Josse

Josse is the youngest son of Hermann and Susanna, and the surviving child who remains at home after his brother Martin’s accidental death. His story is marked by two kinds of crisis: an earlier acute episode he cannot explain, and, years later, his visits to his seriously ill father. Through Josse’s recollections, family life appears not as a return to normality but as the difficult maintenance of daily routines amid grief, illness, and changing relationships.

Identity and Family Background

After Martin’s death, both Susanna and Hermann were changed by their grief. They returned to work, supported one another, ate together, watched television, and went for walks, but Josse understood these routines as a simulation of the life they had once shared. The family’s ordinary gestures continued before ordinary life itself had returned.

With his eldest brother studying in Munich, Josse was the last child living with his parents in their house on the grounds of a psychiatric hospital. That position placed him at the center of the family’s altered daily life, even as the adults struggled to rebuild it around their loss.

An Earlier Acute Crisis

In one clinical episode, Josse is seen by a doctor after an unexplained incident. He feels deeply ashamed, while the doctor responds reassuringly and leaves. Hermann then arrives in the room, disheveled and out of breath, and sits beside him on the bed. Josse begins to cry; when his father asks what happened, he can only say that he does not know and that it came out of nowhere.

The scene establishes a crisis Josse cannot account for, rather than supplying a diagnosis or explanation. His inability to name its cause is central to the moment: his father is present, but Josse himself has no clearer account of what has happened.

Visits to Hermann

By the time Hermann becomes ill, Josse has lived away from home for several years. His father’s diagnosis rapidly compresses the family’s sense of time, and Josse makes the journey to visit whenever he can. Hermann avoids introducing him to the new woman and her children with whom he is living; Josse is relieved not to meet them.

During one visit, Hermann tells Josse that he is glad to see him but has little energy for conversation. He grieves that illness has forced him to stop working and speaks warmly of the children he had known through his work: their liveliness and their unrestrained expressions of joy or distress. He also reflects that he had often felt more at ease among people considered not normal than among those considered healthy. At the same time, he acknowledges that this way of life had caused Susanna to suffer through isolation, with little company, travel, or friendship. His reflection holds affection for his patients alongside recognition of what the family had lost.

Illness and the Return Home

Hermann’s condition worsens after small shadows are found on his lungs, six weeks after the initial diagnosis. He understands the seriousness of the finding and struggles to begin the demanding treatment. His leg is operated on, his lung is treated with radiation, and he returns to hospital repeatedly. He tries to work again, but cannot; clearing his medical practice becomes one of the things he does for the last time.

Although he lives with his new family, Hermann increasingly feels like a burden there, and the illness is difficult for the children. He makes the painful decision to move back to the family house. Josse’s visits thus take place against a sequence of separations and returns: his father had formed a new household, yet serious illness brings him back to the home associated with Josse’s earlier family life.

Hermann’s cancer pain grows progressively harder to control. Each apparent peak gives way to pain in another area, and what had seemed unbearable can later look almost like a period of relief. Morphine begins late, after the pain has become difficult to manage; Hermann administers it himself, and the doses described are exceptionally high. The account presents this not as an abstract medical problem but as an escalating burden that overtakes the father’s remaining strength.

The Final Weeks and Josse’s Perspective

After a prolonged period in which pain had been constant, Hermann wakes from a grave episode without pain for the first time in nearly two years. His unexpected cheerfulness affects the family. The brief reprieve does not undo the illness, but it changes the emotional atmosphere of that moment.

In the final weeks, Hermann and Susanna endure the practical work of dying together, beyond the reach of theory. Josse’s recollections place his father’s medical knowledge beside the limits of that knowledge: books and professional understanding cannot contain the illness, while visits, shared routines, and care remain concrete ways for the family to be present. His narrative follows a gradual change in the father-son relationship, from an earlier scene of bewilderment in which Josse cannot explain his own crisis to the later visits in which he accompanies Hermann through decline.