“The Klaus nightmare”

“The Klaus nightmare” is the name Lotte Reiter gives to a recurring dream about her son, Klaus Haas, who has gone to the United States and stopped answering his family’s letters. The dream begins in the imagined home of the life she hopes he has made, then turns that reassuring picture into an uncanny scene: Lotte is inside a house she cannot identify, seated at a nearly bare table, unable to remember who let her in. Its repetition makes her son’s distance not merely an absence to be endured but a private, unresolved fear that returns in sleep and shadows ordinary mornings.

The Dream’s House and Table

The dream draws on Lotte’s attempts to picture Klaus settled in America. In the imagined scene, she approaches a house whose identity remains uncertain: although it belongs to the world she associates with her son, she does not recognize it as an American house. A pungent smell first repels her; she then decides that Klaus’s wife must be cooking Indian food, and the odor becomes exotic and pleasant. In a few seconds, unease is converted into a consoling explanation, but the reassurance does not hold.

Lotte finds herself sitting at a table set with only a pitcher, an empty plate, a plastic cup, and a fork. There is nothing else on it, and her attention fixes on a more troubling absence: she cannot remember who admitted her to the house. The dream gives her imagined access to Klaus’s domestic life while withholding the knowledge that would make her presence secure. She is inside the home, yet cannot account for how she arrived there.

Repetition and Morning Speech

The nightmare’s distress is rendered as an escalating sound-image. Lotte’s suffering resembles chalk screeching across a blackboard, dragged deliberately by a boy; the imagined source then shifts from chalk to fingernails, and from fingernails to teeth. The sequence does not reveal a visible attacker or explain the dream’s cause. Instead, it intensifies the feeling of injury through a sound that seems to come from an act of deliberate harm.

Over time, the dream recurs often enough to acquire a name: Lotte calls it the Klaus nightmare. In the morning, while helping Werner prepare breakfast, she sometimes says, “I had a nightmare.” Werner asks, “The Klaus nightmare?” and Lotte nods with her eyes averted and a distracted expression. The brief exchange makes the dream part of their shared family language, even as the distress remains hers to experience and theirs to acknowledge indirectly.

Klaus’s Absence and the Family’s Uncertainty

The dream belongs to a longer separation. After reaching New York, Klaus sends his mother a postcard bearing the Statue of Liberty and writes, “This lady is on my side.” Months pass without news, then more than a year. A later postcard says he is applying for U.S. citizenship and has a good job; its return address is Macon, Georgia. Lotte and Werner each write with questions about his health, finances, and future plans, but Klaus does not reply.

With time, his parents get used to believing that he has left home and is doing well. Lotte imagines him married to an American and living in a sunny house like those in the films shown on television. Yet this reassuring fantasy has conspicuous blanks: the imagined wife has no face, and neither do the children Lotte supposes Klaus might have. She sees the woman’s darker blond hair, tanned shoulders, and upright figure from behind, while Klaus’s own face remains visible. The dream’s unrecognizable house and unexplained admission deepen this pattern of imagined domestic life that Lotte can approach but cannot truly know.

Both parents secretly hope that Klaus will eventually return to them asking for money. Years pass, however, and he continues to seem lost in the United States. Werner jokes that, knowing Klaus, he might now be living in Alaska. The humor does not settle the uncertainty; it accompanies it. Lotte’s recurring nightmare gives that uncertainty a private shape, repeating the gap between the son they picture and the person whose life they cannot reach.

The Dream’s Place in the Story

The nightmare joins two kinds of absence: Klaus’s silence in waking life and Lotte’s inability, even in her dream, to account for her place in his imagined home. The nearly empty table supplies the scene with ordinary domestic objects but no meal or welcome that can confirm belonging. The house promises family life, yet its identity and the means of entry remain unknown. This contrast turns Lotte’s hope for Klaus’s ordinary happiness into an experience of estrangement rather than a stable consolation.

The dream also recurs within the novel as a named, shared point of reference between Lotte and Werner. Their breakfast exchange is brief, but it shows how a fear that cannot be answered becomes recognizable through repetition. The nightmare does not disclose what has happened to Klaus; it registers what his parents cannot know, keeping the question of his distant life present in the intimate routines of their own.