The Baltic Sea is more than a setting in Hans Reiter’s early life: it is the landscape through which the novel gives form to his estrangement from ordinary ways of seeing and to his family’s sense of historical loss. Hans does not identify with the conventional image of the open sea. He is drawn beneath its surface, toward a dark, mobile world that becomes at once a childhood fascination and a private way of moving through later life. For his one-legged father, meanwhile, the Baltic is the horizon on which the vanished homeland of Prussia seems to have sailed away.

A Sea Beneath the Surface

The account of Hans’s birth in 1920 sets his affinity for the submerged world against a ready-made national metaphor. The sea is described as the symbol or mirror of the English, while the forest is the metaphor inhabited by the Germans. Hans defies that division from the beginning: he dislikes the earth and forests, but not because he embraces the ordinary sea of waves and wind. He is interested in what lies below it, a second earth whose plains, valleys, and cliffs resist the names people give to land above water. The Baltic’s importance thus emerges through a reversal: the visible sea is not his true landscape; the hidden seabed is.

That distinction becomes physical during his mother’s attempts to bathe him in a washtub. As a baby, Hans slips through her soapy hands and sinks with his eyes open. Beneath the surface he watches the dark water and black wood, and tiny fragments of his skin drift away like miniature vessels. His father once tells his mother not to lift him, to see what he will do. Hans looks up at his mother’s blue eye, turns aside, and remains still, following the fragments until he runs out of breath. Though the surface is only inches above his head, he does not try to rise; his mother must pull him out, and he begins to cry. The scene makes the attraction to depth more than a picturesque preference: it is enacted through a body that appears willing to remain underwater beyond safety.

The Baltic as a Childhood Horizon

The father’s relation to the Baltic is shaped by the disappearance of Prussia. In a long address to his son, he contrasts the many peoples he calls swine with the Prussians, whom he insists are the only people who are not. But Prussia no longer exists, and his questions about its whereabouts turn into a recurring vigil. He goes out among the rocks and searches the gray horizon for the ships that might have carried the Prussians away, wondering whether they sailed toward Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, or Greenland. These possibilities offer no resolution: in his bitter reckoning, the nearby northern lands are no less alien than the countries he has denounced.

The search gives the Baltic a double character. It is a real expanse watched from the rocks, but also an imagined route out of a homeland that can no longer be found. The father sometimes sees Hans’s head rise and fall among the waves. He says he is not afraid when the boy disappears, because he knows Hans will surface again; at times he even falls asleep watching, then returns to town without checking whether the boy is still visible. He sings on his way back so that the neighbors will think he has been drinking at Krebs’s. The scene places the father’s unsteady, almost resigned attention beside Hans’s appetite for immersion: for the child, the water is a domain to enter; for the father, it is the uncertain horizon of a lost people.

Lights and the Peril of Immersion

Hans’s fascination with the sea leads him into danger again in winter. While fishing near the Village of Blue Women, the fishermen discuss lights moving along the bottom. Their explanations range from dead fishermen seeking their way back to shore to glowing lichens, coastal anemones, or electric fish that could make whoever ate them violently ill. Hans’s curiosity overcomes caution. Without warning the others, he drops from the boat and dives after the lights, or the singular fish he imagines might be producing them.

At first the fishermen are not alarmed, since they know Hans’s peculiarities. Their concern comes when his head fails to reappear: they know that no one, least of all a boy, can stay underwater indefinitely. The incident repeats the basic tension of the washtub scene on a larger, colder scale. The seabed draws Hans toward its mysteries, while the people above understand the bodily limit that his curiosity seems to disregard. The Baltic is not simply a refuge from the land; it is a place where his chosen mode of attention can become fatal.

The Sea Carried into Wartime

The Baltic returns in Hans’s dream while he is a soldier waiting in the forests and orchards before the Maginot Line. After hearing that Denmark and Norway have surrendered, he dreams of his father wrapped in his old military cloak, staring out at the water and wondering where the island of Prussia has hidden itself. The dream carries the father’s old question into a new war. The soldiers’ temporary calm—radio, meals, beer, letters, sleep—does not erase the unresolved image of a people whose place on the map has vanished.

Even away from the coast, Hans continues to walk as though he were a diver moving along the sea floor. The others do not notice, but his gait, measured breathing, and careful gaze can give him away. The passage connects the Baltic to a private bodily discipline: Hans carries its submerged world into the military landscape, and his apparent composure takes on an ambiguous edge. The sea’s depths remain both a place of fascination and a measure of distance from ordinary life.

Place, Metaphor, and Historical Loss

The Baltic gathers together distinct but related forms of absence. For Hans, the unseen seabed displaces the surface as the more compelling reality. For his father, the open horizon makes the disappearance of Prussia visible without explaining it. When the father’s image recurs in Hans’s wartime dream, the family’s maritime world crosses into the history of war and surrender. The sea therefore works not as a stable national emblem but as a contested landscape: intimate, dangerous, and unable to return what has been lost.

That instability is central to the Baltic’s narrative significance. The water can conceal lights, threaten a boy who follows them, or hold a father’s gaze as he searches for ships that may never be seen. Hans repeatedly enters or imagines the submerged world, while his father searches the surface for a country that is no longer there. Together, these gestures make the Baltic a place where physical immersion and historical disappearance meet, without resolving either into a simple symbol.