The Psychiatric Hospital Summer Fair is an annual gathering at which the boundaries between patients, staff, families, and visitors briefly loosen. In the narrator’s memory, the fair is not simply a sequence of stalls and performances: it is a crowded public celebration where people dance together, money raised is turned into shared resources, and even a storm cannot dislodge the conviction that the day is summer.

A Fair Across the Hospital Community

By evening, the tents grow crowded and the rows of seats and dance floors fill. Many patients love German popular songs, know the lyrics, and dance with unmistakable enthusiasm. Styles that would rarely share a floor turn together in a jumble, while the usual signs of institutional rank and role become harder to read: staff are no longer readily recognizable without their doctors’ or nurses’ coats.

The crowd includes patients, employees, families, and Danish tourists. Patients dance with attendants; the deputy director dances with the head of the gardening department, and the commercial director with a laundress. The narrator’s mother dances with the retired former director of the psychiatric hospital. Wheelchairs rotate through the crowd, while people with severe disabilities are pushed onto the dance floor and join as they can, clapping or moving their heads to the music. The fair’s communal character is expressed through these particular crossings: not an abstract claim that everyone belongs, but a dance floor where people who usually occupy different positions share the same music.

Hermann on the Dance Floor

Among the evening’s most striking sights for the narrator and his brothers is Hermann dancing. The boys sit on a beer bench and watch in astonishment as their father plants his hands firmly on his broad hips and sways from one foot to the other. Their response is affectionate embarrassment: they cover their faces or whistle along through their fingers, while Hermann turns happily in place.

The scene gives the fair a family dimension without pulling it out of the hospital’s orbit. The children are not watching their father in his professional role, but seeing him absorbed in the same communal celebration as the patients. His resolute, physical dancing is a vivid contrast to the sons’ mortified amusement, and the moment stays with the narrator precisely because it is so unexpected.

The Tally and What It Provides

At ten o’clock the fair ends, and people stream from the stalls into the dance tent for the annual accounting. The money collected in jars, boxes, and cash registers is poured into a tub and counted. Hermann climbs onto the platform and announces the total through the microphone of the one-man entertainer, who is already packing up in the background. The sum—3,435 marks and 50 pfennigs—sounds astronomical to the child narrator and is greeted with a collective cheer.

The tally leads directly to practical benefits. The proceeds buy table-tennis tables for the sports hall and establish a patients’ library; in a particularly successful year, they pay for a film projector ordered in Hamburg. The narrator later watches a film, Tarzan, with friends on a large screen in the darkened gymnasium. During the screening, a classmate suddenly leaps up, runs to a climbing rope fixed to the wall, and swings across the image as a shouting shadow. The projector thus carries the fair’s funds into another shared occasion, while the classmate’s interruption gives that occasion its own unruly spectacle.

Weather, Persistence, and the Sign of Summer

Some years, northern German rain threatens to drown the fair. Wind shakes the stalls, the football field’s grass turns soft, and gusts blow candy floss from its stick and raffle tickets from people’s hands. Even so, visitors and organizers refuse to let the weather dictate the mood. The narrator remembers determined nurses insisting that the sky is brightening, despite a black-grey horizon stretching as far as anyone can see.

The contrast between the storm and the celebration is especially stark when the Halligen off the North Sea coast are being evacuated and patients climbing in the trees are almost invisible from the ground through the rain. The fair nevertheless continues. Its gong can still be heard, and for the narrator that sound serves as proof: it is summer. The remembered festival joins spectacle to care—music and dancing to resources for patients—and makes persistence, rather than good weather, the mark of the season.