the one-legged father

The one-legged father is Lotte Reiter’s father and Hans Reiter’s father, a figure whose brief appearances shape the family’s understanding of death, absence, and wartime loss. He listens closely when Lotte describes dreaming of her brother and challenges her comforting picture of the dead: soldiers who are truly dead, he says, have faces made dirty by the labor of the day. Later, displaced from their village, he dies in Paderborn without receiving the military honors he requested.

Family and the Dreams of War

When Hans goes to war, Lotte is nine. She dreams both of his giant footsteps returning to the family home and of finding his body riddled with bullets. Her one-eyed mother tries to quiet these fears by dismissing them as dreams; her father responds differently. He asks about the dead soldiers’ faces, pressing Lotte for details rather than offering reassurance.

Lotte says that Hans’s face in her dream looks clean, as though he were asleep. Her father draws a distinction between that image and death as he understands it: the faces of dead soldiers are always dirty, like those of men who have worked all day and had no time to wash. The exchange makes his attention to physical detail a counterweight to Lotte’s faith that Hans can survive anything. Yet her dream preserves its own contradiction: Hans appears dead, but his clean face remains capable of action in her imagination.

Displacement and the Search for Hans

As the war approaches, Lotte’s parents decide they must leave the village. Convinced that Hans must be coming too because he lives inside the war, Lotte hides in the forest rather than go with them. Her father finds her at dusk, slaps her, and drags her after him. The episode captures both the force of his decision and the child’s refusal to surrender her expectation of her brother’s return.

Moving west along the coast, the family passes columns of soldiers. Lotte calls out to the first, asking whether anyone knows Hans; they politely say they have neither seen nor heard of him. A second column appears only to her as a procession of ghosts and corpses. Its figures give her incompatible reports of Hans—among them that he died like a soldier and that he has stopped existing. Her father does not resolve these visions or restore certainty. The family continues on to Paderborn, where refugees occupy the house of her mother’s brother, who is nowhere to be found.

Death in Paderborn

The family lives for a time on charitable handouts from the English. Then the one-legged father falls ill and dies. His last wish is to be buried in his village with military honors. His wife and Lotte promise that they will see it done, but his remains are instead placed in a common grave in the Paderborn cemetery, without ceremony.

Lotte suspects that this is precisely when ceremony and attention to detail matter most. The failure to carry out his request repeats, in an ordinary postwar circumstance, the violence and disorder that have already broken the family’s life: even a final wish cannot secure the return to the village or the honors it names. His death closes his part in the story not with a homecoming, but with burial among strangers.

Narrative Significance

The father’s insistence on the dirty faces of dead soldiers gives Lotte’s dreams a stark material measure, while the story leaves her faith in Hans’s survival intact. His own fate then sharpens the distance between military honor as an ideal and the treatment available to a displaced man after the war. The contrast between the precise funeral he requests and the common grave he receives makes his ending an intimate measure of a wider postwar dislocation.