis. She spent three years in a sanatorium and returned just as Michael was beginning university. The illness separated her from her old friends for years; when she came back, she felt lonely and sought contact with them again.

Michael found it easy to make his way into Sophie’s heart. Yet after they slept together, she recognized that he was not interested in her. In tears, she asked, “What’s happened to you, what’s happened to you?” Her question makes the reunion more than a renewed friendship: it exposes the gap between Michael’s ability to enter an intimacy and his inability, or refusal, to remain emotionally present within it.

Narrative Significance

Sophie’s role in Michael’s recollections links the hopeful social beginning of his new class to the later pattern of distance he carried into adulthood. She first appears as a warmly responsive neighbor in the classroom and becomes part of the easy routines of friendship; later, she is the person who directly names the change she sees in him. Michael recalls her question alongside his posture of arrogant superiority and his dismissal of affection, while also remembering that even small gestures could bring a lump to his throat. Through Sophie, the narrative holds callousness and acute sensitivity together without making either cancel the other.