Where are the Prussians

The question “Where are the Prussians?” recurs in Hans Reiter’s childhood as his one-legged father imagines the Prussians sailing away from their lost homeland. Repeated against the boy’s watchful silence and the Baltic landscape, it becomes more than a question about a vanished country: it binds private family memory to historical displacement, while leaving the disappearance unresolved.

The Father’s Question

The question emerges from the father’s sweeping account of national character, in which he singles out the Prussians as the only people he does not condemn. But Prussia no longer exists, and his preference immediately turns into bewilderment: he imagines that while he was in hospital, the Prussians migrated somewhere far away. From the rocks above the Baltic, he searches the horizon for their ships, trying in vain to determine whether they sailed toward Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, or Greenland.

The repeated question is framed by the father’s own absence and return. He describes sitting on a rock watching Hans’s head appear and disappear among the waves, confident that the boy will surface again. Sometimes he falls asleep there, then returns to town in the cold, singing so the neighbors will assume he has been drinking. The passage places the father’s imagined national departure beside his real, recurring vigil over his son: both are acts of watching for someone who vanishes from view and might reappear.

Hans and the Unspoken Island

Hans, too, moves through the landscape like a diver, but his wandering is largely separate from his father’s verbal performance. He walks east through villages that seem haunted and west through places marked by animals, distance, and uneasy social divisions. When he returns home, his mother asks where he has been, and he tells her whatever comes to mind rather than the truth. The question about the Prussians thus belongs to a household where speech does not necessarily disclose what has happened.

At one such moment, his mother looks at him with her blue eye, Hans meets her gaze with both of his blue eyes, and his father watches from beside the hearth. For a few seconds, Prussia seems to rise from the depths. The image briefly gathers the family into a shared vision, but it supplies no answer: the island appears only momentarily, like something recovered from beneath the water and already liable to disappear again.

Returns and Historical Echoes

The wording shifts from “Where is Prussia?” to “Where are the Prussians, then?” as the father renews his search across the gray horizon. That variation makes the object of loss unstable: it may be a country, a people, or a destination that cannot be identified. The question’s repetition, rather than an explanation, is what the narrative offers; the father never finds the ships or learns where they went.

Elsewhere, the novel connects displacement to distinct historical circumstances without making them interchangeable. Archimboldi’s black leather jacket recalls the clothing associated with Gestapo officers, though the narration notes that such jackets were fashionable and worn without everyone considering their associations. Later, the critics speculate that the elderly, missing writer might be a World War II deserter still on the run, and wonder whether he has gone to Mexico to flee. Amalfitano, for his part, explains that the coup in Chile forced him into exile, which he comes to describe as a movement that can help abolish what is generally taken for fate. These episodes give the father’s search a wider resonance: departures and absences recur across the novel, but they arise from different histories and do not resolve into one allegory.

A Motif of Absence

The question also resonates with the novel’s concern with what can enter public language. In a discussion of past crime, a speaker contrasts deaths that society treated as invisible with killings that became widely reported stories: some victims, he argues, were not counted as part of society, while others were socially legible. The words used to describe violence could reveal something, but could also serve avoidance. Against that distinction, the father’s unanswered question becomes an image of an absence that can be named and repeated without being explained.

Its force rests on that gap between speech and knowledge. The father can imagine ships, routes, and a lost Prussian homeland; Hans can witness his father’s search and share, briefly, the image rising between them. Neither the repeated question nor the family’s momentary vision restores what has vanished. The phrase remains open, carrying the novel’s recurring tension between historical memory and disappearance without claiming that these different losses have a single cause.