4 ideas
In the early hours, Mylia, a schizophrenic former asylum patient in severe physical pain, leaves home to find a church where she can pray. On the same night her ex-husband, the psychiatrist Theodor Busbeck, who once had her committed to the Georg Rosenberg asylum, goes out looking for a prostitute, and the traumatized, armed ex-soldier Hinnerk Obst wanders the same streets.
Busbeck devotes his career to quantifying atrocity across history, turning massacres and the Holocaust into data points and graphs so he can test whether horror follows a predictable curve or is declining over time. The project treats evil as a measurable quantity with a law behind it. The attempt to rationalize horror reproduces the same cold, classifying detachment that makes atrocity administrable.
The psychiatric institution is presented as a place where scientific authority gives some people the power to define others as mad, confine them and treat them as material for study. Busbeck committing his own wife, and the asylum's management of inmates under Gomperz, show diagnosis operating as control. In this account, the line between the rational doctor and the damaged patient does not track who is dangerous.
Mylia's urge to pray is shown as a physical compulsion, as urgent as hunger or relief from pain, rather than as a doctrine she holds. Reading religious longing this way means asking what a person's body and suffering demand, not what they believe. In the novel's broken world, the search for a church becomes an act of survival.