Animals and Plants of the European Coastal Region

Animals and Plants of the European Coastal Region is the book Hans Reiter repeatedly returns to as his life moves from service at a country estate into military training and war. Initially his sole measure of what a good book might be, it becomes both a modest point of contact with Hugo Halder’s literary education and a durable private possession: Reiter carries it with him and reads it beside the sea in Normandy, where the wish to remain apart from his battalion gathers force.

The Only Book Hans Knows

When Halder asks whether Reiter has read a good book, Reiter answers that he has one: Animals and Plants of the European Coastal Region. Halder tries to distinguish a reference work from a literary book by appeal to the beauty of a story and of its language, naming Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin, Kleist, and Novalis as writers whose works move him. Reiter, however, says he does not know the difference between a good reference book and a good literary book. His answer sets out the volume’s first role: it is not merely one title among others, but the standard by which he understands reading before anyone has persuaded him to look beyond it.

The exchange also marks a difference between the two young men’s approaches to books. Halder speaks of literature in terms of beauty and emotional response; Reiter’s attachment is grounded in the one book he has actually read and can name. The volume is a practical reference book in Halder’s account, but Reiter’s confidence in it is not presented as a joke or a settled judgment about literary value. It reveals how narrow his reading has been, while giving Halder a concrete starting point for widening it.

Halder’s Attempt to Broaden His Reading

Halder becomes the first person to get Reiter to read something other than the book. He proposes that history must also be studied, describing historical knowledge as a way to hone both edges of a blade, and argues that voids can be filled with effort. The conversation does not settle on a first literary selection. As dusk falls and the two listen to the fire, they fail to agree on which book Reiter should begin with; Halder finally lets him choose any book from the library and asks him to return it in a week.

That offer makes the library a place of possibility without making Reiter’s original volume disappear. Halder encourages him toward a broader education, yet the book remains the object by which Reiter’s reading is measured in the scene. The difference is not resolved through a declaration that the reference book has been replaced: the passage records the beginning of an opening, not its completion.

Carried into Military Service

When Reiter leaves for basic training, he travels alone. Halder and Nisa have not seen him off, and his landlady is the only person he says goodbye to on departure day. In his new kit bag he has only a few items of clothing and Animals and Plants of the European Coastal Region. The detail gives the book a material continuity that Halder’s proposed literary education does not: whatever Reiter may or may not have read in the interval, this is the volume he chooses to carry into military life.

In September, Reiter’s division advances into Poland behind the Panzer and motorized infantry divisions. The march is presented as orderly and almost festive, with the soldiers passing through towns without plundering them; they see no combat during this advance. Against that movement toward war, the book’s place in Reiter’s small kit is a quiet counterpoint. It does not change the course of the military campaign, but it remains one of the few possessions accompanying him as his world narrows to marching and battalion life.

Reading Beside the Normandy Coast

During his regiment’s stay in Normandy, Reiter repeatedly takes the book to the coast. His battalion is based in Besneville. In the mornings he carries weapons and a rucksack containing cheese, bread, and half a bottle of wine, walks to the shore, and chooses a rock out of sight. After swimming and diving, he lies on the rock to eat, drink, and reread the volume. The recurrent scene joins the book to a routine deliberately separated from the regiment: reading is part of the time Reiter claims for himself beyond military company.

The book’s subject also has a specific place in these coastal episodes. Reiter watches starfish for as long as he can hold his breath before touching them, and once follows a pair of gobies, identified in the narrative as Gobius paganellus, through seaweed. The volume is not explicitly said to guide each encounter, so its presence should not be mistaken for a stated cause of his observations. Rather, the narrative places his repeated rereading beside his sustained attention to marine life, making the reference book and the coast part of the same secluded pattern.

The Book and the Wish to Leave

Reiter sometimes feels so content on the rock that he imagines never returning to his battalion. He seriously considers desertion: living as a tramp in Normandy, finding a cave, relying on peasants’ offerings or small thefts, and never going back to Germany. His imagined future ends in drowning, which he pictures as a source of joy. These thoughts are not presented as an action he carries out; they remain a recurring possibility formed during his time apart from the regiment.

In this setting, Animals and Plants of the European Coastal Region acquires significance through recurrence rather than through any recorded change in its contents. It is the book Reiter first calls good, the volume that travels with him in his kit bag, and the one he rereads during his long solitary coastal mornings. Halder’s attempt to lead him toward literary works remains part of its history, but the evidence does not say that Reiter abandons or replaces it. At the Normandy coast, its companionship belongs to a pattern of observation and withdrawal, set against the military life to which Reiter repeatedly has to return.