Himmel is a nearby, fenced-off place associated with girls, maternal tenderness, and communal belonging. For Aden Rheinschiffer, its decisive significance lies not in its geography but in the exclusion it organized: watching girls enter a world of care while being forbidden to follow helped shape the childhood conclusion that belonging and gentleness were available only through becoming a girl.

Definition and Social Function

Himmel is described as a place the boys could observe through fences but could not enter. The girls were taken there and treated gently by their mothers, creating a visible social boundary between those granted affection and those denied access to it. Its name, glossed as “Heaven,” intensifies that contrast: Himmel appears to Aden Rheinschiffer as an ideal realm of safety, celebration, and intimate family life, while the boys remain outside it.

The location therefore functions as more than a setting. Its fence turns a difference in treatment into a physical arrangement. The girls’ inclusion in Himmel and the boys’ exclusion from it make care appear gendered and conditional, while birthdays and repeated gatherings give the girls a sustained community rather than a single moment of privilege. For Aden Rheinschiffer, the repeated spectacle becomes part of the environment through which childhood identity is formed.

Aden Rheinschiffer’s Recollection

Aden Rheinschiffer recalls Himmel alongside the bullying he endured from boys and his father’s failure to protect him. He explains that he did not fit in with the boys, was treated as an easy and safe victim, and received no meaningful defense from his father until he eventually underwent the same soldier training as everyone else. Against that background, the sight of girls being hugged, celebrated, and welcomed into Himmel offered a powerful counter-image to his own experience.

The contrast was not abstract. Aden Rheinschiffer could watch the girls through the fences, close enough to witness their affection but barred from participating in it. As a boy, he was not allowed to join them. Himmel thus joined two injuries in his memory: the direct violence of bullying and the quieter violence of exclusion from a visible world of maternal care.

Formation of Gendered Longing

Aden Rheinschiffer connects his wish to be female to these recurring childhood experiences, while carefully acknowledging that he cannot determine whether the experiences were genetically connected to that wish. In his account, the girls’ treatment taught him that being a girl was the apparent condition for receiving the same gentleness and love. Because he was not a girl, the conclusion became internally destructive: he began rejecting himself and assuming that his lack of protection meant he was not worth helping or liking.

Himmel therefore becomes an origin point for a belief rather than a simple destination. The location did not merely represent what Aden Rheinschiffer wanted; it helped define the terms in which he could imagine being wanted at all. Its apparent heaven was inseparable from the fence that kept him out, so the promise of belonging arrived together with the lesson that his existing identity disqualified him from it.

Psychological and Narrative Significance

In later reflection, Aden Rheinschiffer says that he is thirty-four and has had time to grow and improve, but that childhood experiences still form his foundation. The loneliness associated with being excluded from Himmel remains connected to the adaptations he developed while facing bullying and other dangers. The place consequently survives as a structure of memory: a scene of childhood observation whose emotional force persists long after the original boundary has ceased to be physically present.

Himmel also gives the narrative a concrete image for the social production of alienation. The boys’ exclusion is not presented as an innate inability to belong; it is enacted through fences, permission, parental behavior, and unequal access to celebration. The location makes visible how a child can mistake an unjust arrangement for a truth about the self. Its significance rests in that double reality: Himmel is imagined as “Heaven,” yet for Aden Rheinschiffer it is also the boundary before which loneliness and gendered self-rejection were learned.