Kassel is the narrator’s residence and professional base in the account of his father’s illness and death. It stands outside the family home in Schleswig, marking the narrator’s independent life while remaining connected to the family through visits, work, and the practical tasks that follow bereavement.

Residence and Work

By the time his father became ill, the narrator had lived away from home for several years. He tells his father about his life in Kassel and how his work is going; later, while his father is paralyzed, he is playing his first small acting roles there. Kassel therefore represents not merely an address but the narrator’s developing adult and professional life, unfolding alongside his father’s decline.

Distance and Family Care

The narrator travels from Kassel to visit his father whenever he has time. Those visits bring him back into the father’s changed circumstances: after treatment for cancer, his father returns alone to the family house, where meals come from the psychiatric hospital’s kitchen and daily routines have become difficult. Kassel remains the narrator’s base, but his account measures the distance between the two places through repeated journeys of care and the painful recognition of how ill his father has become.

Return After Bereavement

After his father dies, the narrator is again in Kassel, playing theatre, when his brother calls and asks him to help with an important errand the following Friday. The brothers then travel in their father’s car, passing the site where their other brother had died, before learning that their father had secretly rented an apartment in Kiel. Kassel is thus the point from which the narrator is summoned back into unresolved family history: his work continues there, even as his father’s death leads to a final investigation of the life he had kept partly hidden.