Josse and Hermann: Father and Son

Josse and Hermann’s relationship is marked by a tension between closeness and boundaries: the son watches his father intensely, while the father insists that each has a private life beyond the other’s claim. That boundary first wounds Josse, then becomes a freedom he can recognize and use. In Hermann’s final illness, the distance gives way to tenderness, and their familiar intimacy persists even after death—until a mechanical bed makes the separation unmistakable.

Suspicion and the Boundary of Privacy

As a boy, Josse turns his suspicions about Hermann’s private life into an investigation. He examines hairs from his father’s comb under his brother’s microscope, watches Hermann exchange a coded glance with a nurse, and sneaks into the garage at night to record the car’s mileage. In conversation, he tests Hermann’s account of his day against the odometer: although his father says he has driven only around town, the car has accumulated more than a hundred extra kilometres. Josse searches his pockets and finds a woman’s passport photograph; he also uses the telephone’s redial function and hears a woman answer. Each discovery strengthens his conviction that something is being concealed.

Josse extends this surveillance to Hermann’s reading. He knows the rhythm of his father’s page-turning and notices that Hermann can stare at one page for minutes, turning only when a sound interrupts him: the dog entering the room, Josse shifting position, or the narrator’s mother coming in. What appears to be reading becomes another clue in the son’s private case against his father. The attention is strikingly intimate, but it is also a form of suspicion: Josse tries to convert ordinary gestures and discrepancies into proof.

When he finally confronts Hermann, his father is sitting in an armchair with a magazine. The exchange begins with an ordinary greeting, and Josse, sick with nervousness, says he has something to ask. Hermann does not answer the accusation with a confession or a counter-accusation. Instead, he draws a line between matters each person does that belong to the other, and matters that do not. He lowers his eyes and returns to his reading. The conversation ends without resolving Josse’s suspicions; its decisive consequence is the boundary Hermann asserts.

Josse carries that sentence as a serious injury for months. Only later does he understand that the same principle grants him considerable freedom: if some things his father does are not his concern, then his own life need not be submitted to his father’s scrutiny either. The relationship thus changes not because the mystery is solved, but because Josse revises what he believes a son is entitled to know. Hermann’s refusal to explain himself hurts, yet it also offers a model of separateness within the family.

Intimacy in the Family Home

The reserve of the confrontation contrasts with the bodily ease that remains between father and son. During a later visit, Josse goes into Hermann’s bedroom, where the two marital beds still stand side by side, and throws himself onto the empty bed of the narrator’s mother. Hermann lowers his book and rests a hand on Josse’s shoulder. Josse remembers those hands as exceptionally warm: on winter walks, he and his brothers used to compete to warm their icy fingers in them. The recollection makes physical warmth part of the relationship’s history, not merely a comfort of the present visit.

Their familiarity also survives into adulthood. Josse is twenty and still crawls under his father’s blanket, as he had done before, to lie beside him and talk. Hermann draws the blanket over him and tells him how glad he is that he came. The scene restores an old pattern of protection without pretending that the father is well. Hermann has taken to sucking lollipops before sleep; the narrator’s eldest brother calls him Kojak in bed. Josse wonders who now supplies the sweets he once used to bring. Such small habits register the changed circumstances of care: the son visits and notices details that once belonged to the ordinary routine of childhood.

Reading offers another form of companionship. Hermann says that when he feels bad, he reads poetry, seeking concentrated answers for what is on his mind. He mentions Benn and Goethe, while Josse admits to rejecting Goethe without having seriously read him. Hermann suggests that Goethe may appeal to him later and recommends Werther. He then reads a poem aloud in an almost monotone voice, attentive to each word. The exchange does not erase their differences in age or taste; it lets them share a quiet scene in which Hermann’s reading becomes something offered to his son.

Illness, Work, and Confession

Hermann speaks openly to Josse about what illness is taking from him. He is deeply sad that he can no longer work, especially because he loved the children he cared for and their wild, vivid way of being. He says he felt more at ease among people labelled abnormal than among those considered healthy, whose manners and talk seemed false to him. But he also recognizes the cost to his wife: there were no visitors, trips, or friends. His account therefore joins a sense of vocation and belonging to an acknowledgment of what his life and work meant for the family.

The loss of work is not abstract. Hermann says he cannot spend the day crossing the hospital’s extensive grounds, feels ashamed before other doctors, and believes that in a small town people will know he is ill and hesitate to send their children to a sick doctor. His painful leg remains another burden; he wonders whether to have it operated on again and says that long drives from Lübeck to Schleswig are too much. Josse listens as his father moves between professional shame, physical limitation, and the intimate disclosure of Karin, a younger woman he met on a train in Lübeck. Hermann begins to explain, then checks himself, assuming Josse does not want to hear more. Their earlier conflict over privacy now sits beside a moment in which Hermann voluntarily shares what he can.

Even while describing the approaching severity of his illness, Hermann retains humour and appetite for imagined possibilities. He jokes about the scarcity of men in retirement homes and the jealous competition among older women, wishing he might have been a vigorous, much-courted retiree. He notes that he has passed sixty without a single dental filling, then clicks his lollipop. The detail does not cancel his fear; it shows how his talk can place a mundane bodily fact beside an awareness that the disease will become terrible. Josse’s presence gives these disclosures a listener without turning the scene into a simple reconciliation: the father remains tired, in pain, and unable to return to work.

Death and the Limits of Familiarity

After Hermann dies, Josse stays when the narrator’s mother leaves for her own bed. He undresses and lies beside his father, as he had done throughout his life, touching him and kissing him. Hermann is still warm. The hospital bed, however, is a Dekubitusmatratze, which continually shifts the patient by filling and emptying its air chambers. Josse lies close to his father while the mattress works beneath them, and at first the warmth seems to preserve the familiar nearness of their shared bedtimes.

On waking, Josse realizes that the warmth comes from the electric mattress, not from Hermann. He switches it off. The room falls silent; as the body cools, his father becomes foreign to him, and death acquires an abrupt, rejecting force. The contrast between Hermann’s remembered warm hands and the machine’s borrowed heat gives their intimacy a precise limit: touch can continue, but it cannot restore the person who returned that touch.

When Josse’s brother arrives from Berlin, Josse leaves him alone with their father and goes for a walk. He feels unexpectedly happy and describes the clenched fist in which he had lived for years finally opening. His relief complicates grief without diminishing the bond: the long period of fear and tension has ended, even as Hermann’s absence becomes final. The narrator’s mother is surprised that Hermann is still in bed; then the family leaves. After five full days occupied by the arrangements surrounding death, the funeral and Requiem follow. The narrator cannot stay through the service when the priest describes Hermann as a man of action, and drives home. The relationship’s ending is therefore not a single farewell but a sequence of closeness, release, and rituals that Josse can only partly endure.

Narrative Significance

The father–son relationship is built through changes in what Josse can know and what he can bear. The boy’s scrutiny seeks certainty in mileage, a photograph, a telephone voice, and the pace of a page being turned. Hermann’s answer denies him access to every private fact, but the adult Josse comes to see that this denial also protects his own independence. Later, when illness makes Hermann’s private fears and losses more visible, disclosure occurs not because the son has forced an answer but because the father chooses to speak.

The recurring image of warmth carries that development into the final scene. Hermann’s hand once warmed his sons on winter walks; his blanket shelters Josse in the bedroom; after death, a powered mattress briefly supplies warmth without life. The relationship’s deepest intimacy is preserved in ordinary gestures—reading, lying beside one another, a hand on a shoulder—while the deathbed scene refuses to confuse remembered closeness with continued presence. Josse’s walk afterward gives the bond an ending that is neither uncomplicated sorrow nor rejection: he can leave the room because the years of clenched vigilance have, at last, loosened.