Paderborn is the setting for the postwar chapters of Lotte Reiter’s life: a place of refuge and work, of marriage and motherhood, and of years spent imagining what became of Klaus after he left for America. The town’s ordinary routines—school, repair work, beer halls, family travel—form the long interval between Lotte’s reunion with her brother, Hans, and her eventual journey to Santa Teresa, where the distance she has tried to bridge is revealed in a new way.

Refuge and Reconstruction

Lotte and her mother reach Paderborn after leaving a house that has been occupied by refugees; the relative they hoped to find is absent, and a neighbor doubts they will see him again. For a time they depend on charity and assistance from the English. Lotte’s father becomes ill and dies, having asked to be buried in his village with military honors. His family promises to honor the request, but his remains are placed in a common grave in the Paderborn cemetery. Lotte regards the absence of a ceremony as a failure of attention at precisely the moment when ceremony should matter.

When the refugees leave, Lotte’s mother takes possession of her brother’s house. Lotte alternates between work and school, leaving one for the other more than once before settling into employment. Her mother begins a relationship with an elderly former civil servant whose career spans the Kaiser’s government and the Nazi years. He offers a dry assessment of his profession, but the details of his past do not change the practical scale of life in the household. Lotte’s mother does not want to return to the village, now in the Soviet zone, and shows little interest in learning what happened to her missing son.

Lotte, meanwhile, begins to make a life outside the household. She dates an English soldier, then a young man from Paderborn whose family disapproves of her. The relationship ends when he leaves for university. Her attention is on her own happiness and her attachment to him, not on winning over his family. Paderborn is thus both a place of constraint and a place where she begins to choose her own attachments.

Hans’s Return and Lotte’s Marriage

One night, while Lotte is ironing a dress in the kitchen, she recognizes her brother’s footsteps and runs to answer the door. Hans does not recognize the grown woman who opens it. Lotte does not need to question him before clinging to him; they talk until dawn, and he eventually falls asleep at the table. Their reunion is intense but brief: two days later he leaves, and everyday life resumes.

By then their mother has replaced the former civil servant with a mechanic who owns a successful repair business. He offers Lotte a job at the shop, but she refuses. Before her mother marries him, Lotte meets Werner Haas, a worker there. They begin going to the movies and dance halls, and, after the marriage, Lotte and her mother move into the mechanic’s house. The mechanic suspects Hans of being a criminal living by dishonest means, a judgment that contrasts with the intimate reunion Lotte has just experienced.

Lotte marries Werner. Their honeymoon is spent at a small spa beside the Rhine, after which they return to their jobs and familiar routine. Even in a one-room flat, married life is easy: Werner helps with the chores, takes her to the movies or into the countryside on his motorcycle, and sometimes buys her clothes. He works overtime and takes side jobs repairing farm machinery; payment may come in sausages, meat, or sacks of flour, so the couple’s kitchen can look like a storeroom. Their domestic life is modest but resourceful, sustained by shared routines rather than by wealth.

Work, Family, and the Departure for America

When the mechanic dies without warning, Werner takes over the shop. Lotte’s mother and her lawyers settle the inheritance claims of distant relatives, while the couple move into the larger flat above the business. The arrangement brings Werner greater responsibility and makes home and work difficult to separate: he is almost always working. The shop remains busy, and later business ventures bring Lotte and Werner some profit without making them rich.

They still travel. They spend a week in Paris, visit Lake Constance with Lotte’s mother, and eventually discuss whether to have a child. Though the Cold War and the threat of nuclear attack weigh on the question, their financial position is strong. Lotte ends the discussion by telling Werner she is pregnant. Before the baby is born, they buy a car and take an extended holiday through southern France, Spain, and Portugal. On the return journey they detour through Cologne to look for the only address Lotte has for Hans.

Their son Klaus grows up in the orbit of the family business, but Paderborn cannot hold him. At seventeen, he is involved with two friends in a car theft and a sexual-assault case involving an Italian factory worker. His friends, who are legally adults, go to prison; Klaus is sent to a reformatory for four months. There he learns to repair household appliances, and on returning home he works in his father’s shop. For a while he stays out of trouble, but later he drinks with other young workers and gets into fights and vandalism. Werner pays fines and retrieves him from the police station.

Klaus eventually decides that Paderborn is too small for him and leaves for Munich. He tells Lotte that he sees no future in Germany or Europe and hopes to try his luck in America once he has saved enough money. He later sails from Kiel on a German ship bound for New York. Lotte weeps when he leaves, fearing that he will not be happy in the new country. Werner drives him to the port and tries to reassure her about the ship and Klaus’s work as a waiter and part-time dishwasher, but she has avoided going to Kiel herself because she does not want to prolong the farewell.

A Distant Son and a Changing Town

Klaus first sends a postcard showing the Statue of Liberty, saying that the figure is on his side. Months pass, then more than a year, before another postcard arrives. He writes that he is applying for American citizenship and has a good job; the return address is Macon, Georgia. Lotte and Werner write back with questions about his health, finances, and plans, but he does not answer. In time they make themselves believe that he is settled and well. Lotte imagines him with an American wife and children, yet the wife has no face in her dreams, and the children remain unseen and unheard. Her imagined family life is a form of hope that cannot supply the missing information.

Years later, when Werner becomes ill and is told to stop working, he and Lotte travel. They visit the Nile, Jerusalem, southern Spain, Florence, Rome, and Venice, but first they go to the United States. In New York and then Macon, they discover that Klaus’s former home was an apartment in an old building near a Black neighborhood. They hire an Atlanta detective, who warns them that finding a naturalized citizen after so long is like searching for a needle in a haystack and that Klaus may have changed his name. The investigation yields only people who knew or employed Klaus before he left Atlanta; neither knows where he went next. Lotte and Werner end the search for the time being rather than pay for further lines of inquiry.

After Werner dies of heart disease, Lotte remains in Paderborn and responds to her loss through activity. She keeps the shop in order and her investments profitable, expands into other businesses, and succeeds. Work becomes the organizing force of her later life. Her vacations are short, usually in Italy or Spain, and she often goes alone to the beach, where she reads, rests, or watches others dance in the hotel club. The town remains her base, but it no longer defines the limits of her movement.

From Paderborn to Santa Teresa

Lotte’s life in Paderborn eventually becomes the starting point for a new attempt to reach Klaus. In Santa Teresa, she meets his lawyer, Isabel Santolaya, and learns that the trial has been troubled by irregularities and may be declared a mistrial. When Lotte later speaks with Isabel by telephone from Paderborn, she asks directly whether there is a relationship between the lawyer and her son. Isabel confirms it. Lotte’s first response is to wonder whether the attachment is difficult for Isabel, then to recognize that her own maternal bond does not make her the only person constrained by love.

The revelation also connects the distant family story to the conditions of Klaus’s imprisonment: Isabel explains that she and Klaus are lovers, and Lotte recalls that prisoners may receive conjugal visits. The knowledge changes what Lotte understands about her son’s life in Santa Teresa, though it does not resolve the trial or his future. Paderborn therefore frames a history of waiting and partial knowledge. Postcards, imagined scenes, and an abandoned search keep Klaus present in Lotte’s life without bringing him home; the later phone call supplies an intimate fact, but not the reunion or certainty she once hoped for.