Von Zumpe country estate is the setting for a formative stretch of Hans Reiter’s youth: he serves there alongside Hugo Halder, learns to read under Halder’s guidance, and becomes his accomplice in stealing the family’s neglected heirlooms. The estate’s grandeur survives in its old rooms and antiques, but the baron appears only briefly, the thefts gradually exhaust what can be taken unnoticed, and the house is later found empty and diminished.

Setting and Early Complicity

At the estate, Halder’s gambling debts and obligations to several women lead him to steal from his cousin’s household. Hans does not merely witness the thefts. He devises a way to hide them: servants should be made to rearrange objects, empty rooms under the pretext of airing them, and carry old trunks up from the cellars and back down. The continual movement would make missing possessions harder to detect.

Hans also helps Halder choose what to take. Rather than ordinary household goods, they target antiques that are so old they have been forgotten: ancestral diadems, silver-handled walking sticks made of precious wood, and swords used by Halder’s forebears in the Napoleonic wars or against the Danes and Austrians. These objects make the thefts a kind of illicit rummaging through family history, even as the estate’s inherited treasures become portable booty.

Reading and the Buried Fortune

The estate is also where Halder encourages Hans’s reading. After they fail to agree on which book he should begin, Halder lets him choose one and asks him to return it in a week. Hans selects Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival. Halder doubts that the boy will understand it, yet calls it the perfect book for him, seeing in Wolfram a likeness to Hans’s inner self or aspirations. The text’s image of the untutored, independent knight gives Hans a figure distinct from the formal education and social role he lacks.

Halder gives Hans a share of each theft, which is really a generous tip but, to the young servant, a fortune. Hans hides the money from his parents, who would suspect him of stealing, and spends none of it on himself. Instead, he puts the bills and coins in a biscuit tin, labels the money as belonging to his sister Lotte, and buries it in the forest. The proceeds of their wrongdoing thus become an undisclosed provision for someone else.

The Baron and the Estate’s Decline

The thefts accelerate and then slow as little remains that can be removed without attracting notice. During Hans’s years there, the baron makes only one appearance. He arrives in a black sedan with its curtains drawn and stays a single night, moving silently through the neglected wings, making no demands of the servants, and dining on black bread and cheese with wine he selects himself from the cellars. He leaves at first light. Hans expects to meet him, but the encounter never comes; the baron remains a passing, largely unknowable presence in his own house.

The baron’s daughter visits on three occasions with her friends while Halder is at the estate. Each time, Halder becomes profoundly uneasy and quickly packs to leave. On their last departure through the forest, Hans asks what makes him nervous; Halder curtly says Hans would not understand. The forest that had helped conceal their shared thefts also marks the limit of Hans’s understanding of Halder’s relation to the family.

Return During the War

Later, while posted in Romania, Reiter takes two leaves to visit his parents and returns to the village. His walks repeatedly end at the ancestral home, now empty and diminished and watched over by the old gamekeeper. Their exchanges about the war and the young baroness produce shrugs rather than answers: the gamekeeper’s gestures may signify ignorance, or a reality so vague and deteriorating that questions seem futile.

The estate’s altered condition gives a concrete measure of time passing. The house that had once supplied Halder’s thefts and Hans’s first literary formation has become a remnant encountered from outside, guarded by an old keeper and surrounded by uncertainty. Reiter’s visits do not restore his earlier connection to it; they place the remembered intimacy of the estate against its wartime emptiness and decline.