Hans Wright and Lot's sibling relationship

The sibling relationship between Hans Reiter and Lotte is one of the earliest and most clearly expressed attachments in Hans’s life. When Lotte is born, he becomes her caregiver as well as her brother: he changes her diapers, prepares her bottles, and carries her until she falls asleep. His attempts to draw her transform the child he cannot quite capture on paper into a smiling little mermaid, making their bond visible through the book’s recurring marine imagery.

Lotte’s Birth and Hans’s Attachment

Hans is ten when his one-eyed mother and one-legged father have their second child, a girl named Lotte. She may be the first person in the world who truly interests or moves him. The narrator emphasizes this distinction: in a life otherwise closely associated with observation of the sea and its small forms, his sister becomes a singular human focus.

Their parents often leave Lotte in Hans’s care. He quickly learns the intimate, ordinary labor of tending to her—changing diapers, fixing bottles, and walking with her in his arms until she sleeps. The relationship is therefore established not just as an abstract feeling of brotherly affection but through repeated acts of bodily care.

Drawing Lotte as a Sea Creature

Hans tries to draw Lotte in the same notebook where he sketches different kinds of seaweed. At first, the effort fails: his pictures make her resemble rubbish abandoned on a pebbly beach or tiny marine insects that live among rocks and feed on scraps. These awkward comparisons show the limits of his draftsmanship, but also the imaginative vocabulary through which he approaches her.

In time, he manages to draw her as a mermaid, more fish than girl. The image does not simply reproduce her appearance. Its success lies in preserving her smile and her tendency to see the positive side of things, qualities the narration identifies as faithful to Lotte’s character. The mermaid brings Hans’s marine world and his affection for his sister together: he can render her most truly when he makes her part of the world he knows how to observe.

Care in the Family’s Domestic World

A later scene returns to Hans’s care for Lotte in the presence of their father and a former pilot. As the two men discuss political ambitions and the future of Germany, Hans arrives without speaking, lifts his sister from her cot, and carries her into the yard. The gesture gives the siblings’ relationship a quiet, concrete presence amid the adults’ uneasy conversation. Asked who the boy is, their father identifies him as his son; the scene has already shown Hans acting as Lotte’s attentive caretaker.

Across these details, the bond is defined by both attachment and action. Lotte is the person who first draws Hans out of his habitual imaginative isolation, while his practical care and repeated attempts to portray her make that importance legible. Her smile survives where his drawings otherwise fail, and the final image of Hans carrying her from the cot returns the relationship to its simplest form: a brother taking his baby sister in his arms.