Prussia functions in the novel both as a place in history and as a homeland that has become impossible to locate. In the childhood of Hans Reiter, his father’s stories and the family’s village landscape make Prussian identity tangible, even as the father’s repeated question—where Prussia went—turns it into an absence. That tension links family memory to the novel’s wider geography of displacement: from a village between forest and sea to cities, industrial outskirts, borders, and deserts where people and histories seem to disappear.

Historical Identity and Family Memory

Hans Reiter’s father imagines a family connection to a regiment of unusually tall soldiers who served under Frederick the Great. The story carries a warning as well as pride: the men’s height made them easy targets, and their imagined encounter with a similar Russian regiment ends in a terrible battle that continues even after the armies have retreated. The father’s conclusion is stark: a regiment of giants is madness. His recollection makes Prussia a military inheritance, but one inseparable from exposure to violence and loss.

The father’s own body bears a more recent history of war. He left for the front five foot five and returned a leg short and, as the narrative notes, an inch shorter. His damaged body and remembered service place him within the village as its surviving veteran, a figure whom others describe as a hero and a thoroughgoing Prussian. In the family’s present, however, Prussia is not a secure source of belonging. His one-eyed wife believes men can never be too tall, while he wonders whether a family legend of giant soldiers points to a past that cannot be recovered.

The Vanished Homeland

The father’s most sustained meditation begins with an emphatic distinction: the only people who are not swine are the Prussians, but Prussia no longer exists. He looks toward the Baltic from the rocks and imagines a mass migration during his hospitalization, with Prussian ships setting out for some faraway place. Sweden, Norway, and Finland are dismissed as hostile lands; Iceland and Greenland remain possibilities he cannot settle. The search produces no destination, only a gray horizon and the repeated question of where the Prussians went.

This is not presented as a factual account of a migration. It is the father’s private attempt to give a destination to a vanished political and cultural identity. He looks out to sea month after month, yet never sees the ships or discovers where they sailed. His son, who moves through the world as if walking along the seabed, watches the water differently: the father’s fear and longing are set beside the boy’s confidence that he will always surface. Prussia is thus remembered as something the father cannot find, while the child’s imagination turns the neighboring sea into a medium of movement rather than a map to a lost homeland.

Prussia in the Political Present

The contrast between local memory and national politics becomes explicit in 1933, the year Hitler seized power. Before the seizure, a propaganda committee passes through the region, holding a rally in the Town of Chattering Girls and visiting nearby settlements before reaching Hans’s town. Its members present National Socialism as a movement that will raise Germany and Prussia from their ashes. Their political promise adopts the father’s vocabulary of loss, but redirects it toward a new national project.

The committee’s visit also exposes the distance between its rhetoric and the veteran’s circumstances. A member asks why Reiter is not at the tavern with his comrades. The villagers explain that he has no money for a beer and is at home with his daughter while his wife works; when summoned, he refuses to come, saying he is not properly dressed to meet the visitors. The committee offers to buy him a drink, but its attention to the old soldier does not erase his poverty or bring him into its gathering. Prussia appears here as a political symbol that can be invoked by newcomers, even as the person whose life embodies its older military memory remains on the margins.

A Geography of Absence

The locations associated with Hans’s childhood are given names that sound like fragments of a private map: the Village of Red Men, the Village of Blue Women, the Town of the Fat, and the Town of Chattering Girls. Beyond the first two lie peat-selling settlements and a lake that dries up in summer; beyond them, the boy encounters places that seem abandoned or inhabited by the dead. The Prussian village stands between forest and sea, grounded in ordinary work and family life yet surrounded by a landscape that makes distance and disappearance feel near.

The novel later brings Prussia back through memory rather than through a stable political map. In a conversation about Hugo Halder, the Baroness says she has heard nothing of him since the war. For a brief time, Archimboldi entertains the idea that he might himself be Hugo. The uncertainty does not establish an identity; it shows how war and disappearance unsettle the boundary between remembered people. The Baroness’s recollection of her family’s country estate also reconnects the present to an earlier Prussian social world: Lotte remembers accompanying her mother there to dust, sweep, polish candlesticks, and wax the floors. Her childhood memory supplies practical, domestic detail to a place otherwise encountered through inherited stories and lost affiliations.

The Distant Echo in Santa Teresa

Prussia’s significance is not confined to the European past. The novel’s account of Santa Teresa sets out a city that seems to expand without limit: poor neighborhoods, neglected streets, industrial parks, unpaved outskirts, a garbage-filled gully, and the horizon of the maquiladoras. The critics drive through its contrasting districts and look north across the fence toward the Arizona desert. They believe the city is growing by the second. The setting’s scale and uneven infrastructure make it difficult to distinguish settled space from its edges, and its repeated boundaries echo the novel’s broader concern with places that cannot hold their inhabitants securely.

That geography becomes materially consequential in the accounts of women who vanish while moving between work and home. Margarita Lopez Santos leaves a night shift at a maquiladora at about five-thirty in the morning. Her walk home is expected to take about fifty minutes, but the roads and neighborhoods along the route lack adequate lighting, paving, and drainage; many homes in the northern part of Colonia Guadalupe Victoria have no electricity. More than forty days after her disappearance, children find her body near a shack in Colonia Maytorena. The novel does not equate Santa Teresa with Prussia, or its contemporary violence with the father’s remembered wars. Instead, it places distinct histories of vulnerability and disappearance within a book whose geographies repeatedly make absence visible without resolving it. Prussia remains the father’s lost point of origin; Santa Teresa is a present-day landscape where the city’s expansion, its industrial margins, and its poorly lit routes shape the conditions under which people disappear.