Machtergreifung

Machtergreifung marks the political turning point that made WH 1’s fortune possible and shaped the decades of resentment that followed. The novel connects the Nazis’ rise to power not only with wartime violence but also with the transfer of Jewish property to beneficiaries who later treated their own disgrace as an injustice done to them.

WH 1’s Political Opportunism

WH 1 had joined the Nazi Party in the 1920s. The narrative stresses that he did so not from conviction but because his instinct told him that the Nazis would take power. That anticipation became a route to advantage: in 1935, the Arronge family was among the first Jewish families to be dispossessed, losing its villa on Harvestehuder Weg, its estate at Hornbek, and its entire fleet. WH 1, an early party loyalist, benefited from property that was effectively delivered to him.

Dispossession and Postwar Consequences

After the war, the Arronges’ fate became known. Some had escaped abroad; most of the others, with only a few exceptions, were deported to camps and murdered. The revelation left WH 1 disgraced. The Allies also confiscated two-thirds of the von Dohren fleet, while Hamburg’s merchant community ostracized him. Under mounting pressure, he had to hand the company’s management to his son.

WH 1 resents this reckoning rather than accepting it as a consequence of his actions. He tells himself that other established shipping families also derived their fortunes from the slave trade and similar sources, and regards his own punishment as unfairly selective. The contrast between the Arronges’ murdered family members and WH 1’s fixation on his lost standing makes his grievance part of the novel’s account of how privilege can recast accountability as persecution.

War’s Afterlife

The regime’s legacy also appears in Soldaten-Norbert’s history. He had served in the Waffen-SS and was captured in April 1945; from captivity he went directly into the French Foreign Legion. In the postwar manpower crisis, recruiters sought Legion members among Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS prisoners, offering them a way out of the camps. Norbert served in Indochina from 1948 to 1953 and never recovered his footing afterward.

At the Zum Goldenen Handschuh, Norbert’s account of a badly wounded comrade runs on for minutes before he falls silent in a vacant delirium. The narration presents his war memories as indelibly lodged in him and as consuming him from within. His trajectory carries the history of the Nazi military past into the bar’s present, in a form unlike WH 1’s: one man retains wealth and converts disgrace into hatred; the other is left with trauma, precarious work, and alcoholism.

A Past That Resists Reconciliation

Decades later, WH 1’s son stages a public attempt to rehabilitate him, bringing Leyendieker back into his life after a quarter-century. WH 1 is not told in advance; his son waits until five minutes before noon, leaving him no chance to object. The intended gesture of reconciliation therefore arrives not as relief but as an affront. WH 1 neither wants reconciliation nor feels honored or grateful. Having built his life around hatred and revenge, he cannot receive public recognition as a reason to change.

The scene makes Machtergreifung more than distant background. Its consequences persist through stolen property, postwar punishment, private grievance, and a later public effort to settle the past. That effort cannot undo the original dispossession, and for WH 1 it does not even dislodge the grievance that grew out of his own culpability.