The Black Sea is a historical setting in the wartime narrative of Hans Reiter and a charged element in his private vision of death. Near Sevastopol, the fighting brings Russian sailors into the trenches, far from ships and open water; to Reiter, their presence joins the battlefield to the sea and to his recurring fantasy of sinking away into its depths. Elsewhere in the novel, the Black Sea appears among the waters through which the imagination figures disappearance, making it at once a specific geographic presence and part of a larger, unsettled image.

The Black Sea in the wartime narrative

During the assault on Sevastopol, German forces are driven back by the city’s artillery. Near the Russian trenches, the ground is marked by the dead and mutilated bodies of German and Romanian soldiers, and the fighting repeatedly becomes hand-to-hand. German assault troops reach a trench of Russian sailors and fight for several minutes; one side retreats, but more sailors arrive shouting, and the battle resumes. In this immediate account, the Black Sea is not a distant backdrop: the sailors carry the presence of the maritime war into the trenches.

Reiter’s vision of sea and disappearance

Reiter experiences the sailors’ presence as charged with portents. He imagines that one of them will kill him, after which he will sink into the depths of the Baltic, the Atlantic, or the Black Sea. In the same thought, those seas become one sea, and a forest of seaweed waits below. The passage does not present this as a literal journey; it gives Reiter’s anticipation of death an image of disappearance that moves from a particular battle toward an imagined underwater elsewhere.

A contested battlefield

Wilke finds the sailors’ appearance in the trenches senseless and privately speculates about how they came there. He wonders whether German aircraft have sunk the Russian fleet or whether the Black Sea has dried up, though he does not believe the latter. His questions mark a contrast with the other soldiers, who do not question what they see or what happens to them. For Reiter, by contrast, the sailors’ presence becomes an omen, translating military confusion into a vision of his own possible death.

The sea beyond the battle

The Black Sea belongs to a broader pattern in which water becomes associated with refuge, danger, and disappearance. In another episode, Reiter spends time on a rocky shore but feels no desire to swim or dive. That quiet refusal contrasts with the imagined descent at Sevastopol: the sea he watches from shore is not simply an invitation to escape, while the sea in his battlefield vision is where he expects to vanish. The novel’s movement between these scenes leaves the sea unresolved, at once a physical place and an image through which Reiter imagines what may follow death.