Rage and Anger Attacks (Jähzorn)

Rage and Anger Attacks (Jähzorn) is the narrator’s name for a childhood pattern that changes from immediate reactions to provocation into a chronic pressure that can break out without warning. The outbursts are not simply anger proportionate to an insult: they can overwhelm the child, leave the family unsure what has set them off, and coexist with a remarkable effort to remain gentle. The narrative traces both the attacks and the household’s attempts to understand and contain them, from sibling games and a neurological examination to a song performed on a washing machine.

From Provocation to Apparent Nothing

At first, the narrator’s brothers know how to provoke him with deliberate signals. On the way to the Ostsee, they pass a huge yellow oil tank bearing the slogan named by the canonical title I Am Two Oil Tanks. A mere glance toward the tank, or the brothers’ underwater-style hand gesture made between their knees, can set him off. They have also devised a malicious three-note fanfare, hummed or whistled quietly enough to make the provocation hard to identify. His parents describe the attacks as coming out of nowhere, although in some episodes the brothers have carefully prepared the trigger.

The household’s after-lunch game makes that preparation into a contest. The narrator announces a room-storming raid, rushes into one brother’s room and throws himself onto the bed; the brother retaliates by pulling the sheet off the narrator’s bed. Each answers the other with a more spiteful act: clothes dragged from cupboards, books knocked down, furniture moved or overturned. Neither tries to stop the other, because the point is to watch, endure, and devise a worse response. The brothers laugh and shove each other, at first playfully, until tears come. Their skill at teasing grows so refined that the narrator can no longer tell whether a slight is aimed at him. Then even a brother passing by and saying a casual greeting can precede his collapse to the floor, flailing as if every passing contact were an injury.

The attacks also produce fear about what may be happening physically. The narrator tells Hermann that during some episodes the image before his eyes seems to shake and jump sideways, as if someone had struck his head. Concerned, Hermann arranges an EEG at Hesterberg with a physician colleague. During the examination, two diodes are attached at the narrator’s temples while the equipment beeps. His second-oldest brother has warned him that thinking about his genitals during the test could get him sent to the ward for perverts; the warning makes the thought difficult to dislodge. The examination finds nothing wrong with his brain, and he is allowed to go home. The result rules out a problem detectable in that test, but the account does not present it as an explanation for the attacks.

A Chronic Anger Beneath the Surface

The narrator distinguishes between attacks that follow a specific hurt immediately and a later, less visible form of anger. Over time, the frequency of the attacks decreases, but their disappearance is only outward. Anger has burrowed inward and become chronic: no longer an obvious injury like a broken finger or a scraped knee, it remains under the surface, ready to seize on a trivial occasion. The narrator feels this underlying tension continuously.

In response, he tries to counter it by taking extraordinary care in everything and becoming increasingly kind at school and toward his brothers and parents. That effort does not make the anger vanish. It creates a contrast between a conscientious, gentle conduct others can see and a volatile state that remains concealed until it erupts. When an outburst does come, the people around him look at him with pity. The smallness of a trigger can expose how much feeling has accumulated beyond it: a snapped shoelace can provoke a breakdown even after he has learned to withstand his brothers’ teasing and irony games.

The progression reaches attacks that seem to have no cause at all, beginning within the narrator rather than in an identifiable slight. The family may be sitting comfortably in front of the television, eating sandwiches, when he suddenly falls off the sofa and screams as if confronted with instruments of torture. His brothers, who have previously been adept at provoking him, now become worried and look to Hermann for help. The scene marks a reversal: what began as a sibling contest has become frightening even to the people who once helped set it in motion.

Outbursts in the Family’s Daily Rhythms

Television bedtime negotiations offer another recurring setting for the attacks. The narrator tries to stay up later, bargaining first with his mother and then with Hermann; his second-oldest brother must go to bed at half past nine and becomes angry as the narrator’s bedtime approaches. The eldest brother, anticipating the disturbance, turns up the television. A taunt about the narrator’s head and his poor performance in mathematics precipitates an outburst that the narrator describes through the image of a rocket launch: he screams, rises from the floor, and thrashes as though orbiting beyond ordinary restraint.

Yet this scene complicates the appearance of total loss of control. While the family believes he is no longer fully aware, the narrator keeps the film in view, twisting his body so that he can continue watching. One part of him is bent and convulsed by rage while another remains absorbed in the screen. Once Hermann lifts him and leads him from the room, the narrator breaks into sobs over having missed the end. The episode joins genuine distress to an awareness of what is happening around him; the boy is neither simply performing nor wholly detached from the family scene.

The narrator’s mother has a practical means of calming him. She lifts her youngest son from the floor, carries him through the house, and sets him on the shaking washing machine, sometimes turning it on without any laundry inside. During one of these emergency wash cycles he begins singing The Fox and the Goose. The song has no fixed tune or settled text: it wanders through an improvised, repetitive story whose next sentence may not yet be known when he begins it. As the family’s underwear swirls below him, the machine’s movement and the sing-song words become part of the same gradual settling. When the washer slows, his speech slows with it; during the spin cycle, he feels as if the machine is tossing his tongue up and down and telling the story through him. The account presents this as one of the few measures that brings relief, not as a cure for the underlying anger.

Anger and the Scale of Feeling

The narrator’s descriptions emphasize a mismatch between an occasion and the force of the response. The anger grows beyond its trigger and carries him away; in its most extreme form, he would like to destroy himself. This excess is not confined to rage. When the family’s charcoal kiln finally smokes, the sight of its two white plumes overwhelms him with tears. He insists that he is happy rather than sad, yet cannot stop crying: the pleasure in the achievement opens onto a deeper pain, and his parents comfort him with patient tenderness. The episode does not make joy and rage identical, but it reveals a shared difficulty in finding a measure for intense feeling.

A later family scene gives the narrator an unsettling view of rage in someone else. While playing table tennis in the basement with his brothers, he hears desperate cries from upstairs and recognizes the voice as his mother’s. In the living room she tears newspapers into pieces, hurls them through the air, and repeatedly demands that the pig leave. The boy sees her familiar face transformed by an anger he has never witnessed from her before; Hermann, by contrast, stands rigidly nearby. The scene does not explain the narrator’s attacks or establish their cause. Instead, it overturns his assumption that losing control belongs to him alone, while making visible how differently such an eruption can appear within the same household.

Taken together, the episodes make Jähzorn a pattern of recurrence and concealment rather than a sequence of isolated tantrums. Provocations become subtler, the visible attacks grow less frequent while anger persists, and eruptions over minor or unidentifiable causes disturb both the narrator and his family. The washing-machine song offers a concrete, temporary way back from the intensity; the later tears at the kiln show that an emotion need not be anger to exceed its occasion. The concept therefore encompasses not only explosive behavior but also the strain of living with feelings whose force cannot be reliably predicted from what set them off.