The Gap Between Theoretical Plans and Everyday Life

The Gap Between Theoretical Plans and Everyday Life is a recurring pattern in Joachim’s family story: Hermann imagines whole new ways of living, but The narrator’s mother does much of the labor that makes them possible. Sailing and rural self-sufficiency expose the difference between knowing, planning, and doing. The pattern reaches beyond hobbies, shaping their marriage and Joachim’s retrospective understanding of Hermann as a man who could inhabit family life more easily as an idea than as a daily practice.

The Sailing Dream and Its Preparation

Hermann’s enthusiasm for sailing begins with reading. A small pamphlet about the historical whaling of the North Frisians leads him toward shipbuilding and a flood of novels, picture books, and theoretical works about seafaring. While reading Ich kaufe ein Segelboot, he appears to Joachim to be seized by a new ambition: although his heavy body remains in the armchair, his gaze fixes on the linden trees, and his eyes seem to grow bluer as he imagines the sea. At lunch he lectures about sailing maneuvers; on Sundays, the family’s walks give way to visits to the harbor, where he identifies boats and their classes.

The desire becomes an emotional declaration before it becomes a practical decision. In the living room, red-faced and trembling, Hermann announces that he wants a sailboat and wants to sail out of the harbor until he can no longer see land. The narrator’s mother holds his hands and agrees that they will buy one. His emphatic nods and tears make the decision feel momentous to the family. Yet the first step that might have tested the dream against experience—finding out what sailing actually involved—does not come first.

Instead, Hermann joins the Schleswiger Schlei-Segel-Club and rents a coveted berth before he has sailed or owned a boat. He buys white trousers, blue shoes, and a white V-neck sweater bearing an anchor emblem, then stands with the family beside the empty space reserved for his vessel. At home he wears the sailing outfit in his armchair and practices knots with a length of rope. He also signs himself and The narrator’s mother up for an examination, quizzes her on hull speed, and supplies the formula: the square root of the waterline length multiplied by 4.5 gives the speed in kilometers per hour. His command of the theory is already taking shape; practical experience is still catching up.

The Boat Before the License

Hermann misses sailing lessons more than once because he is occupied with finding a boat. An advertisement offers a relatively inexpensive cabin dinghy with standing headroom of 1.70 meters, a keel, and an outboard motor. Its decisive selling points are that it is described as both uncapsizable and unsinkable. Before either Hermann or The narrator’s mother has earned a sailing certificate, the boat is delivered from Cologne on a trailer. Hermann stands upright, knees straight, to greet it. At the club, no one has heard of a Sepia dinghy.

The family debates what to call the vessel. When the proposed name Nautilus fails to settle the question, The narrator’s mother suggests combining the first two letters of Joachim, Martin, and Hermann. The result is the JoMaHe Sailing Yacht. A crane lowers it into the water, and a small champagne bottle thrown against its side leaves the first small dent in the plastic hull as part of its christening. The scene compresses the larger pattern into one object: an ambitious name, a formal launch, and an immediate mark left by the ceremony itself.

The examination draws a sharp line between Hermann’s theoretical competence and his handling of the boat. Two months later, he finishes the written portion first and talks sailing with the examiner while the others complete theirs. He passes with no errors; The narrator’s mother passes too, with four. The practical test, however, takes place in a strong wind, and the contrast between preparation and performance becomes impossible to ignore. In yellow oilskins, life jackets, and red knitted caps, the candidates look conspicuous against the rough water. Hermann’s mood, buoyed by the theory result, falls as the wind strengthens.

Once the dinghy reaches open water, a gust fills its sail and heels the boat over. Hermann slips on the wet boards during the first maneuver. When he tries to get up, the boom strikes his head and knocks him down again; the boat then hits a pontoon with force, and he falls for a third time. The narrator’s mother gets the dinghy under control and completes the next maneuvers alone while Hermann lies with his eyes closed. He eventually sits up and vomits into the Schlei. When another gust sends the line through his hands and the sail drops, The narrator’s mother climbs the mast in wind of force eight to nine, threads the line back in, raises the sail, steers them to harbor, and docks properly.

Hermann is the only one of nine boats’ eighteen candidates to fail. The examiner tells him that he cannot be passed because he spent most of the test lying down and would have needed rescuing without his wife. The result does not immediately end the project: back at home, Hermann arranges his sailing books on the shelf and gives the knot rope to the dog to play with. Weeks pass before he takes the family out again, this time under The narrator’s mother’s command. The dream survives, but its first working form depends on her competence.

The Country Life as Shared Labor

The same division appears in Hermann’s rural ambitions. He reads extensively about agriculture and treats John Seymour’s Das Leben auf dem Land as a guide to becoming self-sufficient. The narrator’s mother, meanwhile, paints the stables, tends the garden, and cares for the animals. The family keeps three sheep, Kaspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, and she washes and dyes their wool, spins it, and knits a large supply of scratchy clothes. When she accidentally cuts a sheep during shearing, Hermann sprays the wound with Kutasept Orange; the sheep stand dotted with bright antiseptic while neighboring farmers watch and shake their heads.

On weekends at the country property, Hermann reads Walden or garden magazines in his country-house armchair, then walks the grounds looking for the theoretically optimal place for a planned apiary. He counts the eggs laid by his Andalusian hens and, once, puts his hands in a sheep’s stream of urine, calling it life in its bubbling abundance. The narrator’s mother continues to do the work. The comic disparity is not simply between an unrealistic idea and a failed project: the household does acquire animals and cultivate land. Rather, the aspiration and its upkeep fall unevenly across the family.

Joachim makes that imbalance explicit by describing the parents’ division of labor as consistent. Hermann develops plans and gestures across the landscape as though surveying a territory; The narrator’s mother carries load after load of rubbish to the municipal dump. The image gives physical scale to an otherwise abstract contrast. His plans may be expansive, but their daily implementation has a weight, a route, and a worker.

Beyond Hobbies: Theory as a Way of Life

The pattern extends into Hermann’s academic work. The narrator says that The narrator’s mother wrote both his doctoral dissertation and his habilitation for him. Hermann knew a great deal, but could not sit down and organize it himself. For the habilitation, he spent fourteen days pacing the room and dictating the whole work while smoking; she converted that restless knowledge into a structured text. His talent, as Joachim sees it, lay in delegation rather than execution.

This recollection broadens the contrast from particular projects to Hermann’s imagined identities. Joachim lists the life of a psychiatric-hospital director, a ship’s captain, a self-sufficient country dweller, and a father and husband in the family. He wonders whether the family, too, was for Hermann chiefly an idea—something he could bear in an armchair with books, or at a distance. That judgment is presented as Joachim’s later reflection, not as a neutral diagnosis of Hermann’s inner life. Its force comes from the accumulated examples: the sailing clothes and empty berth, the exam in which The narrator’s mother takes over, the rural labor, and the work she had to shape from his dictation.

The gap therefore does not mean that Hermann’s schemes produce nothing. The boat is bought; the family goes sailing; sheep are kept and wool is made into clothing. But each realization discloses who performs the necessary practical work, and how far a plan can remain Hermann’s imagined possession even after others bring it into everyday life. By making the contrast recur across leisure, land, scholarship, and family, Joachim turns domestic anecdotes into a way of understanding both Hermann’s reach and the strain it places on those around him.