Rosenheim

Rosenheim is the southern Bavarian setting where Hannah Doll’s university years and first relationship with Dieter Kruger intersect with her later marriage to Paul Doll. The town’s ordered, genteel appearance—its parks, cobblestones, onion domes, gardens, and cafés—stands beside a story of political radicalism, sexual scandal, and domestic estrangement. It is both a specific social landscape and the stage on which Paul’s retrospective account tries to define what was normal, respectable, and proper.

Setting and Social Character

Rosenheim is presented as a mannerly town of parks, cobblestones, and onion domes, a provincial contrast to Berlin and Munich. Paul invokes those larger cities as places where an eighteen-year-old student’s relationship with a man nearly twice her age might have seemed less scandalous; in Rosenheim, he insists, everyone could see the impropriety. His comparison makes the town’s reputation for respectability part of the conflict: the affair is not only private but exposed to the scrutiny of a community whose standards Paul claims to understand and defend.

The public gardens and elegant cafés are recurring social spaces. While Hannah and Paul were on cordial terms, she was often available to walk with him or share tea in one of the cafés. These public routines contrast with the hidden intimacy of her relationship with Kruger, which Paul associates with the attic rooms of a disreputable boarding house on Bergerstrasse.

University Years and the Kruger Affair

In 1928, Hannah enrolled at the University of Rosenheim to study French and English. Dieter Kruger, who taught Marx and Engels, attracted her and two friends to his lectures; Hannah’s initial interest was his good looks. When Kruger asked whether she felt passionate about the Communist cause, she falsely said that she did. He then invited her to weekly meetings in the back room of a downtown café, where she joined his political group. The university setting therefore leads from ordinary student life into Kruger’s political circle.

Kruger was not only an academic but also an activist and streetfighter, amid running battles involving the Roter Frontkämpferbund and right-wing factions that included the NSDAP. He and Hannah began an affair and, in effect, moved in together by taking adjacent rooms at the boarding house on Bergerstrasse. Kruger was thirty-four and Hannah eighteen. The relationship lasted about six months before he left her. Paul’s account emphasizes both the age difference and the contrast between the town’s decorous public image and the couple’s lodging in a place he condemns as disreputable.

Marriage and the Town in Retrospect

Hannah and Paul married at Christmastide in 1928. A week after returning to the environs of Rosenheim, Hannah’s suspicion that she was pregnant was confirmed: she was six weeks along. Paul presents the pregnancy as a decisive interruption to their intimacy, describing his adherence to Tolstoy’s arguments against erotic activity during pregnancy and nursing. Their twin daughters, Paulette and Sybil, were born the following summer, and Hannah nursed them for three and a half years. By the time Paul believed marital relations could resume, he says, the couple had become virtual strangers; repeated attempts at intimacy failed as Hannah remained tense and unresponsive.

Rosenheim thus links two stages of Hannah’s life without resolving the damage between them. It is where her university education and affair with Kruger began, and where she and Paul returned after their wedding to establish married life. Paul’s later explanations make the town’s reputation for propriety a backdrop to his judgments about Hannah, while the sequence of courtship, marriage, pregnancy, and estrangement reveals how little that outward order could guarantee intimacy.