Sevastopol is the besieged city that marks a decisive break in Hans Reiter’s military life: during the German assault, he is shot and later receives the Iron Cross, but a throat wound leaves him unable to speak. The city remains more than a military objective. It dominates the landscape of the trenches, where Reiter’s attention repeatedly returns to it, and its siege determines what happens to him after he is wounded.

The Siege and Reiter’s Wounding

In the weeks after an earlier near-death experience, Reiter takes part in the attack on Sevastopol. The advance is driven back, and attempts by German troops to establish a defensive line are met by the city’s artillery. Outside the city, near the Russian trenches, lie the bodies of German and Romanian soldiers; the fighting also becomes hand-to-hand. German assault troops reach a trench held by Russian sailors and fight there for five minutes. One side withdraws, but more sailors arrive, and the battle resumes.

The sailors’ presence in the trenches unsettles the ordinary logic of the scene. Wilke privately wonders where they have come from and what they are doing so far from the sea and their ships. He speculates that the German Stukas may have sunk the Russian fleet, or that the Black Sea may have dried up, but neither explanation convinces him. He shares these doubts only with Reiter; the other soldiers do not question what they see or what happens to them.

A City That Holds Reiter’s Attention

One night, standing in the trenches, Reiter rises to his full height and looks at the stars, but his attention turns back to Sevastopol. In the distance the city appears as a black mass with red openings that seem to open and close. The soldiers call it the bone crusher. Reiter’s perception shifts the image from machinery toward something living: the city seems to struggle for breath. Sergeant Lemke orders him down. Reiter looks at the sergeant, removes his helmet, and scratches his head; before he can put the helmet back on, a bullet strikes him. As he falls, another bullet enters his chest.

The scene makes the city’s presence inseparable from the danger of the siege. Reiter is not described as pursuing a particular objective when he stands exposed; instead, the distant city draws his gaze, and Lemke’s order to get down comes too late to prevent his being shot. The narrative also links this battlefield to Reiter’s recurring image of disappearance: amid the fighting, he imagines death as a sinking into the depths of the Baltic, Atlantic, or Black Sea, where a forest of seaweed awaits, or as simply vanishing.

Wounding, Decoration, and Its Aftermath

Two weeks after Reiter is shot, a colonel presents him with the Iron Cross at the field hospital in Novoselivske. The colonel cites outstanding reports of Reiter’s actions at Chornomorske and Mykolaivka, then leaves. The award records military distinction while Reiter is unable to speak: one bullet has pierced his throat. His chest wound heals, and he is transferred from the Crimean peninsula to a larger hospital at Krivoy Rog in Ukraine, where his throat is operated on again. He can eat normally and move his neck as before, but his speech does not return.

The wound leaves Reiter caught between the hospital and the front. His doctors cannot decide whether he should be granted leave to return to Germany or sent back to his division, which is still engaged in the siege of Sevastopol and Kerch. Winter and the Soviet counterattack, which overruns parts of the German line, delay the decision. In the end, he is neither sent home nor reinstated with his unit: the siege and the changing front have interrupted his military trajectory, while his lasting mutism makes that interruption visible.

Sevastopol as a Historical and Narrative Echo

Sevastopol’s importance extends beyond the immediate siege because the city returns in the novel’s reflections on how violence is recorded and whose deaths become legible. In a discussion of nineteenth-century society, the narrative contrasts the thousands killed during the Paris Commune with individual murders that attracted extensive newspaper attention: those killed in the Commune, like enslaved people who died during transport, were treated as outside society, while other victims could become subjects of public narrative. The contrast makes language both a record and a filter, capable of registering some deaths while leaving others at the margins. Against that broader account, the piled-up German and Romanian dead outside Sevastopol’s defenses belong to the mass violence of war, where the scale of loss threatens to dissolve individual lives into the battlefield.

Sevastopol Beyond the Battlefield

The city also enters the novel’s broader account of how violence becomes visible—or is obscured—through language. A speaker reflecting on nineteenth-century society contrasts the thousands killed during the Paris Commune with individual murders that received extensive newspaper attention. The distinction is social as much as numerical: those killed in the Commune, like enslaved people who died during transport, were treated as outside society, while certain other deaths could be made legible in public stories. Words, in this account, often served avoidance as much as revelation. Sevastopol’s siege, with its dead German and Romanian soldiers outside the defenses, belongs to the mass violence whose scale threatens to reduce individual lives to an indistinguishable count. The city thus anchors both Reiter’s personal rupture and the novel’s concern with the unequal recording of death.