Josef's Breakdown at the Officers' Club

Josse's Breakdown at the Officers' Club is a sudden, violent crisis at the end of a night that has already exhausted and disappointed Josse. After arriving too late to share in the party he had worked toward, he turns from watching to drinking, then smashes bottles and attacks the room around him. The episode carries him from the officers’ club to House E, where fear and shame replace the fury, and his father arrives to find him in psychiatric care.

Causes and Background

The breakdown follows punishing work. Josse and his friend have been hauling light aluminum steps and panels as if they were impossibly heavy; both finally collapse, and the friend accepts a hundred-mark note before leaving the remaining work to others. By the time the two ride away, Josse is cramping and struggles to work the combination on his bicycle lock. It is quarter past four in the morning. They had intended to stop at the friend’s home so Josse could shower and change into the tight black jeans and carefully perforated T-shirt he had put aside for the party.

The friend silently turns off and rides away before they get there. Josse continues alone, dirty and smelling of labor, slowly pedaling in low gear through the sleeping town toward the barracks. A guard studies his exhausted face before allowing him in on his entry pass. The passage makes the party’s lateness more than a matter of the hour: Josse has spent the night working toward an occasion for which he can no longer prepare, and arrives after the celebration has changed into its aftermath.

The Party Turns to Fury

There is still dancing in the officers’ club, but the wild party has given way to slow dancing in a smoky room that smells of beer and stale air. Couples cling together in the dim alcoves; some dancers are barefoot, their eyes closed and heads leaning against one another. Josse stands in the doorway and sees, in effect, a memorial to what he has missed. He goes outside and sits on a cut tree trunk, watching pigeons land, crowd together, and peck at the ground. For a moment, their orderly flight and busy movement calm him.

A second flock joins the first. When Josse approaches, the birds are so occupied with jostling and feeding that they do not take off until he is right beside them. He watches an estimated fifty pigeons rise together, then looks down and sees a large puddle of vomit, with noodle scraps and pieces in a bile-yellow sauce. Disgust gives way almost instantly to anger. The sequence sets the birds’ coordinated motion against the mess on the pavement, and marks the point at which the calm Josse has found outdoors gives way to mounting rage.

Back inside, Josse is the only person who is sober and decides to change that quickly. He mixes a B-52, the group’s favorite cocktail at the time, lights it, puts out the flame, and drinks it in one go; he immediately makes another. People begin saying their goodbyes. Through an open window Josse can see the Schlei and the island of gulls. On the water, a naked girl floats among military speedboats, playing dead man. The scene’s quiet, dissipating party and the image on the water precede the abruptness of the violence that follows.

The Outburst

The eruption comes without warning. Josse takes an empty beer bottle and throws it against the wall, then throws more, using all his strength. He cannot account for where that strength comes from. A furious force takes hold: classmates duck and try to get away as he barricades himself behind the counter and begins hurling full bottles through the club, at walls and windows, and apparently toward those fleeing. He yells, but later cannot remember what he said.

He then bangs his head twice against the counter, collapses, and continues striking out and screaming. Three soldiers come and hold him down with all their strength. Josse is terrified of them and struggles in a sticky pool of alcohol as if fighting for his life. The recollection stresses the bodily extremity of the attack—throwing, impact, restraint, and relentless screaming—while its cause remains opaque to him. He loses consciousness before the episode can be explained or brought under his control.

House E and Aftermath

Josse next finds himself on a stretcher being pushed into an ambulance. When it stops, he recognizes the destination: House E, outpatient treatment. He is taken upstairs to a room in E-Mitte, with barred windows and no interior door handle. The doctor asks about drugs, alcohol, and whether Josse urgently needs medication. Josse answers none of the questions. Asked his name, he covers his face with his hands and pretends to be dead. The doctor says that an examination is needed because Josse has hit his head; when he continues to lie curled up, two attendants are called to turn him over and pull his hands away.

The doctor looks at him, appears surprised, and strokes his arm, reassuring him that there is no problem. Josse is overwhelmed by shame. Shortly afterward his father enters, out of breath, sleepy-looking, and with his shirt hanging out of his trousers. He sits on the bed, and Josse begins to cry. His father asks what happened; Josse can offer no explanation beyond that it happened on its own, out of nowhere. With his head on his father’s lap, he wants to leave at once. The doctor draws his father aside, and Josse hears him repeatedly reject something the doctor proposes, while the doctor uses the phrase freely floating. The door closes before Josse learns more. His father returns and tells him that he must stay a little longer to sleep it off, kisses him on the head, and leaves in visible confusion.

Josse sleeps until evening. When he wakes, his muscles ache and his voice is hoarse; his party clothes hang over a chair, and he is wearing a white side-tied hospital garment. He feels well enough to stand at the barred window. Through the tall lime trees he can see the family home, the garden clothesline, and the dog walking across the garden. He also catches sight of a shadow opening the glass door for the dog. The view places home within sight but not yet within reach: the clinical room’s bars and missing handle frame a familiar garden just beyond them. That evening his father returns with fresh clothes, and the two go home; the journey takes less than three minutes.

Narrative Significance

The episode is shaped by sharp reversals: heavy labor ends in collapse, the party becomes a scene of exclusion, the pigeons briefly soothe Josse before the vomit triggers anger, and his sudden violence ends in helpless silence and fear. The repeated sense that the attack came from nowhere is not an explanation but a limit in Josse’s understanding of his own actions. His inability to remember what he shouted, answer the doctor, or account for the force behind the throwing leaves the crisis partly unreadable even to its narrator.

The close shifts from public destruction to intimate dependence. In the club, soldiers hold Josse down; in House E, the doctor examines him and his father sits beside him as he cries. The final view of the dog and home from the barred window gives the aftermath a concrete measure: Josse is separated from ordinary family life for a night, then brought back by his father. The breakdown is thus both a violent rupture in a social gathering and a moment when the unexplained crisis becomes visible to his family and medical caregivers.