Second World War (5f3e28b5)

Second World War is the historical period through which Hans Reiter’s wartime experience takes shape, from his service on the Eastern Front to his surrender and internment in 1945. Its decisive significance lies in the way the novel makes war both an event and an afterlife: military defeat carries Reiter into a prisoner-of-war camp, while the dead, the notebook he carries, and the records made about him continue to shape what can be remembered or known. The period also resurfaces in accounts of Archimboldi’s past and in later characters’ attempts to interpret violence, without the novel reducing those later circumstances to a simple repetition of the war.

Reiter on the Eastern Front

At the start of the summer of 1942, Reiter is returned to his division after his time in Kostekino. He carries Ansky’s notebook under his jacket, between the clothing associated with his earlier, disordered state and his soldier’s uniform. The route of the campaign unfolds as a sequence of movement across a vast front: Crimea and Kerch, the Kuban and Krasnodar, then through the Caucasus to Budennovsk and across the Kalmuk Steppe. Reiter sees no enemy troops during this stretch, but he does see the men around him altered by the war. Wilke speaks almost exclusively in dialect, Kruse’s voice has changed, and Sergeant Lemke, once a shouter, usually addresses his men in a murmur.

The division’s retreat makes the war’s attrition concrete. After Lemke is gravely wounded in the attempt to reach Tuapse, Sergeant Bublitz replaces him. The Russians counterattack in the autumn, and Reiter’s division, now part of the 17th Army rather than the 11th, falls back from Elista toward Proletarskaya and along the Manych River to Rostov, then west to the Mius River. When the Russians attack again in the summer of 1943, the division retreats once more with fewer men. Kruse and Bublitz are killed; Voss is promoted from sergeant to lieutenant, and the casualties under his command double in less than a week.

Reiter adapts to a routine shaped by scarcity and death. He inspects the dead and searches their pockets for food, as Wilke does. The two are nicknamed vampires by some of their comrades; Wilke sings to himself while Reiter keeps silent. In his free time, Reiter takes bread and Ansky’s notebook from his jacket and reads. The notebook remains a counterpoint to the military uniform: a record of another person’s thoughts carried through retreat, while the immediate demands of survival increasingly organize Reiter’s days.

Surrender and the prisoner-of-war camp

After years of retreat, Reiter returns to Germany. In May 1945, aged twenty-five, he emerges from two months in hiding in a forest and surrenders to American soldiers. He is interned in a prisoner-of-war camp outside Ansbach, where he showers after many days and finds that the food is good. The camp is divided between barracks built by Black American soldiers and large tents. Visitors inspect prisoners’ papers, at first at a table outside and later in a three-room barracks built for the process.

Reiter tries not to associate with the other German prisoners and knows no one in the camp. His former comrades from the 79th and later the 303rd have been killed, captured by the Russians, or deserted. He had left his division while what remained of it was heading toward Pilsen, amid the confusion at the end of the war. In the camp, German soldiers sing in the afternoons while Black American guards watch from their posts; conversations among prisoners turn to hunger, Hitler’s death, the possibility of hostilities between the Soviets and the Allies, and the prospect that another potato harvest might save Germany from hardship.

The camp’s formal review eventually reaches prisoners whose surnames begin with Q, R, and S. Reiter is questioned by soldiers and civilians who ask him to face forward and sideways and examine his files. Asked what he did during the war, he says he served in Romania with the 79th and then in Russia, where he was wounded several times; the interviewers ask to see the wounds. A civilian with a Berlin accent asks whether he eats well in the camp. Reiter says he eats like a king, and the answer makes the interviewers laugh when it is translated. The episode sets bureaucratic scrutiny beside a small, guarded joke: the former soldier is now a prisoner being assessed, but the examination does not make his experience fully legible.

Death, silence, and the camp’s records

Reiter’s stay in the camp is marked by the murder of Sammer, whose body is found strangled between a tent and the latrines. The Americans question about ten prisoners, including Reiter, who says he heard nothing unusual during the night. Sammer’s body is removed and buried in the common grave at the Ansbach cemetery. The investigation produces a statement and a burial, but the evidence supplied here does not identify a killer or establish what Reiter knows beyond his answer to the interrogators.

This episode belongs to a wider pattern in the novel in which war’s violence is followed by incomplete testimony and institutional procedures. Reiter is questioned, Sammer is buried, and the camp continues; neither the interview nor the common grave supplies a complete account of the death. The distinction matters: the novel presents the recorded answer as part of the event’s aftermath, not as proof that the mystery has been resolved.

The war’s later echoes

The war reaches beyond Reiter’s direct experience through the stories told about Archimboldi. A Swabian cultural promoter recalls meeting the young writer in a Frisian town after the war, where Archimboldi arrived in a black leather jacket that the speaker associates with jackets worn by Gestapo officers. The recollection makes clothing a carrier of historical association, but it does not establish the young writer’s political identity. Elsewhere, the European critics imagine that an elderly Archimboldi, if awarded the Nobel Prize, would represent a wartime deserter still on the run and a reminder of Europe’s past. This is their conjecture about his public meaning, not confirmation of his whereabouts or motives.

Other parts of the novel place wartime experience beside later political violence while preserving differences of time, place, and speaker. Amalfitano recalls that the coup in Chile forced him into exile in Argentina in 1974, and describes exile as a movement that may help abolish what is generally taken to be fate. In his reflections on a book attributed to Kilapan, he imagines the prose as potentially belonging to a dictator or to figures across Chile’s political spectrum; this is a speculative reading of political language, not a factual claim that the text was written by any of them. The war thus supplies one historical frame through which characters approach authoritarianism and violence, but the novel leaves their analogies open to scrutiny rather than treating the histories as identical.

Death’s legibility and narrative form

A speech about how society has represented death places the Second World War’s historical horizon within a broader account of selective attention. The speaker contrasts the deaths of thousands during the Paris Commune with the wide newspaper coverage of a knife sharpener who killed his wife and elderly mother. He also points to people who died aboard slave ships, whose deaths did not provoke the same public response as deaths regarded as belonging to society. The contrast is not a survey of the war itself; it clarifies a recurring question in the novel: which deaths enter public language, and which remain outside the stories a society is willing to tell.

The novel approaches the period through different forms of mediation: Reiter’s movement through war and captivity, a remembered meeting with Archimboldi, critics’ speculation about a missing writer, and arguments about political language and public memory. These accounts do not combine into a single, complete record. They show how historical violence persists through the objects carried from it, the questions asked after it, and the stories that later observers build around incomplete evidence. Second World War is therefore not only the setting of Reiter’s past but also one of the novel’s measures for thinking about survival, responsibility, and the limits of what testimony can establish.