Vienna

Vienna is presented as a city where the pursuit of precious objects and the pursuit of people unfold against the same accumulating wartime disorder. In one episode, Reinhold von Rumpel follows the Sea of Flames through geological books and historical accounts; in April 1944, Werner Pfennig and his unit search Vienna for the source of resistance broadcasts. The city’s libraries, streets, apartment houses, and park thus become places where knowledge can be sought, signals can be traced, and human lives can be caught in the consequences.

A city of collections and competing searches

A summer afternoon in Vienna places Reinhold von Rumpel in a dusty geological library, following an underweight secretary through stacks of periodicals. She climbs a stepstool to reach a book, and he later works through accounts of famous diamonds, including Tavernier’s Travels in India and P. S. Pallas’s Travels Through the Southern Provinces of the Russian Empire. The setting matters because the search does not begin with a visible jewel. It begins among records, where a scattered historical story can make a lost object seem locatable.

The library investigation takes place amid rumors that Hitler intends to assemble precious objects from across Europe and Russia for a vast museum in Linz. The proposed cultural capital is imagined as monumental, orderly, and clean; against that ambition, Reinhold von Rumpel narrows his attention to a single stone. In the books he finds the Sea of Flames, described as grayish blue with a red center and recorded at 133 carats. Its history links a prince, a priest’s warning, and a French prelate who believed he had acquired the same gem centuries later. Vienna is therefore a point in a wider European search, where libraries preserve the trail even when the object itself is absent.

The city in April 1944

In April 1944, Frank Volkheimer identifies Vienna as the unit’s destination. Werner Pfennig arrives with the soldiers in a city whose former grandeur is visible but unsettled. They stay in an old suite, with furniture pushed against the walls and newspapers covering the windows; a switching yard spreads its tracks below. Werner Pfennig imagines the city as a place where Dr. Hauptmann might once have encountered scientists in cafés, among discussions of Bohr and Schopenhauer. That imagined past, however, offers no shelter from the present: Dr. Hauptmann is presumed to be elsewhere, either in Berlin or at the front.

The unit receives little attention from the city commander. A subordinate reports resistance broadcasts in Leopoldstadt, and the soldiers drive around the district looking for their source. For five days, Werner Pfennig hears only anthems, recorded propaganda, and colonels requesting supplies, fuel, and men. The contrast between official transmissions and the sought-after clandestine signal makes Vienna feel like a communications landscape as much as a physical city: voices travel, overlap, and disappear, while the military tries to locate the person transmitting them.

The Staatsoper offers a different image of Vienna. Its imposing facade recalls the city’s capacity to build and make music, but Werner Pfennig sees that achievement as precarious beside the war’s indifference. The thought is sharpened by the unit’s surroundings and duties: artistic grandeur persists in view while the broader conflict consumes people and institutions. Vienna is not simply a preserved imperial setting or a backdrop to military action; it holds both at once, making the distance between cultural aspiration and wartime conduct difficult to ignore.

The search around Vienna Augarten Park

The search proves difficult in the streets around Vienna Augarten Park. Apartment buildings interrupt the radio work: transmissions pass through them and reflect from them, complicating efforts to determine where a signal begins. During a pause, Werner Pfennig sits with his transceiver and notices a small red-haired girl in a maroon cape emerge from a doorway. She crosses to the park and plays alone beneath budding trees while her mother waits nearby. The girl swings and sings a counting rhyme Werner Pfennig remembers from the alley behind Children’s House.

The encounter briefly redirects his attention from military work to an image of ordinary life. He imagines joining the girl’s play and pushing the swing higher, but does not approach. Her mother calls, takes her hand, and leads her around a corner; the cape disappears from view. The scene gives the city a fragile interval in which childhood seems to persist outside the unit’s immediate purpose. That interval is brief: less than an hour later, Werner Pfennig detects a simple broadcast in Swiss German, and the signal disappears before he can fully understand it.

By switching to the second transceiver and triangulating the signal, Werner Pfennig locates what appears to be a wire antenna running down the side of an apartment building beside the square. The method turns the city’s architecture into part of the pursuit. Buildings that distort and reflect the transmission are also the landmarks that help narrow its source. The search moves from a broad district to a particular apartment, where the transmitter itself is not immediately found.

The apartment raid and its aftermath

Inside the building, the search enters a woman’s room. Werner Pfennig questions his own calculation and wonders whether the signal was scattered by the buildings or whether illness has affected his judgment. A child’s maroon cape hangs on a doorknob. At that moment, gunshots sound in another bedroom, followed by a woman’s scream and further shots. The unit converges on the room where Neumann Two has been searching; there is no radio there. A woman and the girl from the park are dead, and the child is found in a closet.

Werner Pfennig waits for the child to move, while Frank Volkheimer closes the closet door as far as it will go and another soldier covers the woman. The details make the connection between the two scenes unmistakable: the cape belongs to the girl whose play had momentarily allowed Werner Pfennig to imagine a life beyond the unit’s violence. The broadcast search has led not to an identified transmitter but to a fatal encounter with civilians. The city’s network of signals and buildings has delivered the soldiers to a room where the human cost of their operation is immediate.

Narrative significance

Vienna binds together two different acts of searching. Reinhold von Rumpel reads across geological and historical records to identify the Sea of Flames; Werner Pfennig uses radio equipment and calculation to find an unseen broadcaster. In both episodes, what is sought is initially absent, and the search depends on traces: a description in a book, a reflected signal, an antenna glimpsed on a building. Yet the consequences diverge. The library search makes an object’s uncertain history newly legible, while the military search ends in the deaths of a mother and child.

The movement from the library’s accumulated records to the apartment’s irreversible discovery also sets preservation against destruction. Vienna’s books and grand buildings embody the work of collecting and making; the resistance hunt shows how wartime systems can turn careful observation into a means of reaching vulnerable people. The remembered counting rhyme and the red cape connect the city’s public spaces to the private room where the search ends. They leave the episode’s central contrast in view: the ordinary life Werner Pfennig recognizes is present in Vienna, but recognition alone does not protect it.