Ukraine is rendered through Werner Pfennig’s wartime passage across a landscape where radio static, sunflower fields, and the machinery of military pursuit meet a widening sense of disorder. The place is not presented as a detached geographical survey: it emerges through the work of locating illegal transmissions and through Werner’s growing inability to reconcile the mission’s claims of control with the devastation around him.

The Radio Landscape

Late one afternoon, after moving through a region where they have seen nothing but sunflowers, Werner searches the frequencies from the truck. The static is described as vast and old, seeming to precede human attempts to hear it. That image gives the landscape a scale beyond the military operation: the radio fills the air with noise, but the noise does not yield its secrets easily. Werner keeps switching bands and retuning the transceiver, trying to distinguish a signal from the surrounding interference.

When Volkheimer gets out of the truck, Werner is about to adjust the aerial. Instead, a Russian transmission suddenly comes through. Werner turns the volume up and presses the headphones to his ears. The abrupt clarity changes the scene: the open field is no longer merely an expanse they cross, but a place carrying a hidden message. Volkheimer watches Werner as if he too recognizes the importance of the moment. The signal recalls an earlier occasion when the men learned that Werner’s equipment could locate transmissions, tying this Ukrainian search to the technical skill on which his wartime role depends.

Partisan Signals and the Search

The mission repeatedly turns uncertain signals into locations. In January 1943, Werner finds another illegal transmission near an orchard whose trees have been split by a shell. Two weeks later he finds a third, then a fourth. The searches use triangulation: each narrowing segment brings the team closer to a transmitter, until the signal resolves into a particular building or hiding place. The repeated pattern makes the work systematic, but its destinations are makeshift—a barn, a cottage, a factory basement, or an encampment in the ice.

One such search brings the men to a cottage with a small, partly eaten brick of cheese in the kitchen and a cupboard containing jars, remedies, and substances with labels including belladonna and an X. The partisan transmitter is poor equipment, probably salvaged from a Russian tank; its improvised components and clumsy construction stand in contrast to Werner’s training. The ground-plane antenna beside the cottage might have carried transmissions thirty miles. These details make the radio network tangible without making it seem orderly or powerful: a limited signal, assembled from available materials, has nonetheless drawn an armed search party to its source.

Werner leaves carrying the battered transmitter, its leads, and its inferior microphone. The cottage burns as he watches from the truck, and the team departs with the seized equipment. In his thoughts, the moment gathers together the path that brought him there: his father’s death, listening to the crystal radio with Jutta, the years at Schulpforta building transceivers for Dr. Hauptmann, and the destruction of Frederick. Ukraine is thus also the setting in which Werner understands his technical expertise as part of a chain of events leading to the pursuit and suppression of other radio users.

War and Civilian Life

The searches continue as the months pass. Werner finds transmissions roughly every two weeks, salvaging Soviet equipment and judging it crude and unsystematic. The official picture of the resistance describes disciplined, dangerous insurgents directed by lethal leaders; what Werner encounters instead is a scattered and impoverished population, with partisans living in holes and possessing little. The difference between these accounts does not produce certainty. He cannot decide which description is closer to the truth, and his own observations suggest that resistance may be widespread even where it lacks centralized organization.

The truck’s passage through towns gives him another view of the war. People shrink from it, conceal their faces and families, and shops display shoes taken from the dead. Werner’s account of these scenes places the civilian world inside the military landscape: the German search operation moves through communities already shaped by fear and death. His perception grows harsher during the winter, amid ruined villages, broken masonry, frozen bodies, shattered walls, abandoned cars, dogs, rats, and lice. Rather than presenting these as isolated signs of damage, the narrative accumulates them as the material conditions through which the army’s claim to restore order must be judged.

Disorder and Narrative Significance

Werner has been taught to think of order in terms of systems. He applies that framework to the war around him, where German forces are retreating and the military landscape is marked by destruction. The rule he learned from Dr. Hauptmann—that a decrease in disorder in one system requires an increase in another—becomes an uneasy measure of what the campaign is doing. The question is no longer simply whether the team can locate a transmitter, but what order its operations can possibly be creating.

The contrast sharpens in February, when the truck moves through mountain switchbacks above a network of trenches. German positions lie on one side and Russian positions beyond them; smoke crosses the valley and flares rise over the battlefield. For a moment, Werner sees the trenches as the circuitry of an enormous radio, with each soldier moving along a path like an electron. The image translates the war into the technical language that has defined his work, but it also exposes its limit: the soldiers appear to have no more choice than components in a circuit. Ukraine’s narrative significance lies in this collision between an engineer’s search for signals and a war that reduces people and places to parts of a system. The transmissions can be isolated and pursued; the disorder surrounding them cannot be so neatly contained.