Zweiter Weltkrieg

Zweiter Weltkrieg is not confined to the novel’s past. Its aftermath follows men into postwar work and drinking, while Nazi-era enrichment remains embedded in Hamburg’s business elite and returns decades later as a conflict over memory, responsibility, and recognition.

Soldiers and the Afterlife of War

Soldaten-Norbert’s nickname preserves his wartime history: he served in the Waffen-SS. Captured in April 1945, he moved from captivity directly into the French Foreign Legion. At a time when the Legion had been depleted, recruiters sought new members among prisoners from the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS; enlistment offered a way out of the camps. Soldaten-Norbert served in Indochina from 1948 to 1953, carrying the war’s aftermath into another conflict before returning to a civilian life he could not sustain.

After his discharge, Soldaten-Norbert repeatedly lost work—as a stevedore, night watchman, and laborer—usually because of alcohol. For the past few weeks he has worked on the refuse collection, drinking somewhat less because the job requires early mornings. The change from SS man to municipal refuse worker is described as a bitter descent. When he wants sick leave, he injures himself with an aluminum stick, swelling his ankle so he can spend a week drinking. The gesture links the war’s residue not to a heroic account of service but to a present marked by self-harm, unstable employment, and dependence on alcohol.

The Repeated Testimony of Trauma

At the bar, Soldaten-Norbert’s war memories erupt in a long account of a comrade named Peter. He describes Peter’s legs being broken so often that his calves withered, yet the wounded man was not allowed to go home. Sent back to the front, Peter was hit again; Soldaten-Norbert recounts the destruction of his head and the blood left on the ground. The graphic detail is not presented as a settled story of the past. The account continues for five, ten, fifteen minutes, then stops abruptly in the middle of a sentence as Soldaten-Norbert sinks into a vacant delirium.

The narration presents these memories as indelibly burned into him, consuming him from within. Their return is both repetitive and incomplete: he speaks at length, but the monologue does not lead to understanding or release. At the Zum Goldenen Handschuh, Fiete and Soldaten-Norbert toast before the story begins; the ordinary bar ritual gives way to a recollection that overwhelms the present. War appears as an experience that persists in speech and behavior, but cannot be made whole simply by telling it.

Profiting from the Nazi Era

WH 1’s history presents a different relation to the period: not the trauma of a soldier, but the benefits acquired through political opportunism and the dispossession of others. He had joined the Nazi Party in the 1920s, supposedly not from conviction but because he anticipated the Nazis’ rise to power. In 1935, the Arronge family was among the first Jewish families to be expropriated. Its villa on Harvestehuder Weg, estate at Hornbek, and entire fleet passed to WH 1, who had become a party loyalist early on.

After the war, information about the Arronges’ fate became known: some escaped abroad, while the others, with few exceptions, were deported to camps and murdered. WH 1 was not put on trial. The postwar settlement nevertheless brought consequences: the Allies confiscated two-thirds of the von Dohren fleet, and Hamburg’s merchant community ostracized him. Under that pressure, he had to hand management of the business to his son. The novel also gives his resentment its own logic: WH 1 complains that other old shipping families had accumulated their wealth through slavery and similar abuses, as though the existence of comparable wrongdoing elsewhere could make his own dispossession unjust.

Memory, Resentment, and Failed Recognition

For twenty years, WH 1 has waited to take revenge for his removal from power. He has cultivated silence and an appearance of frailty, encouraging his family to think him senile and near death, while privately recording insults, slights, and failures of respect in a dedicated book. He assigns the humiliations points and attaches punishments to them, to be carried out when the time is right. The record turns memory into an instrument of anticipated retaliation: the past is not examined so much as kept ready for use.

That private accounting collides with a public attempt to rehabilitate him. WH 1 is the only person unaware that the event is intended to restore his standing; his son reveals it only five minutes before noon, leaving him no time to object. When he sees Gerhard Leyendieker again after twenty-five years, the intended gesture of reconciliation feels to him like an insult. He neither wants reconciliation nor feels honored or grateful. Having made hatred and revenge into the structure of his life, he cannot accept the recognition offered to him, even if he wished to change.

Through these contrasting histories, the novel makes Zweiter Weltkrieg more than a date-bound conflict. Its legacies are unevenly distributed: Soldaten-Norbert is left with memories that overwhelm him, while WH 1’s wartime-era gains and later grievance shape a battle over public honor. The attempted reconciliation does not resolve that history; it reveals how differently the past can be remembered, concealed, and claimed.