Nazi Seizure of Power in 1933

Nazi Seizure of Power in 1933 is a historical marker in Hans Reiter’s early life and in the political atmosphere surrounding his town. In that year he left school after being judged unfit for it, and a National Socialist propaganda committee passed through the area. The novel places these developments side by side without making Reiter’s difficulties a consequence of the political movement: the connection is one of chronology and contrast, between an institution’s verdict on a distracted boy and a movement presenting itself as Germany’s renewal.

A Year of Departure and Political Persuasion

At thirteen, Reiter left school. He had begun attending a school in the Town of Chattering Girls the previous year, but disliked it and was habitually late. On his walks there, his thoughts turned toward marine life and the imagined transformation of the landscape into an underwater world. In 1933 the headmaster summoned his parents; only his mother attended. The headmaster said Reiter was not fit for school and suggested that she apprentice him in a trade.

The same year, before Hitler seized power, a propaganda committee traveled through Reiter’s town and neighboring villages. It held a rally at a movie theater in the Town of Chattering Girls, then continued through Pig Village and Egg Village before reaching Reiter’s town. At a tavern, its members spoke with local farmers and fishermen about National Socialism as a movement that would raise Germany and Prussia from their ruins. Their reception was described as open and friendly. The episode shows political persuasion entering ordinary social life through conversation and hospitality, rather than through a formal account of state power.

The Tavern and Reiter’s Family

The committee’s interest in Reiter’s father brought the political gathering into contact with the family’s circumstances. A townsman mentioned that Reiter’s father was a one-legged veteran who had returned alive from the front and was known for telling stories of his wartime experiences. One committee member wanted to meet him and asked why Reiter was not at the tavern with his National Socialist comrades. A local replied that the father could not afford even a beer. The committee offered to buy him one and sent a townsman to fetch him.

The father declined to come, saying he was not suitably dressed to meet the committee and was alone with his daughter because his wife was still at work. The exchange makes the committee’s friendly manner more complicated: its members offer hospitality, but also presume the right to summon a veteran into their company and invoke the son’s supposed comradeship with them. Reiter himself is absent from the gathering, and the explanation for that absence is practical and domestic, not political.

Work After School

Leaving school led Reiter through a series of short-lived jobs rather than into the conventional education the headmaster had rejected. He worked for three months on a fishing boat, where the skipper dismissed him because he watched the sea floor instead of helping cast the nets. He was then let go from farm labor for idling, and later tried peat gathering, work in a tool shop in the Town of the Fat, and helping a farmer take vegetables to Stettin. Each placement ended because he was considered more burden than help.

Finally, Reiter was put to work at a Prussian baron’s country house in a forest near a dark lake; his mother also worked there. The move gives his childhood a different kind of education: surrounded by a large library, he dusted books one by one and handled them carefully, though he did not read them. He remained attached to his book about marine life and feared the baron’s occasional arrival. The year’s institutional verdict therefore does not close off Reiter’s development; it redirects him into a life of work and into the orbit of books, without yet turning him into a reader.

Political Memory Beyond 1933

The novel later places 1933 within a wider reflection on how societies make violence visible—or render it socially unreadable. A speaker contrasts the deaths of enslaved people during transport with murders that provoked public attention, arguing that the difference lay in who counted as part of society and whose death could be written about. That reflection does not equate distinct historical events; it draws attention to the unequal distribution of public recognition and remembrance.

Elsewhere, Archimboldi is imagined by critics as an elderly World War II deserter and a possible Nobel candidate whose presence would remind Europe of its past. Amalfitano, asked why he was in Argentina in 1974, explains that the coup in Chile forced him into exile. These later passages extend the novel’s attention to political rupture and historical memory across different places and periods. Against that broader frame, Reiter’s 1933 story begins not with political participation but with dismissal from school, a distracted gaze toward the sea, and the practical sequence of jobs that follows.