Berlin is a city of wartime destruction and family rupture in Ingeborg Bauer’s account to Hans Reiter. Her memories make it more than the setting of her past: the bombing of the city sends her family into displacement, while the story she tells of her sister’s illness and Nazi past carries Berlin’s violence into her later life with Reiter.

War and Displacement

Walking through the destroyed city with Reiter, Ingeborg explains that her father died in an air raid and that her mother and sisters fled Berlin before the Russian siege. They first sought refuge in the countryside with one of their uncles, but the move offered neither reliable food nor safety. Ingeborg describes a landscape where displaced city residents were robbed and killed, and where women faced danger within the families that were meant to shelter them.

The family left for a small city in the Westerwald after one of Ingeborg’s younger sisters was assaulted by a thirteen-year-old cousin who wanted to join the Hitler Youth and die a hero. The episode shows how war’s pressures persist beyond the bombed capital: flight does not end the family’s exposure to violence, and the ambitions of a boy shaped by Nazi ideology enter the private sphere.

The City Remembered Through Family

Ingeborg’s account gives Berlin a personal geography of loss. Her father is dead, her mother and sisters have dispersed with her, and their movement away from the city is driven by the collapse of ordinary safety. When Reiter asks whether Ingeborg herself was assaulted, she says no, distinguishing her experience from her younger sister’s without making the broader danger disappear.

The family’s departure also marks a contrast between Berlin and the town where they next live. Ingeborg recalls that the Westerwald town seemed boring and strange: its inhabitants behaved as though there were no war, although men had gone to the front and the town had been bombed three times. Her mother found work at a beer hall, while the daughters took occasional jobs in offices and factories or delivered messages; some of the younger girls sometimes attended school. These ordinary routines follow the account of flight, but do not erase what drove it.

Ingeborg’s Past and Reiter’s Response

Berlin returns in Ingeborg’s conversation with her sister Grete, who tells Reiter that both their father and Ingeborg had been Nazis and that Ingeborg belonged to the Hitler Youth. Grete calls her sister insane, adding that psychiatrists and neurologists had examined Ingeborg in Berlin and that the diagnosis was generally insanity. Reiter questions Grete’s conclusion, so the exchange leaves the relationship between Ingeborg’s wartime past and her illness in dispute rather than resolving it.

The city therefore enters the novel through testimony that is intimate but incomplete: family members offer competing accounts, and Reiter has to receive them without a settled explanation. Berlin is not rendered as a comprehensive portrait of the capital. It is the remembered point of departure for a family driven from home, and the place where Ingeborg’s troubled history becomes part of the relationship she forms with Reiter.