“Giants never die”

“Giants never die” is Lotte Reiter’s childhood belief that her brother Hans is beyond death and will come home to end the war’s uncertainty. The phrase turns her longing into a protective myth: Hans is a giant who can do anything, while the adult brother who finally appears tells her he never was one. Its later echo in Lotte’s hopes for her imprisoned son Klaus shows how the childhood image continues to shape her understanding of family, danger, and return.

The Childhood Image

As a girl, Lotte dreams of her brother. Her one-eyed mother dismisses the dreams, but her one-legged father questions her about the dead soldiers she sees in them. Their faces, Lotte says, look as if they were asleep. Her father answers that truly dead soldiers’ faces are dirty, as if they had worked all day and never had time to wash. Against this account of death, Hans’s face in Lotte’s dream remains perfectly clean. He looks sad but determined, as if death has not taken away his capacity to act.

Lotte believes her brother can do anything and waits for him as a giant whose footsteps will announce his return. She imagines him approaching the village, the house, and the garden where she waits, telling her the war is over and that he is coming home forever. She expects this return to change everything, though she cannot say what the change would be. The belief gives her hope a shape and a destination: Hans will return, and the world will become different.

War, Separation, and Persistence

The war does not end, and Hans’s visits grow less frequent until they stop. Lotte overhears her parents speaking of him as if he were already dead, but she refuses their implication. In her reasoning, giants do not die; if they do, they die only at such an old age that death resembles falling asleep beneath a tree or beside the door of a house. The fantasy does not erase the separation. It supplies a rule by which she can keep believing that Hans remains alive somewhere beyond her reach.

When her parents decide they must leave because the war is coming, Lotte interprets the news as evidence that Hans must be coming too: he lives inside the war as a fetus lives inside a woman. Certain that he is on his way, she hides so that the family cannot take her away. Her father eventually finds her in the forest, slaps her, and drags her after him. As they move west along the coast, she calls out to two columns of soldiers to ask whether they know her brother. The soldiers politely say that they do not. The episode places her private certainty against repeated public evidence of absence, without making her abandon the certainty.

The Return and Its Reversal

Years later, Lotte is preparing for bed when the doorbell rings. Over the intercom, the visitor identifies himself as her brother, Archimboldi. They talk until dawn. Lotte recounts her son Klaus’s imprisonment and the killings of women in Santa Teresa, then describes Klaus’s dreams: in them, a giant comes to rescue him from prison. She tells her brother that he no longer looks like a giant.

Archimboldi answers that he never was one. The line directly overturns the childhood image without undoing its emotional history. The dream of a brother whose strength could end separation has been carried into adulthood and transferred to Klaus, now the one Lotte hopes will be rescued. The actual return is intimate but not miraculous: the siblings can speak through the night, yet the conversation does not make the prison or the killings disappear.

Family Memory and the Meaning of the Phrase

Lotte’s conversation with Archimboldi also reveals how family memory changes under pressure. She fears illness and Klaus’s death, and says that she no longer understands what is happening. She asks why her brother calls their father one-legged and their mother one-eyed. He replies that they were exactly that, and asks whether she has forgotten. Lotte admits that sometimes she does. Her questions and admissions place the phrase beside an uncertain recollection of the people and childhood from which it arose.

The giant is therefore neither a literal description of Hans nor a simple statement of confidence. It is Lotte’s name for the brother she needs to imagine as capable of overcoming war and bringing the family back together. Its recurrence in her account of Klaus’s dreams reveals how the image survives by moving from one endangered family member to another. Archimboldi’s denial marks the limit of that hope: he can return as her brother, but he cannot become the invulnerable figure she once awaited, or promise the rescue she wants for her son.