Werner Haas

Werner Haas is Lotte Reiter’s dependable partner, husband, and fellow traveler: a mechanic whose seriousness and labor build a secure domestic life, yet whose long attachment to the repair shop also narrows it. He and Lotte marry, have a child, and later search for her missing brother Klaus in the United States. Werner’s death from heart disease ends their shared life; Lotte responds not by withdrawing but by multiplying her work and continuing to travel.

Background and Meeting Lotte

Werner works at the repair shop run by Lotte’s stepfather, a mechanic who has prospered by servicing vehicles for occupation troops, farmers, and factory owners in Paderborn. Lotte meets Werner shortly before her mother marries the mechanic. They like each other and do not quarrel, and their courtship begins simply: first the movies, then dance halls. When the mechanic offers Lotte a job at the shop, she refuses it; Werner, by contrast, is already part of its working world.

The early outline of Werner’s character comes through his practical seriousness. Lotte’s mother and stepfather approve of him because he works hard and appears committed to Lotte. His steadiness does not mean that the relationship proceeds without hesitation, however. After Lotte begins smoking openly, Werner asks her to marry him. She says she needs weeks or months to decide, not merely a day or two. He accepts her need for time, saying that he wants a marriage to last a lifetime and that the decision should not be rushed.

Courtship and Marriage

While Lotte considers the proposal, she and Werner see less of each other. Their excursions become less regular, and they stop going to the movies and dancing together. Lotte also begins seeing Heinrich, an engineer employed at a newly built pipe factory who lives in a Paderborn boardinghouse while his home is in Duisburg. The evidence places this other relationship alongside her unresolved decision, without suggesting that Werner knows its particulars.

Werner eventually waits for Lotte outside work on his motorcycle. Rather than raising marriage or love again, he invites her to a cafe and takes her home. They gradually resume seeing each other, to the satisfaction of Lotte’s mother and stepfather. Lotte’s childhood nightmares, which had continued into the country period, become less frequent and then disappear; eventually, she says she does not remember her dreams when she wakes. When she finally tells Werner she has thought long enough and will marry him, he cries and confesses that he has never been happier. They marry two weeks later.

At their wedding party on a restaurant terrace, Lotte remembers her brother Hans and briefly cannot tell, perhaps because she has drunk too much, whether she invited him. That fleeting uncertainty signals how her family’s unresolved past remains present even at the beginning of married life. Werner and Lotte honeymoon at a small spa on the Rhine, then return to their jobs and familiar routines.

Work, Home, and Family

Their marriage is described through repeated acts of care rather than dramatic declarations. Although they live in a one-room flat, Lotte finds living with Werner easy because he does what he can to make her happy. They go to the movies on Saturdays, ride into the country on Sundays, and sometimes dance. Despite working hard, Werner helps with the household chores; cooking is the one task he cannot manage. At the end of the month he often buys Lotte a present or takes her into central Paderborn to choose shoes, a blouse, or a scarf.

To provide for them, Werner works overtime at the shop and sometimes takes private repair jobs behind the mechanic’s back, fixing farmers’ tractors and combines. They are paid not only in money but in sausages, meat, and sacks of flour, so their kitchen comes to resemble a storeroom—or preparations for another war. The detail makes material security concrete: Werner’s effort is measured in extra hours and in provisions accumulated at home.

The mechanic dies suddenly, without prior signs of illness, and Werner takes over the shop. The inheritance prompts distant relatives to demand a share, but Lotte’s mother and her lawyers settle matters so that the cousins leave with only a little money. Werner has grown heavier and is losing his hair; although the physical labor declines, management brings greater responsibility and makes him quieter. The couple moves into the larger flat above the shop, and the separation between home and work nearly disappears. Werner is always working, and he would have preferred that the mechanic had lived or that Lotte’s mother had entrusted the business to someone else.

The new position nevertheless makes travel possible. Lotte and Werner spend a week in Paris and later visit Lake Constance with Lotte’s mother. They talk about having a baby, but neither is inclined toward the idea in a period marked by the Cold War and the threat of nuclear attack. After two months of halfhearted discussion, Lotte announces at breakfast that she is pregnant and that there is nothing more to discuss. Before the child’s birth, they buy a car and take a vacation through southern France, Spain, and Portugal. On the way home, Lotte asks to pass through Cologne to look for the only address she has for her brother.

Searching for Klaus and Traveling Together

Klaus does not come to the couple asking for money, despite their private hope that he might. Years pass, and he seems lost in the United States. Werner jokes that, knowing Klaus, he might by then be living in Alaska. The humor cannot resolve the absence: Klaus remains unreachable, and Lotte and Werner eventually turn their concern into a search.

When Werner becomes ill, doctors order him to stop working. Since money is no longer a problem, he hands the shop to one of its most experienced mechanics, and he and Lotte set out to travel. Their destinations include a cruise on the Nile, Jerusalem, a drive through southern Spain, and visits to Florence, Rome, and Venice. Their first destination, however, is the United States. They stop in New York, then go to Macon, Georgia, where they learn sorrowfully that the house where Klaus had lived is an apartment in an old building near the Black neighborhood.

Possibly prompted by the American movies they had watched together, they decide to hire a detective. In Atlanta, they explain the problem to a former Atlanta police officer. Werner speaks some English; the detective leaves them in his office to buy an English-German dictionary, returns, and resumes the conversation. He warns them from the outset that finding a naturalized American citizen after so much time would be like looking for a needle in a haystack, and says Klaus may even have changed his name. The detective finds a former landlord and a man Klaus had worked for, but neither knows where Klaus went after leaving Atlanta. Further inquiries would cost more, so Werner and Lotte thank the detective and end the arrangement, at least for the time being. The search yields no reunion, only a clearer measure of how little can be recovered from the traces Klaus left behind.

Death and Lotte’s Continuing Life

A few years later, Werner dies of heart disease, leaving Lotte alone. The narrative gives no extended account of his final illness or death; instead, it marks the consequence through Lotte’s response. Rather than sitting idle or allowing herself to be overwhelmed by fate, she doubles and triples her daily activity. She keeps her investments profitable, maintains the shop, and uses her remaining capital to enter other businesses successfully. Work, in excess, seems to rejuvenate her, even as employees come to dislike her intrusiveness.

Lotte continues taking short vacations, usually no longer than a week or a week and a half, seeking the warmth of Italy or Spain. She sunbathes on the beach and reads bestsellers, sometimes going out with casual acquaintances but usually crossing alone from the hotel to the beach. At night she may sit on the terrace or watch couples dance in a hotel club where the orchestra sometimes plays songs from the early sixties. From a distance she appears elegant and self-contained; when men who are widowed or divorced invite her to dance or walk, she smiles and declines. In those encounters, the narrative suggests, refinement falls away and sadness remains. Werner’s death therefore does not end Lotte’s movement through the world, but it changes its texture: travel and activity continue, now without the companion whose care had once made ordinary life easy.