Klaus Has

Klaus Haas is Lotte Reiter’s son and the nephew of Hans Reiter, later known as Benno von Archimboldi. Raised in Paderborn, Klaus grows from an ordinary, mechanically minded boy into a young man repeatedly in trouble with the law, then leaves Germany for the United States. Years later his mother learns that he is imprisoned in Santa Teresa; his trial ends in a conviction for four murders, a verdict that does not appear to disturb him and that his lawyer intends to appeal.

Identity and Family Background

Lotte and Werner name their son Klaus after Lotte’s maternal grandfather. Lotte had considered naming him Hans, after her brother, but reflects that the person matters more than the name. From the beginning, Klaus is adored by his grandmother and father, though he is closest to Lotte. At times Lotte sees her brother’s likeness in the boy, imagining him as a small reincarnation of Hans—a striking thought because she had previously associated Hans with everything large and outsized.

That resemblance becomes a family reference point rather than a route to actual intimacy with the absent uncle. Klaus asks his father about Hans and whether he looks like him. Werner describes Hans as quiet and observant; Lotte says her brother had not always been that way, and attributes his reserve to the war’s artillery, mortars, and machine-gun fire. She confirms the physical likeness—both men are tall and thin—while distinguishing Klaus’s much blonder hair and possibly brighter blue eyes. After this exchange Klaus stops asking, and ordinary life resumes.

Klaus’s childhood in Paderborn is largely conventional. He plays soccer with friends and basketball at school, is an unremarkable student, and shows an unusual interest in machines, spending hours watching the mechanics in his father’s shop. His one childhood fight follows a classmate’s insult about his one-eyed grandmother. A separate, unsettling detail is that when illness does strike, his fever rises sharply and he becomes delirious, seeing things others cannot. When he is twelve, his grandmother dies of cancer in a Paderborn hospital. Under continuous morphine, she mistakes him for Archimboldi, calls him her son, and sometimes speaks to him in the dialect of her Prussian birthplace, bringing family history into the child’s bedside visits through confusion and memory.

From Paderborn to the United States

At seventeen, Klaus becomes involved with two friends in a car theft and a later sexual-assault case concerning an Italian woman employed at a small medical-supply factory. His friends, already legally adults, serve time in prison; Klaus is sent to a reformatory for four months. There he works in a repair shop and learns to fix appliances ranging from refrigerators to blenders. On returning home, he receives a job in his father’s shop and for a while stays out of trouble. Lotte and Werner try to believe that he has found a steadier path.

That hope proves provisional. At eighteen, Klaus briefly dates a bakery worker, but the relationship lasts scarcely three months. His parents do not meet another girlfriend and wonder whether he has none or simply does not bring anyone home. He begins drinking after work in Paderborn’s beer halls with other young workers from the shop. Friday- and Saturday-night fights and vandalism bring him back to the police station, where Werner repeatedly has to collect him and pay fines. Eventually Klaus decides that Paderborn is too small for him and leaves for Munich. His occasional collect calls home are trivial and strained, yet Lotte finds them comforting.

After several months, Klaus tells his mother that he sees no future in Germany or Europe and intends to try his luck in America once he has saved enough money. He works at the shop for a few months, then sails from Kiel on a German ship bound for New York, working as a waiter and part-time dishwasher. Lotte weeps when he leaves. Although he is tall and does not look fragile, she fears he will not be happy in a place where, as she imagines it, men will be less tall and blond than he is but more clever and ill-intentioned. Werner drives him to Kiel and later reassures Lotte that the ship is sturdy and the work is not dangerous. Lotte has refused to go to the port, unwilling to prolong the pain of parting.

From New York, Klaus sends a postcard of the Statue of Liberty, writing that the woman is on his side. Months pass without news, then more than a year. In his next postcard, he says he is applying for U.S. citizenship and has a good job; the return address is Macon, Georgia. Lotte and Werner write with questions about his health, money, and plans, but he never replies. His departure therefore becomes more than a change of country: it establishes a long pattern in which the family receives brief signs of life without the explanations it seeks.

Imprisonment and Lotte’s Efforts to Reach Him

In 1995, Lotte receives a telegram from Santa Teresa saying that Klaus is in prison. The message comes from his lawyer, Isabel Santolaya. The shock is so great that Lotte leaves her office and goes to bed, though she cannot sleep; the thought that Klaus is alive is what matters most. She replies with her phone number. Four days later, after operators ask whether she will accept a collect call, a woman speaks to her slowly in English. Lotte cannot understand her until the caller manages to convey that Klaus is fine and that there is a translator. The lawyer also dictates a phone number, which Lotte carefully writes down.

Lotte responds at once by arranging help: she calls a secretarial school and requests someone fluent in English and Spanish, even though mechanics at the shop could have helped with English. A young woman arrives at the shop three hours later. The episode shows Lotte’s practical urgency alongside her isolation; a few reassuring words about Klaus are enough to redirect her entire day, while language stands between her and the details of his condition.

By her later visits, Lotte has begun learning how to inhabit the unfamiliar setting around the prison. While waiting, she talks with women visiting inmates and learns simple Spanish compliments for children and elderly women. She buys a shawl, which sometimes hides her face when she weeps behind Isabel and the lawyer. Klaus, meanwhile, remains distant and cold, seeming unchanged by imprisonment. Lotte chooses not to raise a troubling matter during one visit or press him with questions, leaving a widening gap between her need to know and his apparent withdrawal.

Trial and Ending

In 1997 Lotte returns to Mexico alone because Ingrid, who had accompanied her before, has found a good job and cannot travel. Lotte’s Spanish has improved enough for her to speak with Isabel by phone. On reaching Santa Teresa, however, she reads something unusual in the lawyer’s expression and in the length of her embrace. The trial lasts twenty days and passes for Lotte as if in a dream. At its end, Klaus is found guilty of four murders.

That evening Isabel drives Lotte to her hotel and stays instead of leaving. Lotte offers her a drink, although she is exhausted and wants to sleep. Beside a large window overlooking a tree-lined avenue and the passing cars, Isabel curses in Spanish, as Lotte understands it, and begins to cry. Lotte realizes that the lawyer is in love with her son. Isabel tells her the trial was plagued by irregularities and would probably be declared a mistrial; she promises to appeal. Lotte thinks about Klaus, whose response to the verdict seems negligible, and about Isabel, concluding that the two of them make a couple in a way that is strange yet natural. The account leaves Klaus’s fate unresolved: the conviction stands at the end of the described episode, but the promised appeal and the lawyer’s doubts keep its legal conclusion open.

Narrative Role

Klaus’s history is presented largely through what Lotte learns, remembers, and fears. The contrast between the family’s modest routines in Paderborn and the distant prison in Santa Teresa makes his life legible through absences: unanswered letters, short collect calls, a postcard, and the difficulty of understanding a phone message. His resemblance to Hans adds an inheritance motif without making Klaus a replica of his uncle; the family resemblance persists even as Klaus’s choices and circumstances separate him from the life Lotte hoped he would lead.

His characterization also depends on a tension between visible vulnerability and emotional inaccessibility. His mother grieves over the departure of a tall, capable young man, yet receives little explanation from him after he leaves. Later, when she travels across an ocean to see him, he remains distant, and the murder conviction appears not to affect him. The narrative gives no account here of his response beyond that detachment, so the contrast between Lotte’s sustained concern and Klaus’s silence remains unresolved.