Welcoming Guests at the New Child Psychiatric Clinic’s Opening

The opening of the new child and adolescent psychiatric clinic becomes a carefully prepared welcome repeatedly unsettled by rain, delay, and the awkward realities of the hospital grounds. For the child narrator, the ceremony is also an encounter with Dr. Gerhard Stoltenberg that enlarges the minister-president into an almost otherworldly figure. Behind the spectacle, the hospital’s director, the narrator’s father, presents the new building as a break with custodial psychiatry and a commitment to treatment and patient welfare.

Preparations in the Rain

The visit took place eight weeks after the narrator’s father’s birthday, by which time he had become somewhat lighter. The clinic building had occupied much of his attention for four years: he had talked about its progress and setbacks over lunches and walks, from the first ideas and planning through financing and construction. Now, after the family and roughly thirty other people had waited outside for more than half an hour, the minister-president was still delayed. His office had relayed that he would be late, but no one knew what that meant in practice. The narrator’s father rejected the deputy director’s suggestion that the group go back inside and return when the car arrived; he wanted the reception party to be in place when the visitor appeared.

Rain began to fall on the group gathered beneath the entrance canopy. The family stood in front: the narrator’s father in a suit made conspicuously loose by his recent diet, the narrator’s mother in high heels and freshly styled hair, and the narrator with his two older brothers. Doctors and nursing staff gathered behind them. A group of patients waited apart from the canopy, exposed to the rain and ready to sing for the guest. The narrator’s father worried that they would have to be brought inside if the weather worsened, but the unfinished approach to the building created another problem: Dr. Gerhard Stoltenberg would have to walk the last eight or nine metres through mud.

The narrator’s father became increasingly concerned about the minister-president having to cross the wet ground. A small hospital tractor arrived with boards in its trailer, but its driver first stopped where the minister’s car was expected. The exchange over where to unload them briefly complicated the rescue. The driver then laid bright-yellow formwork panels onto the wet earth, one after another, making a narrow walkway. The rain strengthened and drummed on the boards. The deputy director recognized that the driver had mistaken the path as a means of rescuing the waiting group; the narrator’s father, meanwhile, wanted him to move the tractor out of the way before the official car arrived.

The Arrival

As the driver restarted the tractor, a staff member called that the minister-president was coming. A large, black limousine rolled silently onto the grounds through the increasingly heavy rain. Its dark windows made it appear almost without glass. The reception party straightened beneath the canopy, while the narrator tried to stand more upright and look more dignified. The arrival was staged in stages: two men got out first and scrutinized the grounds, the new parking lot with its bright white markings, the garden beds, the older institutional buildings, and the people waiting at the entrance. One surveyed the building floor by floor, moving his eyes from window to window. Only after they had inspected the scene did one man open the door and hold an umbrella over it.

Dr. Gerhard Stoltenberg remained inside long enough for the narrator’s eldest brother to notice that he was using a car telephone. The narrator’s second-oldest brother speculated that the minister-president might be waiting for their father to join him in the car. The narrator’s father stepped forward, then hesitated. At last, one polished shoe emerged and settled heavily on the boards; the other foot behaved quite differently, lifting and moving restlessly. The narrator’s account lingers on this contrast before the minister-president unfolds himself from the low car and rises to his full height. The child, who had seen him on television, felt that this towering figure had little in common with the familiar screen image. Although the narrator felt singled out by his gaze, other family members later claimed that the minister-president had looked directly at them instead.

The yellow boards pressed into the mud under Stoltenberg’s weight as he crossed the short distance beneath the umbrella. The narrator wondered how a man who seemed so tall could cover the eight metres in only four or five steps. In that moment the familiar proportions of the family changed: the narrator’s father, ordinarily the tall one beside his small child, seemed small beside the minister-president, while the narrator felt smaller still. When Stoltenberg shook the child’s hand, the narrator’s hand disappeared into his and felt, for an instant, like it was inside a warmly preheated glove. The touch left the child unexpectedly happy.

A Welcome Interrupted

The narrator’s father greeted the minister-president and introduced his wife, sons, and deputy director. The narrator’s second-oldest brother, usually quick-witted and difficult to unsettle, performed a formal bow when Stoltenberg greeted him; the narrator had never seen him do so before. The director proposed showing the visitor around the clinic before a small meal upstairs. An aide then explained that the minister-president had only forty minutes. The limit disappointed the narrator’s mother, who had prepared a Bavarian reception with homemade liver-dumpling soup, imported white sausages, pretzels, and several pork roasts.

Before entering the new building, Stoltenberg turned toward the patients’ choir, which was completely soaked but persevered with What shall we do with the drunken sailor. He remarked that the scene was a shame, and the narrator’s father answered with an ingratiating smile, acknowledging that they had been caught in the rain. A local newspaper reporter asked the group to draw closer together and took several photographs. The party finally went inside, more than an hour behind schedule. As they passed the porter, the child recalled a disturbing secret the narrator’s father had once confided: the porter had bitten off his wife’s nipple. The father had made the child promise not to tell anyone, even his brothers. That memory, and the child’s bewilderment that a father had told him such a thing, intruded into the formal welcome as the group crossed the threshold.

The Clinic’s Public Promise

The narrator’s father described the building as the definitive departure from a purely custodial model of psychiatry, declaring that treatment and the patient’s welfare would now be central. Staff members were positioned on the wards to give brief introductions to their work. The visitors first saw rooms for music therapy and what the narrator calls art or creative therapy, where patients sat at tables painting, making things, or playing music. The tour continued to the swimming pool, presented as a facility for movement and body therapy; a handful of patients floated peacefully in it.

That quiet presentation did not convince the narrator’s second-oldest brother, who whispered that the more difficult patients had been kept out of sight and that only the well-behaved ones were being shown. The narrator agreed with his assessment: an unusual stillness prevailed throughout the wards, and the patients seemed intimidated, as if they had been harshly shouted at just before the visitors arrived. Stoltenberg also remarked on how peaceful everything appeared. The narrator’s father acknowledged that things sometimes became loud, while saying that the staff tried to manage them. The contrast between the institution’s public declaration and the conspicuously subdued tour gives the ceremony its central tension: the new building embodies a stated movement toward therapy and patient welfare, but the staged calm leaves open how much of that promise the visitors are actually seeing.