The Opening Ceremony of the New Schleswig Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Hospital Building turns a long-awaited institutional milestone into a rain-soaked performance of welcome, authority, and care. Recalled by the narrator, the event places the father’s years of work on display before Dr. Gerhard Stoltenberg, while the patients’ drenched chorus and the carefully controlled tour complicate the hospital’s public promise of a new, therapeutic psychiatry.

Background and preparations

The ceremony takes place eight weeks after the father’s birthday, by which time he has become somewhat lighter. Dr. Gerhard Stoltenberg, the incumbent Minister-President of Schleswig-Holstein and a candidate facing an imminent election, is expected to open the new building. The family and clinic staff wait beneath its entrance canopy as a steady rain begins. About thirty people crowd together there; the patient group designated to sing stands apart, outside the shelter.

The father’s investment in the building reaches well beyond the ceremony. For four years, its progress has occupied him so insistently that, according to the narrator, he talked about plans, financing, construction, setbacks, and advances over lunches and walks. The opening therefore gives public form to work that has been woven into family life. The father refuses the deputy director’s suggestion that the group wait indoors and return when the Minister-President arrives: he does not want the official to pull up to an empty entrance only for everyone to rush outside.

The welcome is unsettled before the guest appears. The unfinished access road has turned to mud, leaving Dr. Gerhard Stoltenberg an eight- or nine-metre walk from the street to the canopy. The father, alarmed at the prospect of the visitor having to cross it, calls for boards and asks why the approach is still incomplete. A small tractor arrives with yellow formwork panels on its trailer. Its driver, Herr Björnsen, unloads them at an unhurried pace, apparently understanding the boards as a path for the waiting party rather than as a solution to the Minister-President’s muddy approach. The father thanks him, but is also anxious for the tractor to move out of the way.

Arrival in the rain

The wait stretches beyond forty minutes. As the rain intensifies, the group senses the car’s approach before it can see or hear it. The black, heavily tinted limousine glides onto the grounds almost silently. The father straightens; the people beneath the canopy compose themselves for the arrival. Meanwhile, a staff member tries to direct the soaked patients into their song, and the deputy director points out that they have no umbrellas. Their woollen hats and wet clothes make the planned welcome look less like a polished ceremony than an exposed obligation.

Two men get out first and scan the site, examining the new parking lot with its stark white markings, the planted flower beds, the older, darker institutional buildings farther away, and the people waiting under the canopy. One checks the building’s windows floor by floor. The deliberate inspection makes the arrival feel guarded as well as ceremonial. The Minister-President remains inside the car, speaking on a car phone, while an aide holds an umbrella over the open door. The narrator’s eldest brother notices the phone; the narrator’s second-oldest brother speculates that the visitor may be waiting for the father to join him. The father steps forward, then hesitates.

The narrator’s attention fixes first on the visitor’s feet. One shoe rests heavily on the boards; the other seems restless, its toe moving and circling. Then Dr. Gerhard Stoltenberg unfolds himself from the low car and rises to his full height. The narrator, who has seen him on television, experiences the man in person as almost unrelated to the familiar image on the screen. He feels singled out by the visitor’s gaze, only to hear later that the narrator’s mother and both brothers each believed the same thing. The brief handshake brings an unexpected happiness: the narrator’s hand disappears inside the visitor’s and feels, for a moment, like it is held in a warm glove.

Welcome and tour

The father offers to show Dr. Gerhard Stoltenberg the new hospital and then host a small meal. An aide limits the visit to forty minutes, disappointing the narrator’s mother, who has prepared a Bavarian reception with homemade liver dumpling soup, imported white sausages, pretzels, and several pork roasts. After arriving about an hour late, the Minister-President turns first to the patients’ chorus, which is singing What shall we do with the drunken sailor. Looking at the drenched group, he remarks on the sin of leaving them in such conditions. The father responds with a deferential grin and acknowledges that they have been caught by the rain.

A local newspaper reporter photographs the assembled family and staff before they enter. The new building’s tour then gives the father the opportunity to explain what it is meant to represent: a definitive break with psychiatry organized around mere custody, and a shift toward treatment and the patient’s welfare. Doctors and nurses introduce their areas of work. The party visits rooms for music and art therapy, where patients sit at tables painting, making things, or playing music. The building’s showpiece is a swimming pool for movement and body therapy; there, a handful of patients float quietly.

The ceremony’s double image

The peacefulness of the tour is not accepted at face value by the narrator’s second-oldest brother. He observes that the most difficult patients have been shut away and that the visitors are being shown only the compliant ones. The narrator agrees with the substance of the observation: an unusual quiet hangs over the wards, and the patients seem cowed, as if they had been harshly shouted down shortly before the party arrived. When Dr. Gerhard Stoltenberg asks whether the hospital is always so peaceful, the father answers that it can become loud, but that the staff try to manage it.

That contrast gives the ceremony its significance beyond the opening of a building. The father’s stated ideal places treatment and patient welfare at the centre, and the new rooms and therapies make that ambition visible. Yet the welcome itself depends on presentation: patients are left standing in heavy rain, while the tour offers the distinguished guest a conspicuously orderly version of hospital life. The episode holds the promise and the strain together, showing a new institutional setting whose therapeutic claim is real to the father but whose public image has been carefully composed for the occasion.