Lot

Lotte Reiter is Hans Reiter’s younger sister, present in his wartime story chiefly through letters and remembered words. Her affectionate image of him as a giant gives his wandering a human counterpoint: while he moves alone through occupied territory, her writing keeps a bond with home alive and imagines his footsteps reaching people far beyond the family.

Letters in Wartime

As Hans Reiter walks west amid the retreat, he spends nights on the move and days sheltering, sleeping, and reading Ansky’s notebook. His family is distant and nearly unreachable: he has had no news for a long time, and the letters from his parents and sister occupy different places in his memory. He cannot recall what his mother wrote, only her shaky, sprawling handwriting and its errors. Lotte’s letters, by contrast, remain vivid to him. They tell him about her village, school, dresses, and the things that have happened to her, as well as about him.

The distinction makes Lotte’s correspondence more than a record of domestic life. Hidden in the grass and falling asleep, Reiter remembers her words with a pleasure that briefly interrupts the exposed, solitary conditions of his march. The letters preserve ordinary particulars—clothes, school, village life—against the disintegration of the world around him. They also make him a recipient again: someone whose sister watches his life from afar and writes him into hers.

The Giant in Her Letters

Lotte calls her brother a giant, an image that initially disconcerts him. He then interprets it as a child’s response to his unusual height: for a girl as young and impressionable as Lotte, he is the closest thing to a giant she has ever seen. Her letters enlarge that private observation into a whole landscape. His steps echo through the forest; birds stop singing, workers in the fields hear him, and people concealed in dark rooms hear him too. Even Hitler Youth members, in her imagined scene, come out to wait for him on the road into town.

The vision turns Reiter’s physical scale into a figure for presence and survival. Lotte’s extravagant description sets his solitary body against a world populated by listeners, making him seem connected to people he cannot see. Its imagined happiness and declaration that he is alive, and that Germany is alive, carry the strained confidence of a letter written from home during wartime. The giant is at once her affectionate invention and a measure of the distance between her life and his.

Family Memory and the Old Woman’s Words

Much later, an old woman tells Reiter that his mother is alive and thinks of him every night, and that Lotte is alive and dreams of him every morning, afternoon, and night. She repeats the image that his giant’s strides echo in his sister’s head, joining Lotte’s remembered letters to a new assurance about her continuing attachment. The father is not mentioned. The scene thus brings Lotte back not through a letter in Reiter’s hands but through someone else’s report, preserving the sister’s place in his life while leaving the family’s condition only partly disclosed.

Across these appearances, Lotte is both a character in her own right—writing about the village, school, and dresses—and a presence Reiter carries through memory. Her letters give his wartime movement a domestic measure, while the giant image converts distance into a sound that reaches her. The recurring echo is intimate rather than triumphant: it cannot bring the siblings together, but it makes their separation imaginable as a continuing bond.