Hans Reiter (Benno von Archimboldi) and Lotte Reiter

Hans Reiter and Lotte Reiter are bound by a lifelong intimacy formed in childhood separation and sustained through long absences, brief reunions, and Lotte’s persistent belief that her brother can return to rescue what remains of their family. To Lotte, Hans is first a giant whose survival seems to exceed the war’s power; as an adult, she welcomes him without questions and eventually asks him to take responsibility for the unresolved crisis surrounding her son, Klaus. His departure for Mexico gives their final reunion the shape of both a return and another separation.

Childhood and the Giant Brother

Lotte was born in 1930. She and Hans shared blond hair and blue eyes, though she never grew as tall as he did. When Hans left for the war, Lotte was nine and longed for him to receive leave and come home covered in medals. His absence quickly became a matter of dreams: she heard his footsteps approaching the family home, imagined his specially made Wehrmacht boots striding through puddles and brambles, and pictured him coming back to the house where she and her parents slept.

Her dreams also gave the war a more frightening possibility. Sometimes she dreamed that she had gone to war herself and found Hans’s body on a battlefield. Her mother tried to dismiss such dreams, while her father questioned her about the faces of the dead soldiers. In the dream, however, Hans’s face was always clean, and his expression remained sad but determined. Lotte’s confidence that he could do anything grew from this recurring image: even in dreams of death, he seemed capable of returning.

Lotte waited for the giant’s footsteps and imagined that Hans would tell her the war was over and that he was coming home forever. She could not say what would change after that promised return, only that everything would. As the war dragged on, his visits became less frequent and then stopped. Hearing her parents speak of him as if he were dead, she privately refused their conclusion. In her childish faith, giants did not die, or died only so late and quietly that their deaths could scarcely be noticed.

Separation and Return

When the family had to leave their village because the war was coming, Lotte hid in the forest rather than go with her parents. She believed that Hans must be coming too, because, in her imagination, he lived inside the war. Her father eventually found her and took her with them. The episode makes the siblings’ separation more than a matter of distance: Lotte’s hope in Hans shapes her resistance to the family’s move, even when it cannot change what happens.

After the war, the family’s circumstances changed, but the question of Hans remained open. Lotte’s mother did not want to return to the village, which had ended up in the Soviet zone, and showed little interest in learning her son’s fate. Lotte began dating, first an English soldier and later a young man from Paderborn, and pursued ordinary pleasures, including popular dances. That life did not erase her attachment to Hans; it continued alongside the uncertainty of whether he was alive or would come back.

One night, while Lotte was ironing a dress in the kitchen, she heard familiar footsteps and recognized Hans before opening the door. He did not recognize her at first because she had grown into a woman. She did not need to question him: she clung to him for a long time, and the siblings talked until dawn. Lotte had time to iron her dress and all her clean clothes before Hans, exhausted, fell asleep at the table. Their mother’s touch on his shoulder woke him. Two days later he left, and, as the narrative puts it, everything returned to normal—a phrase that marks both the reality of his visit and how little it could repair the separation.

Lotte’s Household and Hans’s Place in It

Lotte’s life continued to develop during Hans’s absences. Her mother replaced the civil servant she had been living with with a mechanic whose business repaired vehicles for occupation troops, farmers, and factory owners around Paderborn. The mechanic offered Lotte work in his shop at her mother’s request, but she refused. Before her mother married him, Lotte met Werner Haas, a worker at the shop. They liked one another, did not fight, and began going together to the movies and dance halls.

Even as Lotte’s life took shape around new relationships, Hans remained present in her dreams. In one, he appeared outside her bedroom window and questioned her mother’s impending marriage; he told Lotte not to marry, then disappeared, leaving the frost-covered window and the echo of the giant’s footsteps. The dream briefly turns Hans from the brother whose return she awaits into a voice that comments on the choices being made at home. When he later came to Paderborn, after their mother’s marriage, Lotte introduced him to Werner, and the two men seemed to get along. Hans could enter her changed life, but his visit did not restore the household to its earlier form.

Reunion and the Appeal for Klaus

Decades later, after Lotte had returned to Germany, Hans appeared at her home again. She was in her nightdress and about to go to bed when the doorbell rang. Asked who was there, he identified himself as her brother. They talked until dawn, repeating the pattern of the earlier reunion, but the concerns of the conversation had changed. Lotte spoke about her son, Klaus, and the killings of women in Santa Teresa. She also told Hans that Klaus dreamed of a giant who would rescue him from prison, then observed that Hans no longer looked like a giant.

Hans answered that he had never been a giant. The exchange places Lotte’s childhood image beside the adult reality of a brother who cannot simply embody the rescue she and Klaus imagine. The giant has been a way of making absence bearable and of imagining a return that could alter everything; now Lotte must speak to Hans about a concrete family crisis rather than a childhood promise. Her account also recalls that, in Klaus’s dreams, the rescuer from prison occupies the same giant-shaped place Hans once occupied for her.

Lotte describes herself as unable to understand what is happening and frightened by what little she does understand. She worries about Klaus in a Mexican prison, asks who will look after him, and fears that he has no children or friends to remember him after her death. Her question to Hans—whether he will take care of it all—gives the reunion its practical and emotional center. It is not followed by a clear explanation of what he will do. Hans asks for a beer, which she does not have, while her appeal remains in the conversation.

Departure and Narrative Significance

When Hans leaves Lotte, he goes on to Hamburg, where he plans to catch a direct flight to Mexico the following morning. His route makes the siblings’ reunion consequential: after listening to Lotte’s account and her request, he sets out toward the country where Klaus is imprisoned. The evidence establishes the sequence and destination, but does not turn Hans’s departure into a promise or specify what will follow. The ambiguity preserves the distinction between the childhood fantasy of an all-powerful rescuer and the uncertain action available to a brother confronting a crisis.

The relationship is structured by repetition with difference. Lotte recognizes Hans through his footsteps, welcomes him physically before asking anything, and talks with him through the night; each return is followed by his departure. The first reunion briefly restores the brother she had imagined, but only for two days. The later one takes place after decades of separation and centers not on the war’s end but on Klaus, prison, and Lotte’s fear that her son will be forgotten. Hans’s movement toward Mexico answers her appeal only in the form of a journey, leaving the outcome open. Through Lotte’s memories, the novel gives the absent writer a family history in which return is always desired, repeatedly achieved, and never sufficient to make everything change.