Friederike Jöns

Friederike Jöns is a school volleyball player from Eggebek whose exuberant, erratic energy first attracts the narrator at a tournament and carries into their later meeting at a New Year’s Eve party. She is both the tournament’s most spectacular player and its most spectacular source of mistakes, and her brief appearances combine flirtation, defiance, and solicitude without resolving into a single role in the narrator’s life.

Identity and First Encounter

The narrator meets Friederike while watching an interschool volleyball tournament at his gymnasium. She attends the Realschule, a school that students at his gymnasium tend to look down on, but his own poor academic performance has made that distinction feel precarious to him. Their schools compete on the court, where Friederike’s team defeats his in straight sets.

Between matches, Friederike sits alone on a long gym bench, listening to loud heavy metal through her Walkman and shaking out her calves. The narrator tries to speak to her, but she leaves her headphones on, apparently absorbed in her private musical world. Just as he is about to give up and walk away, she calls out loudly that she does not know him. The interruption turns an awkward approach into a conspicuous exchange: several students look over, and her coach removes her headphones to send her back to warm up, chiding her for poor underhand serves.

A Champion of Contrasts

In the final, Friederike’s team faces the heavily favored team from Louisenlund. The match goes five sets, and Friederike repeatedly puts her side at risk with daring plays before rescuing it with remarkable diving digs. Her performance gives the narrator a vivid impression of someone capable of both the match’s most dazzling points and its most startling errors. She does not appear to treat either success or failure with solemnity; even after sending a powerful spike out of bounds, she grins.

After the victory ceremony, the narrator congratulates her and asks to see her medal. Friederike has tucked it beneath her sweat-soaked shirt because she thinks wearing it openly would be embarrassing. She draws it out and shows it to him privately. When he steps closer and takes the medal in his hand, he notices that the metal is warm, even hot. Their exchange is physically and socially tentative: he struggles to say anything beyond observing that it is heavy, while she eventually asks him to let it go because she feels foolish standing there like a dog on a leash. They laugh, and she goes to shower.

The New Year’s Eve Party

The next day, the narrator finds Friederike’s name in a newspaper photograph of the winning team and calls the first listed Jöns telephone number. A person who answers tells him she is at Volki’s. Later, he accepts her invitation to a New Year’s Eve party in Eggebek, despite having turned down other invitations and knowing nobody there but her.

He arrives underdressed for the cold, in a light denim jacket, and spends time searching for her in the chilly barn. When he encounters her at the entrance with a man noticeably older than himself, Friederike greets him with evident surprise and says she had not really believed he would come. The man goes to get a beer after looking at the narrator and bumping his shoulder into him. Friederike leads the narrator a few steps away from the barn, where it is quieter, and takes his hands, remarking on how cold they are.

The older man returns, takes Friederike by the wrist, and orders the narrator to leave. Friederike jerks her hand free and challenges the man for his behavior. He presses his forehead against the narrator’s and pushes him backward, repeating his demand that he go. Two other men eventually pull him away. Friederike tells the narrator that she and the man are no longer together, though the encounter makes clear that the separation has not ended his possessiveness. The narrator is frightened and shivering, but he likes Friederike’s laughter, which strikes him as carrying the promise that anything might happen at once.

Care, Contradiction, and Narrative Role

The party does not leave Friederike in the role of the narrator’s protector. A girl calls her over because Volki is causing trouble, and Friederike goes to calm him. The narrator briefly sits on a sofa and notices a hole in its upholstery, probing the loose filling with his finger and imagining mice nesting inside, overwhelmed by the music. When a sentimental rock ballad starts, Friederike and Volker dance closely together; she stands upright while supporting him, and he rests his head against hers, grinning. Her tenderness toward him complicates the earlier account of their separation without explaining it away.

The narrator leaves for his car, too cold to get the key into the ignition easily. When men surround the vehicle and block his way because he has not paid for his beer, Friederike stands in the barn entrance and calls out. They move aside, allowing him to drive away. Across these brief scenes, she shifts from audacious athlete to teasing acquaintance, forceful defender, and caretaker. The narrative offers no settled account of what she feels for the narrator or for Volki; instead, it makes her memorable through the contrast between those roles and through the narrator’s uncertain, intensely attentive reading of her gestures.