Second World War

World War II is both a historical catastrophe and a recurring structure of memory in 2666. It determines the circumstances of Hans Reiter’s family, separates him from his younger sister Lotte, and returns through scattered scenes of retreat, flight, and postwar survival. The novel does not confine the war to a completed past: its consequences persist in displaced lives, fractured recollections, and the stories people tell to make the vanished present again.

Family and the Wartime World

The family history opens through the parents’ wartime experience. Hans’s father, a one-legged veteran, had lost a leg in the war and spent time in a military hospital near Düren. There, unable to move about, he watched the other patients and guarded his cigarettes; a scene involving a bandaged patient, remembered as a mummy, gives the hospital episode the strange, dreamlike quality that recurs in the book’s treatment of wartime memory. The father eventually left the hospital and made his way home, while the war continued to shape his family’s sense of what could be endured or recovered.

Hans’s mother is blind in one eye, and the returning soldier’s reunion with her becomes a private counterpoint to military history. After weeks of wandering, during which Germany surrendered, he arrived home in ragged condition. His mother did not recognize him at first, but his family welcomed and fed him. He then asked whether the girl who was blind in one eye had married. When he went to see her, she recognized him immediately. His formal salute at her window became the basis for his recurring claim that everyone in the town was blind and the one-eyed girl was a queen: a personal image of recognition formed amid the disorder of war and return.

Hans Reiter and the Separation of War

Born in 1920, Hans grew up in a world where the war and its aftermath were not abstractions. In 1933, the year Hitler seized power, a National Socialist propaganda committee visited his town. Its members presented their movement as a promise to restore Germany and Prussia, while the townspeople discussed Hans’s father as the only man from the locality who had returned alive from the front. The contrast places private war experience beside public political rhetoric: the veteran’s survival is a local fact, while the new movement seeks to absorb the past into a national story.

When Hans went away to war, Lotte was nine. She imagined his return in dreams, hearing the steps of a giant in oversized Wehrmacht boots approaching the family home. In other dreams, she saw him dead on a battlefield. As his visits grew less frequent and then ceased, she held to the belief that he must still be alive, reasoning that giants do not die until they are very old. Her parents spoke of him as though he were already dead, but their talk did not dislodge the private certainty she had built from absence.

The family’s own flight westward deepens that separation. As the war approached their village, Lotte hid because she believed Hans was coming with it; her father found her in the forest and forced her to leave with the family. On the road along the coast, she called out to passing soldiers to ask whether they knew her brother. The first column, a mixture of ages and incomplete uniforms, politely said no. The second exists in the scene as Lotte’s vision of ghosts: its spectral soldiers offer contradictory accounts of Hans, placing him in Soviet country, at the Dnieper, on the Kalmuk Steppe, in Hungary, and near a cemetery. These answers do not resolve his fate; they give form to the uncertainty that has taken hold of her.

Flight, Surrender, and Displacement

The family’s westward journey carries them through a landscape in which ordinary time seems to break down. They stop in Lübeck, but Lotte’s father fears that the Russians will come and continues west. Lotte loses her sense of days and nights; the passage describes time as a continuum marked by brightness and explosions rather than a stable sequence. The family’s movement is therefore more than a change of location: it is an experience of flight in which home, chronology, and reliable knowledge all become difficult to hold onto.

One night, Lotte sees her parents and other figures listening to the radio. A voice announces that Hitler is dead. The news reaches her alongside the onset of her first menstrual period, which her mother explains as a change that comes to women. Lotte thinks that her brother does not exist, but that this does not mean he is dead. The two changes—political news and bodily maturation—meet in a scene where the adults respond to the announcement with subdued grief, while Lotte continues to separate absence from death. The war’s ending does not give her the certainty she needs about Hans.

The novel also follows wartime memory beyond the Reiter family. Years later, Benno von Archimboldi searches the Internet and recognizes Hermes Popescu as the secretary of General Entrescu, whose crucified body he had encountered in 1944 as the German army retreated from the Romanian border. That discovery links an intimate remembered image to the later life of someone who survived the war and entered Romanian exile circles in Paris. Popescu’s subsequent career in murky business dealings and management of undocumented workers reveals a postwar life shaped by adaptation, not a clean return to an earlier order.

War’s Afterlives and Narrative Form

The war’s significance extends beyond the scenes set during it. Archimboldi’s later public identity as an elderly writer is shadowed by the possibility that he is a World War II deserter still on the run, an association invoked when European critics speculate about a possible Nobel Prize. The description joins literary reputation to unresolved history: the imagined public honor sits beside the figure of a man whose wartime past may never have been fully settled.

Across these episodes, the novel presents history indirectly, through remembered scenes, family stories, a child’s dreams, reported encounters, and later acts of recognition. The accounts do not combine into a single authoritative explanation of what happened to Hans or of what the war left behind. Instead, they show how historical violence persists unevenly: in a veteran’s altered body, a sister’s imagined giant, a family forced west, and a writer’s recognition of a name encountered decades later. World War II is thus not merely the period in which these events occur; it is the rupture that makes absence, displacement, and uncertain testimony central to the lives and narratives that follow.