the one-eyed mother

The one-eyed mother is Lotte and Hans Reiter’s mother, and a figure through whom the novel shows how war’s upheaval hardens into postwar domestic life. During the family’s westward flight, she tries to soothe her daughter’s fearful dreams; later, in Paderborn, she survives her husband’s death and lets the question of her missing son recede. Near the end of her life, illness draws Hans back into the family’s present—not through a reunion, but through the confused recognition of her grandson as her own son.

Family and Flight

When Hans went to war, Lotte was nine and imagined his return as the arrival of a giant in enormous Wehrmacht boots. Her mother’s response to the child’s dreams was simple reassurance: “They’re just dreams,” she told Lotte, asking her not to dream them. Lotte dreamed both of Hans coming home and of finding him dead on a battlefield; the mother’s comfort could not settle the uncertainty that those two possibilities left behind.

The family’s displacement made that uncertainty concrete. After stopping in Lübeck, Lotte’s father led them west because he feared the Russians would come. The journey blurred day and night into a continuous landscape of brightness and explosions. At a night stop, Lotte saw her parents among people listening to a radio announcement that Hitler was dead. Her mother explained that the bleeding Lotte had begun that day was normal, while the daughter privately connected her own bodily change to the announcement and continued to distinguish nonexistence from death: Hans, she thought, might be absent without being dead.

In Paderborn, the family moved into the house of the mother’s brother, who was nowhere to be found. A neighbor predicted they would never see him again. They lived for a time on charity and English handouts, and then Lotte’s father fell ill and died. His last wish was burial in his village with military honors. His wife and daughter promised him they would arrange it, but his remains were put in a common grave in the Paderborn cemetery, without ceremony. Lotte understood the burial as a failure of the gallant gestures and attention to detail her father had wanted; the mother is part of the promise and its painful nonfulfillment.

Life in Paderborn

After the other refugees left, the mother took possession of her brother’s house. Lotte moved between school and work, eventually returning to a better job and leaving school for the last time. The mother, meanwhile, found a boyfriend: an old man who had been a civil servant under the Kaiser and during the Nazi years, and had resumed the same occupation in postwar Germany. His pride in the rarity of a German civil servant offers a small, dry note of continuity amid the family’s dislocation.

The mother did not want to return to the village, which had ended up in the Soviet zone, and she did not want to see the sea again. Nor did she show much interest in learning what had happened to Hans. With a hard, resigned shrug, she said he must be buried in Russia. The answer marks a contrast with Lotte’s childhood vigilance for the giant’s footsteps: where the daughter had kept open the possibility of his return, the mother treated his disappearance as a loss already absorbed into life.

Lotte’s Family and the Grandson

Lotte later married Werner Haas and had a son, Klaus. When Klaus was two, she became pregnant again, but miscarried four months later; afterward she could have no more children. The mother became Klaus’s grandmother, and the boy’s childhood in Paderborn included ordinary interests—soccer, basketball at school, and a particular fascination with machines. Once he came home with a black eye after fighting a classmate who had mocked his one-eyed grandmother, a small but direct sign of his attachment to her.

When Klaus was twelve, the mother died of cancer in a Paderborn hospital. She was kept on a constant morphine drip. During his visits she confused him with Archimboldi, called him her son, or spoke to him in the dialect of the Prussian village where she had been born. She also told him about Lotte’s father: his faithful service under the Kaiser and his regret that he had not been tall enough to join the elite Prussian regiment, which admitted only men over five foot eleven. In her illness, family history returns in fragments, joining the dead husband and absent son in the person of the grandson before her.

Memory and Narrative Significance

The mother’s confused recognition is the first occasion on which Klaus hears anything about his uncle. After her death, he asks Lotte about Hans—not out of strong prior interest, but because he is grieving and hopes the subject might distract him. Lotte, who has not thought about her brother for a long time, is surprised by the question. She gives Klaus a vague account: Hans was about ten years older, his livelihood was not a model for the young, and the family had not heard from him in a long time; he had more or less disappeared from the face of the earth. At the time, Lotte and Werner were involved in real estate without knowing much about it and feared losing money, circumstances that accompany her evasive answer.

The mother therefore stands at a hinge between Hans’s wartime absence and the later discovery of his place in the family. Her reassurance to Lotte cannot resolve the child’s dreams; her later resignation replaces waiting with an assumption of death; and, near the end of her life, her morphine-addled speech restores the missing son to the household only by mistaking another generation for him. The novel does not give her a reunion with Hans. Instead, his presence survives in Lotte’s early expectation, in the stories the mother tells Klaus, and in Klaus’s resemblance to the uncle his grandmother believes she is seeing.