The Town of Chattering Girls is a recurring point in the childhood geography of Hans Reiter, a town he visits and passes through as he grows up. It is associated both with the everyday social world that he observes from its margins and with the imaginative, underwater landscape through which he experiences his journey to school. The place joins those perspectives: a named community of parties, movies, and conversation, and part of a route that Reiter mentally remakes into a descent beneath the sea.

Social Life and the Young Reiter

The town’s girls attend parties and dances in larger towns, smoke in the streets, and talk about sailors and the ships on which they serve. They also go to the movies, where the young Hans Reiter hears about admired actors and actresses. Yet these details do not settle into lasting knowledge for him: he immediately forgets the names of the towns, ships, performers, and films. The repeated forgetting gives the town’s lively social world a particular distance. Reiter sees and hears it, but does not retain its references as ordinary biographical facts.

At home, his mother asks where he has been during the day, and Reiter tells her whatever first comes to mind rather than the truth. The town therefore belongs not only to his outward route but to the gap between his movements and what he chooses to report about them. His mother’s questioning frames his excursions as something he can conceal, even when his answers offer no reliable account of where he has gone.

A Place on the School Route

At twelve, Reiter begins attending a school in the Town of Chattering Girls. He dislikes it for several reasons and dawdles on the way there. The route is not represented as a straightforward walk: in his perception it becomes a prolonged fall toward the bottom of the sea. Trees, grass, swamps, animals, and fences turn into marine forms, including starfish and sea spiders. The ordinary journey toward school is thus overlaid by an imagined descent into another environment.

Reiter’s attention to the sea spider’s unusual anatomy makes that transformation more than a change of scenery. He wonders about its small appendages near the head, imagining them as hands that the creature has not yet learned to recognize. He estimates that it might take a thousand, two thousand, or ten thousand years for it to discover what it has. The route through the town gives his private speculation a setting: reluctance to attend school stretches travel time into a space for observation and imaginative thought.

Childhood Geography and Danger

The town also appears in an earlier account of Reiter’s childhood near the water. During a summer visit, a tourist from Berlin named Heinz Vogel sees the boy struggling among rocks and saves him. Vogel initially mistakes him for seaweed, then confirms that the shape is a boy, climbs down as far as he can, and swims out to him. The rescue makes the coastal setting more than a backdrop to Reiter’s memories: the water is a real danger as well as the medium through which his imagination repeatedly remakes the world.

Vogel is spending his holiday in the town on his doctor’s orders, intended to get him away from Berlin for the sake of his health. His brief intervention links the town’s seasonal visitors to a decisive moment in Reiter’s childhood. It also places the rescue within the same landscape that later becomes, in Reiter’s schoolgoing imagination, an underwater world.

Narrative Significance

The town is rendered through accumulated fragments rather than a comprehensive portrait. Its social life comes to Reiter through talk whose proper names vanish from memory; its streets and route to school open onto a private marine vision; and its nearby shore is the setting of a rescue. These strands keep the place poised between concrete geography and the way Reiter perceives it. The Town of Chattering Girls is at once a destination, a stretch of childhood terrain, and a passage into the sea-filled imaginative world that shapes his account of growing up.