Sehnsucht nach Schreien

Sehnsucht nach Schreien is the narrator’s name for his longing for the patients’ nightly cries at the psychiatric hospital where he grew up. Their voices were not an interruption of home life but part of its familiar soundscape: he listened for them, slept best with them nearby, and found the silence elsewhere unsettling. Years later, as Hermann’s illness brought screams into the family home, that childhood soundscape returned in a painful new form.

A Childhood Soundscape

At bedtime, Hermann came to the narrator’s room and opened the terrace door. From his bed, the child could see the hospital balconies, enclosed in wire mesh for safety and nicknamed the madmen’s aviaries. The patients’ voices carried across the grounds: cries, moans, howls, and sounds of jubilation, so varied that pain and happiness were not always easy to distinguish. He recognized some voices from his earliest years, even from before he could speak. He had supposedly never cried as a baby; in a world where others cried through the night, he wondered, what would have been the point?

The evening cries seemed to follow their own pattern, like birds beginning to sing at a particular hour. The narrator paid attention to their length and force, and to the striking endurance of the patients’ voices. Their cries did not fail or fade in the way his mother’s voice sometimes did after choir practice. Even the hospital’s architecture belonged to this nightly spectacle: the secured balconies hung against the buildings like angular honeycombs, visible beyond the crematorium tower.

The Ritual of Listening

The sounds came with a precise arrangement of light and air. The narrator’s window had to remain open, and his bedroom door could not be fully shut; the hallway light stayed on, making a narrow strip across the end of his bed. He placed one bare foot in that strip, as though keeping part of himself in the light would protect him. His mother might be ironing in the doorway, and the bed would be freshly made, while the patients’ voices rose outside. Those details, together with the open window and the cries, made the scene feel complete to him.

The contrast with other homes revealed how deeply this setting had become his own. When he slept at his grandparents’ in Munich, the quiet gave him terrible homesickness. Without the cries, he became conscious of the blood rushing in his head and felt shut into the dark like a preserved mummy. He missed the patients’ noise not despite its intensity but because its presence made the night familiar and bearable.

Summer Nights and the Pleasure of Noise

Warm, windless evenings were rare in Schleswig, and the family might sit on the terrace at ten only four or five times a year. Hermann gave these uncommon nights names, such as the warm Marie, the balmy Anna, and the slightly clammy Anton. On such evenings, the patients’ cries could build into deafening uproar, a collective surge that continued late into the night and ended in exhaustion.

The narrator loved this rising and falling chorus. He tried to stay awake to hear it swell, echo through the hospital’s corridors, and die away; at the same time, he could fall asleep best while it continued. The family’s reactions sharpen the contrast: his older brothers and parents shut their windows despite the heat, and the dog grew restless, barking and hiding behind a chair. The narrator’s window alone had to remain open. What others kept out was, for him, the sound that made the night feel like home.

The Cry Returns in Illness

The remembered longing acquires a darker resonance when Hermann becomes gravely ill. Years after the narrator has left home, his father’s cancer advances, and the pain grows harder to control. The narration describes it as spreading beyond Hermann’s body, through the hospital room and into the house. When the disease reaches his spinal cord, Hermann screams through a warm night while the psychiatric patients also cry outside. The narrator lies in his former bedroom, hearing both: the patients’ voices that once comforted him and his father’s cries, which he cannot bear for long.

He repeatedly goes to Hermann, but after about ten minutes the sight of his suffering and the force of the pain overwhelm him, and he returns to his room. The childhood pattern of listening remains, but its emotional meaning has changed: the familiar chorus no longer holds the night at a safe distance from suffering, because suffering is now audible within the family itself. After Hermann’s paralysis, the pain suddenly disappears, and he wakes, for the first time in nearly two years, without pain. In the account of the parents’ shared final weeks, the earlier night sounds stand beside a changed form of attention: the narrator’s parents face the practical labor of dying together. The expression thus joins a child’s sense of shelter in the cries of the hospital to the adult narrator’s witness of pain, helplessness, and care.