SS

The SS is represented through Soldaten-Norbert, whose wartime service becomes the defining fact behind his name and one strand of the novel’s account of violence carried into postwar life. Rather than offering an institutional history, the narrative follows the consequences of that affiliation: capture at the end of the war, recruitment into the French Foreign Legion, and memories that later overwhelm him in the bar.

Identification and wartime service

Soldaten-Norbert is called that because he served in the Waffen-SS. In April 1945 he was taken prisoner; from captivity he moved directly into the French Foreign Legion. The novel explains that the Legion, depleted of personnel, recruited among prisoners from both the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS, offering them a way out of the camps. The account gives Norbert’s route in concrete stages, linking his SS service not to a clean postwar break but to another military commitment.

Combat memory and its aftermath

Norbert served in Indochina from 1948 to 1953. After leaving the Legion, he never regained a stable footing. He was dismissed from jobs as a dockworker, night watchman, and laborer, usually because of alcohol; only recently has he found work in garbage collection, where the early start has led him to drink somewhat less. The narrative sets this precarious present against the remembered descent from SS soldier to refuse collector, a fall he experiences as humiliating.

His memories surface at length in the bar. Norbert recounts the horrific wounds and death of a comrade, then falls silent mid-sentence and sinks into a vacant delirium. The episode lasts five, ten, fifteen minutes before its abrupt collapse. War is not presented as a finished chapter for him: the recollection remains lodged in him, consuming him from within. The scene makes his past audible, but also shows how little control he has over its return.

Historical responsibility and narrative distinction

The novel places Norbert’s service alongside other forms of Nazi-era entanglement, but does not make them interchangeable. Wilhelm Heinrich von Dohren had joined the Nazi Party in the 1920s and profited when Jewish property was confiscated from the Arronge family; after the war, the revelation of the family’s fate and the seizure of much of his fleet helped force him from management. The narrative identifies this as Party membership and profiteering, not as SS service. That distinction matters: Norbert’s story centers on military capture, renewed enlistment, and traumatic memory, while von Dohren’s centers on political opportunism, material gain, and postwar disgrace. Together, their histories make the past persist in different forms—one as an involuntary, consuming recollection, the other as a record of responsibility that its beneficiary resents.