Hermann

Hermann is a psychiatrist and hospital director whose life is marked by a striking divide between professional authority and domestic withdrawal. He can speak confidently about humane psychiatric care and organize an urgent rescue, yet his son remembers a man who often left the practical labor of his ambitions—and of family life—to The narrator’s mother. In his final illness, the theories and distances that once defined him give way to the intimate, difficult work of dying.

Identity and Public Work

At the opening of a new child and adolescent psychiatric hospital building, Hermann presents the institution as a break with custodial psychiatry: treatment and patients’ welfare, he says, are to take precedence. Doctors and attendants introduce visitors to their work, including music and art therapy, while patients paint, make things, and play music. The narrator and The narrator’s second-oldest brother recognize that the calm on display may be selective; the wards seem unnaturally quiet, and the brother observes that the most disruptive patients have been kept out of sight. Hermann does not deny that the hospital can be noisy. His measured acknowledgment of occasional disturbances sits beside the polished public ideal he has just announced, exposing the gap between an institutional presentation and the less orderly life of its wards.

Hermann’s professional standing is also evident in the way others address and defer to him. But the visit is not wholly controlled by ceremony. When a teenager interrupts a group discussion to leave, the minister-president responds with apparent amusement. Hermann’s authority therefore exists amid events he cannot script: his public role requires him to explain the hospital, while the patients remain people whose behavior exceeds the carefully arranged tour.

Plans, Competence, and Practical Life

The contrast between conception and execution recurs beyond the hospital. Hermann becomes absorbed in the idea of sailing and in acquiring a boat, choosing a design advertised as both uncapsizable and unsinkable. The family’s boat is named JoMaHe, a name formed from the first two letters of three family members’ names. It is ceremonially christened with a small bottle of sparkling wine, which leaves a dent in its plastic hull. The vessel makes Hermann’s imagined life as a sailor tangible, but the practical test of that identity is less secure: during the sailing examination, in a strong wind, he slips on the wet deck and is knocked down again by the boom as The narrator’s mother tries to bring the boat into the wind.

In a different kind of emergency, Hermann’s ability to turn knowledge into action is unmistakable. During the 1978–1979 snow disaster, Michaela Meisner is stranded without insulin, confused, and unable to get up. Ordinary routes to the hospital and police are blocked or overwhelmed. Hermann identifies a possible solution in a Bundeswehr helicopter already scheduled to fly a patient to Kiel, and proposes arranging a stop on its return. He coordinates with a senior officer, the psychiatric hospital, the pilot, and Michaela’s brother, who is asked to reach a large field and mark the least snow-covered landing place. His instructions are precise, and he remains calm on the telephone even as he paces, repeatedly running a hand over his thinning hair. The scene shows a capacity for decisive organization that sharply complicates any simple portrait of him as merely impractical.

Marriage and the Burden of Execution

The narrator’s retrospective account places The narrator’s mother at the center of Hermann’s practical life. She had written both his doctoral dissertation and his habilitation. For the latter, Hermann paced and dictated for fourteen days; he possessed the knowledge, but could not sit down and arrange it into a finished work himself. The narrator describes Hermann as skilled at delegating and inept at carrying projects through. This imbalance extended into country life: while The narrator’s mother labored, Hermann read, planned where a beehive should stand, counted eggs laid by his Andalusian hens, and inspected a sheep’s urine with an enthusiasm that made him call it living life in full flow. His schemes gave the household its projects, but she supplied much of their execution.

The narrator understands this pattern as more than a division of chores. Hermann’s imagined identities—as psychiatric director, ship’s captain, self-sufficient country dweller, father, and husband—could, in his son’s view, remain ideas that Hermann endured chiefly from his armchair or at a distance. This is explicitly the narrator’s later interpretation, not a neutral account of Hermann’s inner life. Its force comes from the repeated contrast between the breadth of Hermann’s plans and the labor borne by his wife. Even his homecoming after work has a habitual remove: he settles into his armchair with a book, arrives at meals after everyone else is seated, keeps his chair angled away from the table, and returns to reading as soon as he has eaten.

Hermann’s marriage also contains a lighter, ambiguous intimacy. He gives The narrator’s mother a nickname derived from a maritime expression for the North Sea in calm weather, eventually shortening it to Hans. She is never quite sure whether to find the name funny or insulting. The small domestic joke captures a relationship in which affection and abrasion are not easily separated; it offers no simple resolution to the larger imbalance between them.

Illness, Reconciliation, and Death

After the narrator has moved away from home, Hermann becomes seriously ill. Blood in his urine is followed within a day by the removal of the affected kidney. He tells his son that six years must pass before the risk of recurrence has fallen enough for his prospects to resemble those he had before the illness. The diagnosis accelerates events, while Hermann and The narrator’s mother, left without a child or dog at home, find it increasingly difficult to live together. Hermann moves to Lübeck to live with a woman he has met, who has two young children.

Later, as his condition worsens, The narrator’s mother returns to him. Hermann’s illness has spread into his spine and spinal cord, bringing severe pain despite morphine. During one night he loses movement in his feet and then his legs; he cries out that they are burning. Then the pain abruptly disappears below his chest. The apparent reprieve is not recovery: he is paralyzed from that point down. The narrator learns that the body’s loss of sensation has silenced the pain that had seemed to consume his father, while leaving Hermann gravely ill and dependent on care.

In the last weeks, his parents endure the daily labor of his dying together, beyond the realm of theory that had so often framed Hermann’s life. When the narrator arrives at the hospital, a crying nurse embraces him. The narrator’s mother sits beside Hermann; a candle burns, and Hermann’s hands are folded. His face looks relaxed, even relieved. The narrator asks the chief physician to delay taking the body away and is given as much time as he wants. He stays alone with his father, lies beside him as he had done when younger, and touches and kisses him. Hermann’s death does not erase the earlier distance, but it gives the family a final scene of physical closeness. The recurring contrast in his character—between plans and practice, professional composure and private vulnerability—ends not in a new theory but in the shared, practical presence of those who remain.