NS-Zeit

NS-Zeit is not merely a historical backdrop in the novel: its violence and opportunism survive into the postwar present, shaping the fortunes of Wilhelm Heinrich von Dohren and the damaged life of Soldaten-Norbert. One man profited from the dispossession of Jewish neighbors and later resented the consequences; the other moved from the Waffen-SS through captivity and the French Foreign Legion into a civilian life repeatedly broken by alcohol and memories of war.

Opportunism and dispossession

Wilhelm Heinrich von Dohren had joined the Nazi Party in the 1920s. The narration stresses that he did so not from ideological conviction but because he anticipated the Nazis’ seizure of power. In 1935, the Arronge family was among the first Jewish families to be dispossessed: its villa on Harvestehuder Weg, estate at Hornbek, and entire fleet were taken. Von Dohren, an early party loyalist, benefited from the transfer of their property.

The Arronges’ fate became known after the war. Some had escaped abroad; the others were deported to camps and murdered, with only a few exceptions. The revelation left von Dohren politically and socially compromised. The episode makes his postwar decline inseparable from the wealth he acquired under Nazi rule: his success had depended on dispossession, and the victims’ persecution could not be kept outside the history of his business.

Defeat, disgrace, and resentment

After the war, the Allies confiscated two-thirds of the von Dohren fleet. Hamburg’s merchant community, which prided itself on tolerance and cosmopolitanism, ostracized him, and the pressure eventually forced him to hand management of the business to his son. Von Dohren regarded this reckoning as unfair, comparing his fate with that of other shipping dynasties whose wealth, in his view, also rested ultimately on the slave trade and related exploitation.

That comparison does not undo the specific history of his own gain from the Arronge family’s dispossession. Instead, it reveals how he turns accountability into grievance. The novel links his enduring hatred and desire for revenge to the loss of power after the war, while making clear that the account he keeps of his humiliations leaves out the victims whose property helped establish his position.

Soldaten-Norbert and the afterlife of war

Soldaten-Norbert’s nickname recalls his service in the Waffen-SS. Captured in April 1945, he moved directly from captivity into the French Foreign Legion. At the time, the Legion recruited among Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS prisoners because it had been depleted of personnel, offering some a way out of the camps. Norbert served in Indochina from 1948 to 1953.

After his discharge, he could not establish a stable civilian life. He was dismissed from jobs as a dockworker, night watchman, and laborer, usually because of alcohol. When the novel presents him working for the garbage collection service, the early start has made him drink somewhat less, but the descent from SS soldier to refuse collector remains a source of bitterness. He even injures his ankle with an aluminum rod to obtain sick leave and spend a week drinking.

At the bar, Norbert’s recollections of a fellow soldier’s horrific wounds run on for minutes before stopping abruptly as he sinks into a vacant delirium. The narration describes the war as indelibly burned into him and as consuming him from within. His monologue makes the violence of the period audible in the postwar present, while his alcoholic collapse shows how little his return to civilian life has repaired.

Public rehabilitation and private refusal

A later public attempt to rehabilitate von Dohren brings this buried history into the open but does not produce reconciliation. He is the only person unaware that the ceremony is planned; his son waits until five minutes before noon to tell him, leaving no time to protest. The gathering includes prominent attendees, even the senator for the interior, and von Dohren is confronted with Leyendieker after a quarter-century apart.

Von Dohren experiences the gesture not as honor or atonement but as an affront. He does not want reconciliation and feels no gratitude; the public act strikes him as a humiliating reversal of the story he has told himself about his life. Having settled into hatred and fantasies of revenge, he appears unable to change even if he wished to. The ceremony therefore exposes the distance between public rehabilitation and private reckoning: recognition can be staged, but it cannot compel acknowledgment of the past or restore what that past destroyed.