Düren is the city where Hans Reiter’s father was treated after losing a leg in the war. Its military hospital and the father’s later departure from it establish a concrete, unsentimental background to the family’s story: a place of injury and scarcity, set against grand claims about military fellowship and a new era.

The military hospital

The one-legged father spent a month in a military hospital near Düren, believing he was close to death. Unable to move, he watched mobile patients take cigarettes from others. When someone tried to steal his own cigarettes, he seized the thief and insisted that a soldier’s tobacco was sacred. The episode presents his injured body not as an abstract emblem but as a condition shaping what he could do and what he had to defend in an institution where basic possessions were vulnerable.

A mummy occupied the next bed. The father offered him a cigarette, briefly mistook his silence for a possible sign that he recognized a fellow soldier, and then learned from another patient that the man had died that morning. The account gives no further explanation of the mummy’s identity or history; the father’s routine response after hearing of the death is simply to light another cigarette and wait for breakfast. Düren’s hospital thus appears through fragmentary encounters rather than as a fully described institution.

Departure and the journey onward

After his release, the father stumped toward Düren and boarded a train to another city. He waited there for twenty-four hours, eating army soup beside a one-legged sergeant who predicted that the approaching end of the war would bring a new era. The father answered that nothing would change: neither man had changed, and both had lost a leg. Their exchange makes the hospital experience persist beyond the hospital walls, as the father measures political promises against the enduring fact of bodily loss.

The sergeant laughed at the father’s contrary answers, and the two traded opposites while sharing the soup. When the train seemed never to arrive, the father stopped waiting and set off on foot. Düren is therefore not the end of his movement but the point of departure from a sequence of wartime hardship, uncertain transport, and continued travel.

Place in the family history

The narrative introduces the father through his disability, poverty, and memories of military life, while also showing his blunt resistance to other people’s confident explanations. Elsewhere in the family history, a National Socialist Party member visits the Reiter home and claims firsthand knowledge of front-line suffering; the father counters with his account of the Düren hospital, where he says comrades stole not only cigarettes and possessions but even men’s souls. His experience of the place gives him grounds to challenge the visitor’s polished picture of hospital care and military solidarity.

Düren’s significance is consequently both geographic and narrative. It anchors the father’s war injury in a specific place and supplies a remembered experience against which later speeches about sacrifice, progress, and national renewal can be tested. The novel does not make the city a developed setting; it returns to it through the father’s account, where a hospital month and the loss of a leg outlast the promise that history is about to change.