The giant image of Hans Reiter

The giant image of Hans Reiter is a recurring figure of absence, hope, and imagined rescue. It originates in Lotte Reiter’s childhood vision of her brother as a giant marching home from war, persists as a private answer to his prolonged absence, and returns in the dreams surrounding her son Klaus’s imprisonment. Its final collision with reality comes when Hans denies ever having been a giant: the image that sustained Lotte belongs to her longing, not to his self-understanding.

Origin in Lotte’s Childhood

Lotte was born in 1930. When Hans went away to war, she was nine, and she wished for him to receive leave and return covered in medals. In her dreams, his approach took the form of enormous footsteps: giant feet in Wehrmacht boots made especially for him, striding toward the house where Lotte and her parents slept. The imagined scale gave shape to a child’s expectation that her brother would come back and that his return would alter the family’s life.

The dreams held both expectation and fear. Sometimes Lotte dreamed that she herself had gone to war and found Hans dead on the battlefield, his body marked by bullets. She told her parents about such dreams. Her one-eyed mother dismissed them as dreams, while her one-legged father asked Lotte to describe the dead soldiers’ faces. He told her that a dead soldier’s face would be dirty, unlike the clean face she saw on Hans. In Lotte’s dream, Hans looked sad but determined, and even death did not seem to diminish what he could do. Her father’s distinction cannot dispel her conviction: in her heart, Hans remains capable of anything.

The Giant as an Answer to Absence

Lotte listens for the giant’s footsteps and imagines Hans coming to the village, then the house, then the garden where she waits. She expects him to say that the war is over and that he is coming home forever. Yet the promise remains undefined: she cannot say what would change. The image therefore makes hope vivid without supplying a future she can actually describe.

As the war continues, Hans’s visits grow less frequent and eventually stop. Lotte overhears her parents talking about him as if he were already dead, but she resists their implied conclusion. Giants, she thinks, do not die young; they die only when they are very old, so quietly that their deaths might go unnoticed. Her belief transforms the frightening gap in her knowledge into a story that keeps Hans alive and his return possible.

When the family has to leave the village because the war is approaching, Lotte interprets the danger as evidence that Hans must be coming too: he lives inside the war, as a fetus lives inside a woman. She hides in the forest rather than be taken away, certain that her brother is on his way. Her one-legged father eventually finds her at dusk, slaps her, and drags her after him. The episode gives the image a concrete consequence: faith in the imagined giant shapes Lotte’s response to displacement, but cannot prevent her family from leaving.

Return in Dreams of Rescue

Years later, while trying to contact the publisher, Lotte identifies herself as Benno von Archimboldi’s sister and waits in a hotel room. After asking the front desk to wake her in three hours, she falls asleep without undressing. She dreams of a cemetery and a giant’s tomb splitting open: first a hand rises, then another, and then a blond head coated in dirt. She wakes before the promised call. The dream recasts her childhood image as a figure emerging from burial, bringing the unresolved question of Hans’s fate into the present of her search for him.

When Hans finally comes to Lotte’s home, the giant image has also been attached to Klaus’s dreams. Lotte tells her brother about Klaus and the killings of women in Santa Teresa, and about Klaus’s dream that a giant will rescue him from prison. She adds that Hans no longer looks like a giant. In this way, the image has passed from Lotte’s childhood into her son’s hope for rescue, linking two generations through an absent or inaccessible figure.

Hans’s Denial and the Image’s Limits

Lotte and Hans talk until dawn. He walks through her living room and dining room, stopping beside a shelf holding more than a dozen of his books. When Lotte connects him to the giant of Klaus’s dreams, Hans replies, “I never was a giant,” rejecting the identity that has organized so much of her expectation. The words do not erase the image’s emotional reality for Lotte, but they establish that it was never a shared account of who Hans was.

The contrast is central to the motif. For Lotte, gianthood means that Hans can survive absence, war, and even the prospect of death, and can still return to change everything. For Hans, it is a description he refuses. The book leaves the promise of rescue unresolved: Lotte admits that she no longer has the strength to understand what is happening, while Hans tells her she is tired. The giant persists not as a confirmed power or a fulfilled prophecy, but as the figure through which Lotte has imagined her brother’s return and tried to make uncertainty bearable.