Joachim and Father Hermann: Father–Son Relationship

Joachim(Jocki) and his father, Hermann, are bound by small, repeated acts of attention and by the child’s confidence that his father can make sense of the world. Their closeness is physical and playful, most evident in bedtime rituals and shared work; its limits emerge later, when Joachim recognizes how often Hermann’s ideas depended on others to become real. Together, these memories make the relationship loving without making it simple.

Affection, trust, and childhood memory

When Joachim tells the family that he has found a dead man, Hermann responds as both father and psychiatrist. He consoles his son, places the discovery in the larger context of mortality, and suggests that the old man probably died of a heart attack while picking flowers, without suffering. Unlike the brothers, who doubt Joachim’s account, Hermann does not first interrogate him about what he was doing in the gardens, despite having forbidden him to go there. His response gives the frightening discovery a measure of explanation and care rather than turning it into a reprimand.

That confidence in Hermann’s attention is also expressed through the child’s attachment to his body. At the Baltic Sea, Joachim searches the beach for belemnites and rounded pieces of glass while his father lies in the sun reading. To prolong the day, Joachim brings water from the sea in his cupped hands and fills his father’s deep-set navel. He is allowed to stay until the water evaporates, checking from a distance whether any remains. The comic little bargain makes Hermann’s belly a clock that can postpone leaving the beach: an ordinary bodily detail becomes the measure of a cherished shared time.

The adult narrator also remembers how his father brought him back from daydreams with a snap of the fingers near his staring eyes. The gesture is affectionate but practical: Hermann notices when the child has drifted away and calls him back into the room. That combination—indulging Joachim’s imaginative absorption while also attending to him—reappears in the family’s bedtime routine.

Bedtime rituals and a shared imaginative world

On most evenings, except Mondays, Hermann comes to Joachim’s bedroom shortly before sleep and opens the terrace door. He tests the wind with a moistened finger, while Joachim asks where it comes from. Hermann assigns winds different origins and stories, and father and son calculate how long a gust has traveled from the coast, using its strength to estimate the journey. The rustling of the tall linden trees becomes, in Joachim’s perception, the sound of surf; the air carries the sea into the bedroom. The ritual gives the child both a geography and a language for the unseen movement outside the house.

The wind also prompts recurring stories. In one, a dwarf serves a wicked sorcerer, forced by day to stand naked on an overturned bucket until he develops a fever and, at night, to warm the sorcerer’s feet from his sickbed. When Hermann runs out of story, he carries Joachim onto the terrace to listen again, pretending to receive a message from the air before bringing him back to bed, drawing the curtains, and kissing his head. This is not simply storytelling performed at a distance: the father makes the wind itself part of their joint invention, then completes the routine with bodily reassurance.

The bedroom door and the sounds beyond it complicate this sheltered intimacy. Joachim grows up on the grounds of a psychiatric hospital, where night calls and the institution’s siren are familiar parts of the surroundings. He trusts that Hermann, as director, will know what to do when something goes wrong. As an older teenager, he uses the same terrace door to slip out at night and hitchhike to a disco, returning at dawn to wash the smell of smoke from his hair. The door that once opened onto a father-guided world of wind and stories becomes an exit into a life kept secret from his parents.

Gifts, humor, and the importance of being understood

On Hermann’s fortieth birthday, the family breakfast is marked by smoked fish, including the sprats he likes to eat whole, heads and all. Hermann speaks openly about having feared the milestone and wanting to live to eighty. The occasion joins mortality to family life: his thoughts about age and change are delivered at a crowded breakfast table, amid the ordinary pleasures and teasing of the household. Later, he announces that he will smoke his last cigarette with the family. The farewell is treated with ceremonial seriousness, but the scene’s comedy and domestic interruptions keep it from becoming grand or solemn in any simple way.

Joachim’s own gift for the birthday is forty homemade marzipan potatoes, one for every year of his father’s life. The attempt goes wrong, and Joachim cannot bring himself to explain the failure when Hermann asks what happened. Hermann nevertheless tells him that the idea was wonderful and thanks him for the forty handmade pieces, although he never received them. Joachim moves closer and hides his face against his father’s leg. Their dog pushes the door open and presses its cold nose against Joachim’s neck as he hugs it. The scene does not undo the child’s disappointment; it shows Hermann recognizing the care behind the failed present and giving the boy room not to recount his distress.

Their humor can be quiet and shared. On the same birthday, Joachim approaches a garden-furniture advertisement that Hermann is studying from the other side. Hermann slowly raises the paper until his own familiar face appears where the printed woman had been. Father and son laugh, and Hermann lowers the page again like a magician completing a trick. The scene’s smallness is part of its force: their closeness does not depend only on major declarations, but also on a joke made with a sheet of paper.

Making something together

Joachim remembers the charcoal kiln as the only time he and Hermann actually built something together. They had talked often and walked together in many places, but this project turned their attention into shared physical work. At the neglected country property, Hermann photographs cracked walls, a leaking thatched roof, broken windows, and heaps of rubbish before imagining repairs and a possible first overnight stay. The practical condition of the place makes the difference between an appealing plan and the labor it will require unmistakable.

Hermann is clumsy with the axe and hammer, grips the tools too high, and quickly develops blisters on his right hand. Joachim, by contrast, shows him how to stack the wood so there will be room to shovel embers into the center. When they cut and carry squares of turf, Joachim works out how to drive the spade into the ground by jumping onto it with both feet; Hermann has already given up after his first attempt. For once, the child gives instructions and his father readily accepts them. Joachim remembers the pleasure of being the one who knew what to do.

The work also brings out Hermann’s capacity for delight in an activity rather than its imagined result. The old pump in the damp, cold barn is rusted and web-covered. Joachim clears the cobwebs with a file while Hermann works the handle and his son pours water into the opening. The first water comes out rusty and icy; after several buckets it runs clearer, proving that the well works. Hermann laughs as he pumps, his belly shaking, then washes his hands and drinks. Joachim drinks too, noticing the water’s faint metallic taste. Their satisfaction comes from getting the pump to function, not merely from having planned a self-sufficient country life.

When they try to light the kiln, Joachim cannot get the damp newspapers to catch. Hermann returns from the house with only a stock cube and some noodles, kneels beside his son, and helps blow on the last glowing ember. The fire finally flares. They eat together on a bench, and Hermann talks about patients and families while they wait to finish the kiln. In this rare episode of building, the intimacy is made through instruction, mistakes, hunger, laughter, and a task neither could complete alone.

Care in crisis and the adult reassessment

During the snow disaster, the relationship is recast through an urgent act of care. Michaela Meisner is stranded without insulin, confused and unable to stand; roads are impassable, and ordinary calls for help are difficult to arrange. Hermann realizes that a Bundeswehr helicopter already due to land at the hospital may be able to carry insulin on its return journey. He coordinates with the military officer, the hospital, the pilot, and Michaela’s brother, giving instructions for marking a landing place in the snow. Joachim watches his father work the telephone with precise, sustained attention before Hermann heads out through the storm.

Hours later, Hermann returns unharmed. He has flown to the farm and delivered the insulin. A television crew records the rescue: Joachim sees his father in the helicopter, then watches him cross beneath its slowing rotors and enter the darkened house to treat Michaela. Afterward, when asked whether he was frightened, Hermann admits that he was, but says the fear did not stop him. For Joachim, the rescue makes his father’s competence visible on a public scale; the remembered embrace after the broadcast also returns that drama to the intimacy of the family living room.

The adult narrator’s account does not leave Hermann as an uncomplicated hero. Joachim reflects that his mother spent her life carrying out in practice what Hermann conceived in theory. She wrote his dissertation and habilitation from his dictation; he could know and imagine, but struggled to sit down and put things in order. He was skilled at delegating and poor at executing his own projects. Joachim extends this insight beyond work in the country: Hermann’s lives as psychiatric director, sailor, self-sufficient landowner, father, and husband could feel like ideas he could bear in a chair, absorbed in books, or at a distance from the family.

That retrospective judgment does not cancel the tenderness recorded in the earlier scenes. Rather, it changes their weight. The bedtime wind stories, the birthday gift, the pump brought back to life, and the helicopter rescue preserve real forms of attention and courage, while the account of delegated labor exposes the gap between Hermann’s imagined roles and the practical burden they placed on others. Joachim’s relationship with his father is remembered through both kinds of evidence: what Hermann could make happen with his son, and what the family had to make happen for him.