Linz

Linz is presented as the intended site of a vast Nazi cultural project: a rebuilt Austrian town crowned by a monumental museum and a collection of treasures gathered from across the world. Though the city appears chiefly through rumor and von Rumpel’s imagination, it gives physical form to the regime’s ambition to possess, order, and display cultural wealth—and to his private fixation on the Sea of Flames.

The planned cultural capital

Rumor has it that the Führer is compiling a wish list of precious objects from across Europe and Russia, with Linz as the destination for a sweeping reconstruction. The proposed city would be an empyrean cultural capital, laid out with a promenade, mausoleum, acropolis, planetarium, library, and opera house. Marble and granite would make the whole project appear profoundly clean, as if monumental architecture could turn political power into an ideal of order.

At the center of this scheme would stand a museum a kilometer long, intended to contain the greatest achievements of human culture. The plan is not described as a settled reality: von Rumpel hears that a four-hundred-page document exists, while the reconstruction and its collections remain projected. That distinction matters. Linz first enters the narrative as an ambition whose scale is already consequential, even before the imagined city has been built.

Collections, removal, and display

The plan for Linz sits against the wartime movement of collections elsewhere. At the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, the threat to Paris prompts the protection and transfer of objects: couriers carry collections toward country estates, crates are padlocked, manifests kept secure, and armored trucks arrive at the loading docks. The objects at risk range from fossils and ancient manuscripts to jade, cavansite, rhodochrosite, pearls, gold, and a sapphire. In this atmosphere of removal and uncertain custody, the possibility that the Sea of Flames is among the treasures becomes part of Marie-Laure’s thoughts.

The contrast sharpens when the projected museum in Linz appears in von Rumpel’s imagination as a destination for mineral wealth harvested from every part of the globe. His vision transforms objects from catalogued specimens into trophies of possession: dioptase, topaz, amethyst, and California rubellite occupy a thousand crystalline cases that seem to float above a marble floor. The image is beautiful in its precision, but its abundance depends on the prior gathering of objects into one immense collection. Linz therefore represents not simply a museum, but a system in which acquisition and display are bound to power.

Von Rumpel’s imagined centerpiece

Von Rumpel’s interest in Linz is inseparable from his search for the Sea of Flames. A fifteenth-century davenport taken from a villa and sent toward Marshal Göring’s hunting lodge calls to mind a jeweled tobacco box; that object, in turn, draws his thoughts back to the diamond. In a moment of weakness, he imagines himself walking through the future Führermuseum, past its mineral displays, toward a central gallery where a spotlight falls on a small blue stone beneath glass.

That imagined placement makes the Sea of Flames more than one treasure on a wish list. For von Rumpel, it is the object that would complete the museum’s hierarchy and give the vast collection a personal center. Yet the stone’s actual whereabouts remain uncertain. Three replicas were made from a casting, not from the real diamond, and von Rumpel believes the maker who explains this. He understands that the real stone and its three copies are scattered, with one stone locked in the museum basement and three still to find; Linz offers him a vision of possession, not proof that he will attain it.