Weihnachten

Weihnachten is the narrator’s annual high point not because of the family’s tree, festive meal, or presents, but because he accompanies his father through the psychiatric hospital’s Christmas celebrations. Across the wards, the holiday’s formal rituals repeatedly give way to unruly feeling: patients tear apart gifts in delight, grieve over the wreckage, and perform a nativity play that may collapse into disorder. At home, the narrator’s own excitement takes a quieter, more effortful form: resisting the urge to break a gift becomes his contribution to the celebration.

The hospital rounds

The narrator describes Weihnachten as the year’s emotional peak, and locates that peak in a particular itinerary. He accompanies his father, director of the Landeskrankenhaus für Kinder- und Jugendpsychiatrie Hesterberg, from ward to ward. Each celebration allows only twenty minutes before they must move on, and the patients are already gathered when the pair arrive. The narrator and his father are expected; without them, the proceedings cannot begin. Patients have been dressed and groomed, and wait in a state of visible agitation, rocking or tossing themselves about. Staff members and ward doctors sing two Christmas songs with them before opening the large double doors to a room where presents lie arranged on tables in the electric candlelight.

That carefully staged pause lasts only until the patients see the gifts. They then surge forward, ripping at ribbons and wrapping paper, sometimes with their teeth, and lifting presents in triumph. Within minutes, many objects are broken: doll arms are pulled from their sockets, stuffed animals split open, and a new anorak is torn. The mood does not settle into simple happiness or disappointment. The same patients who have just attacked the presents with delight may mourn the resulting heap of fragments with equally unrestrained pain. For the narrator, the rapid passage from a composed Christmas room to a wrecked one is itself a source of fascination.

The scenes also make clear that there is no single hospital Christmas. On some wards, patients who are profoundly disabled remain quiet, and gifts are placed beside their heads on pillows; there, the presents stay intact. On another, four young women watch the narrator with an intensity that frightens him, while their full-bodied swaying gives the Christmas songs an unexpected beauty. The narrator’s account holds these contrasting encounters together without treating one response as the proper version of the holiday.

Ceremony and its disruptions

The hospital’s Christmas observances extend beyond gift-giving. At a crowded service in the gym, the Bell ringer sits above the congregation and waits for the pastor’s signal. When the pastor nods, he rises and rings his polished bells over the crowd; those sitting directly below cover their ears and duck. The ringing announces that the nativity play can begin. Patients from a different ward take part each year, and the performance often veers into crisis: Mary may have a seizure and fall into the manger, an animal may knock another into the scenery, or shepherds may fight with their staffs. In one performance, one of the Three Kings behaves obscenely before the audience. The play’s centre remains a crib made from a cot decorated with fir branches, holding a severely disabled patient as Jesus.

The casting changes the scene further when the service brings together the children’s and adult psychiatric hospitals. Some productions include men permanently confined for sexual offences or murder, with a large attendant positioned behind each shepherd; the narrator has also seen Joseph in handcuffs and the Virgin Mary in a straitjacket. The annual religious form persists, but its familiar roles are played by people and under conditions that make the ceremony difficult to separate from the institution around it. For the narrator, the play’s disorder does not cancel its force: the patients play with conviction even when the performance breaks down.

Returning home

Later, the narrator’s father and the narrator must eat cake on every ward, with the father drinking coffee and his son cola. The narrator recalls that he often vomits after these rounds. The caffeine then keeps him awake with a pounding heart, building Lego for hours into the morning. The patients eat Christmas figures still wrapped in foil, bite into unpeeled oranges, and eat cake with their hands. The holiday itinerary thus continues beyond the gift-room spectacle, carrying its bodily excess back into the narrator’s night.

At the family’s own gift-giving, the hospital celebrations make the narrator unusually solemn. A present can seem to invite the very destruction it is meant to prevent. When he takes hold of a fragile gift, such as a large box of perfectly sharpened colored pencils, he feels a nervousness heightened by the object’s delicacy and imagines snapping the pencils one by one. The box contains thirty-six, from pale pink to black. He is pleased to receive them, but understands leaving them unbroken as an achievement: sparing what has been given is his solemn contribution to the festival. The home celebration is not separate from the hospital rounds; the earlier scenes of destruction have sharpened his awareness of the impulse he must contain.

Conflict at the family celebration

One Christmas, the family’s celebration also erupts into a brief act of domestic violence. The narrator’s second-oldest brother gives an extended speech after opening a Trivial Pursuit game, criticizing the parents for choosing presents that seem designed to educate or shape their children rather than giving him the money he wanted. He recalls wanting an ice-cream maker and receiving a fountain pen instead. His performance is eloquent and self-satisfied, and its complaint sets the stage for the argument over their parents’ gifts.

The narrator’s mother opens the gift from the narrator’s father: an electric knife intended for meat and bread. That same evening, she uses it to cut unwashed tripe for the Family dog. Seeing this, the father snatches the knife away, runs into the Christmas room, overturns his gift table, and clumsily saws into the case of the complete Adalbert Stifter edition his wife gave him. The blade lodges in the cardboard; he leaves the knife stuck there and rushes out. From a large wing chair, the narrator watches, fascinated by his father’s sudden enactment of the destructive impulse he himself has imagined but resisted. The family incident reverses his role as observer of the patients: at home, the protected objects and controlled ceremony also give way to an act of destruction.

Across these episodes, Weihnachten is structured by repeated transitions: waiting gives way to a rush for presents, celebration to grief, religious ceremony to disruption, and the hospital rounds to the narrator’s private effort at restraint. The holiday brings patients, staff, father, and son into recurring rituals, but does not make their experiences uniform. Its importance lies instead in the sharp contrasts it exposes—between gift and wreckage, impulse and self-control, and the formal shape of a celebration and the unpredictable feelings that fill it.