Germany

Germany occupies two connected but distinct places in the narrative: it is the wartime occupier whose retreat left lasting damage in Greece, and a destination for Greeks seeking work in a difficult economic climate. These histories meet most personally in Athina’s life in Düsseldorf, where a well-paid banking career offers security but not a sense of belonging.

Germany and the wartime history of Greece

The account of German occupation centres on its consequences in Greece. As German troops retreated in 1944, they destroyed resources and infrastructure; the narrator allows that Franz Dieter may have been among them, but presents this only as a possibility. The passage places Germany within a history whose effects remain in discussion long after the occupation itself has ended.

The narrator reports that Greeks encountered during the journey believed Germany still owed reparations. The claimed costs included Nazi war crimes, damage to infrastructure, and a forced loan extracted from Greek banks. Together, these were said to amount to nearly 300 billion euros in present-day value, a sum imagined as capable of helping pay down Greece’s contemporary debt. The account frames this figure as an outstanding claim, not as a resolved payment or settlement.

The wartime history is also tied to the persecution of Greek Jews. In Thessaloniki, more than fifty thousand people—described as the majority of Greece’s Jewish population—were forcibly deported by train to Auschwitz, and very few escaped. The narrator invokes the Jewish poet and painter Max Jacob, who died in March 1944 while being transported to Auschwitz, as a point of personal reflection on the scale of that history. The city’s present-day liveliness does not erase the events: the passage stresses that their memory remains, even when the spring landscape makes the hardship difficult to imagine.

Düsseldorf and the promise of work

In the contemporary strand, Germany is the place Athina has moved to for employment. She is one of many Greeks who have left their country to find work abroad, and she lives in Düsseldorf while working in banking. When she explains her circumstances to the narrator, she describes banking as well paid. Her carefully composed professional appearance—a smart jacket, designer-tagged handbag, and cropped hair—marks her as a young professional living in a northern European city, though it does not reveal how unsettled she feels there.

Athina’s doubts have lasted beyond the first excitement of moving. After more than a year in Düsseldorf, she finds herself repeatedly questioning why she is living in a foreign country, in a cold climate, far from friends and family, and doing work she does not enjoy. The question is not simply whether Germany offers opportunity; it is whether the life made possible by that opportunity feels like her own.

Her work makes the cost of the arrangement concrete. At a long evening meeting, surrounded by stale filter coffee, notepads, and sharpened pencils that seem redundant beside iPads and takeaway cappuccinos, she struggles to remain engaged with the routine of banking. The first weeks had been exciting, but the novelty has worn off. Yoga—she has tried Bikram, Ashtanga, and meditation—offers brief relief from the pressure, rather than a lasting answer.

Money, family, and distance

Athina’s salary complicates her relationship with her parents. She has told them she earns 1,600 euros, and has not corrected their assumption that this is her monthly income. In fact, it is her weekly pay, an extraordinary amount by Greek standards. At first she is astonished by the bank’s generosity; later, the money begins to feel like compensation for having sold her life to a faceless corporation. The difference between what she earns and what her parents believe she earns makes the emotional distance between Greece and Germany measurable, while also showing what she has concealed from those closest to her.

Her parents’ hopes pull in opposite directions. Her father’s pride and ambition for her and her mother’s wish to bring their only child back home have both pressed on Athina for years. She reacts against their expectations and finds their conversations exhausting, yet Düsseldorf gives her space from the pressure she experienced in her hometown. Distance therefore offers a kind of freedom even as it separates her from friends and family. An embryonic relationship with a colleague has also fizzled out; dating within the firm is frowned upon, leaving her with little reason to feel rooted in her new life.

Germany as departure and contrast

Athina’s dissatisfaction leads her to recognise that she needs to get away from Düsseldorf. A long weekend gives her an opportunity to travel to Greece, and she considers visiting Delphi, a place associated with seeking guidance about the future. On the flight, she reads her horoscope and reflects on how people look for direction through different forms of belief. Her journey places the professional life she has built in Germany beside the country she left, without making either setting a simple answer to her questions.

For the book’s travelling narrator, Germany also stands behind the encounter with Athina: a Greek migrant temporarily back in her country of origin, still trying to understand what she wants. The earlier postcards of Greece and the later experience of travelling through it frame the contrast between an imagined destination and lived circumstances. Germany is not reduced to a single meaning. It represents employment and a measure of independence, but also coldness, corporate routine, distance from family, and the uneasy bargain by which financial security can seem to claim a person’s life.