Germany in 2666 is both a place of ordinary passage and a landscape overtaken by political and military upheaval. Hans Reiter’s route through labor, Berlin, and family visits gives the country a personal geography, while the invasion of Poland and Boris Abramovich Ansky’s reflections place it within the wider history of war. The novel presents these scales together: work and friendship continue amid political change, even as the march toward war makes ordinary life newly precarious.

Work, Berlin, and Displacement

In 1936, after the baron closed his country house and dismissed the servants, Hans Reiter was left without work. He joined the laborers building the Reich’s highways and sent nearly all of his salary to his family each month, keeping little for himself. The construction crews’ drinking contests offered a brief social routine, but Reiter did not enjoy alcohol; when his team was stationed near Berlin, he gave notice and left.

Berlin became a place where Reiter sought help through an existing friendship. He found Hugo Halder in the city, and Halder secured him a clerk’s job in a stationery shop. Reiter rented a bed in a shared room in a house occupied by working men. His roommate, Füchler, was a factory night watchman with shifting ailments and a history of grief and wandering after his young son’s death. The rooming house and stationery shop locate Reiter among ordinary urban work and precarious accommodation, far removed from the country estate where his previous employment had ended.

Family Visits and the Search for Halder

While posted in Romania, Reiter obtained two leaves and used them to visit his parents. His village remained a point of return, and on each journey he also stopped in Berlin, trying unsuccessfully to find Halder. At the family home, he spent long periods with his ten-year-old sister, Lotte, who adored him. Her devotion made him laugh but also sharpened his bleak thoughts about meaning and death; the narrative records that he avoided reaching a decision because he believed he would end up shot.

The search for Halder makes Berlin less a secure home than a city of missing connections. Halder’s former apartment was occupied by a family of civil servants, and the head of the household, a Party member, said he did not know where the previous tenant had gone. One of the daughters then approached Reiter with information, but the encounter did not provide a straightforward answer: she made disclosure conditional on his kissing her, and her laughter led him to fear that the police might arrive. The episode leaves Halder’s whereabouts unresolved in this scene and shows how Reiter’s attempt to recover a friendship is redirected through unstable, difficult encounters.

Germany and the Beginning of War

Reiter’s journey out of Germany is set against the outbreak of war. He carried only a few clothes and a copy of Animals and Plants of the European Coastal Region when he left; in September, the war began. His division advanced to the border and crossed into Poland behind the Panzer and motorized infantry divisions. The regiment’s early movement was described as a forced march without combat and with few precautions, conducted in an atmosphere that seemed almost festive despite the knowledge that some of the men would die.

The advance through Polish towns initially appeared orderly. The soldiers did not plunder; they smiled at children and young women, while motorcycle messengers carried orders between the troops and headquarters. From hilltops, they looked east toward a front they could not see and west toward the artillery dust cloud struggling to catch up. On the third day, Reiter’s regiment reached a river and moved through a forest toward a village where Polish resistance was expected. After the troops crossed at night and advanced, they found the village deserted. The sequence turns the apparent openness of the march into a threshold: the soldiers move forward into a war whose violence is not yet visible in every place they pass.

Historical Memory and Narrative Scale

Germany’s place in the novel is not confined to Reiter’s movements. Ansky’s notebooks set the invasion of Poland within a list of collapsing European settings: Warsaw falls, Paris falls, and the Soviet Union is attacked. Against this expanding chronology, Ansky considers parallel universes and the possibility that time and space might end, while returning to the thought that only in chaos can people be conceived. His ideas do not cancel the historical events around him; their juxtaposition makes the notebook’s private speculation coexist with a continental catastrophe.

The book also places the war’s beginning beside a broader reflection on how societies make death visible—or leave it outside the bounds of public attention. In a discussion of earlier historical examples, violence against people excluded from society is contrasted with crimes that become legible through words and news. That account ranges from deaths during the Paris Commune to individual murders that drew widespread reporting. Read alongside the invasion and the later scenes of military advance, the contrast gives Germany’s wartime setting a larger narrative pressure: events may be recorded, imagined, or left at the margins, but the act of narration does not make every life equally visible. Germany thus functions as a concrete setting for Reiter’s work and relationships and as part of the novel’s wider inquiry into war, memory, and the unequal public recognition of violence.