Second World War

The Second World War is not merely a past period in the novel but a history that continues to act upon its characters. Its aftermath appears in the traumatized memories of former soldiers, in Frida’s experience of forced prostitution, and in the reckoning over wealth acquired through Nazi-era persecution. These different legacies show how the war survives in bodies, fortunes, and the struggle over who will be remembered or publicly vindicated.

War’s Afterlife in Personal Memory

Soldaten-Norbert’s postwar life is marked by a succession of ruptures. He was captured in April 1945 after serving in the Waffen-SS, then moved directly from captivity into the French Foreign Legion. Because the Legion needed recruits, it enlisted men from the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS, offering them a route out of prisoner-of-war camps. Norbert served in Indochina from 1948 to 1953; after his discharge, he never managed to establish a stable life. Jobs as a dockworker, night watchman, and laborer repeatedly ended, usually because of alcohol. His current work in garbage collection has reduced his drinking somewhat because of the early start, but he experiences the descent from SS man to refuse collector as a humiliation. He even injures his own ankle with an aluminum stick to obtain sick leave and spend a week drinking.

The past also returns in Norbert’s speech. At the bar, he recounts the grotesque wartime fate of a comrade, Peter, who was sent back to the front after his legs had withered and was killed by a shell. Norbert speaks at length before falling silent mid-sentence and sinking into a vacant delirium. The narration presents these memories as something that has been burned into him and is consuming him from within: the war has ended in time, but not in his consciousness.

Frida’s wartime history is different but equally embodied. From 1937 until the end of the war, she was forced into prostitution in a concentration camp. A seven-centimeter scar on her right wrist remains a physical trace of that period. When she later lives with Fiete, her sexual experience helps her devise ways to endure his assaults, but it does not make the violence voluntary or harmless. The scene links the coercion of her earlier life to a postwar present in which her body is again subjected to another person’s demands.

Persecution, Profit, and the Postwar Reckoning

The war’s political history also determines the fortunes of WH 1. He had joined the Nazi Party in the 1920s, not from conviction, as he tells himself, but because he anticipated the Nazis’ rise to power. In 1935, the Arronge family was among the first Jewish families to be dispossessed. Its villa on Harvestehuder Weg, its estate at Hornbek, and its fleet passed to WH 1, whose access to the property was effectively delivered to him through the regime. After the war, information emerged that some members of the Arronge family had escaped abroad, while most of the others had been deported to camps and murdered.

The consequences reached WH 1’s business and public position. The Allies seized two-thirds of the von Dohren fleet after the war, and Hamburg’s merchant community ostracized him. Under this pressure, he had to hand management of the company to his son. He resents the outcome and invokes the histories of other shipping families as a reason he should not have been singled out; that comparison exposes his grievance without undoing the record of the Arronge family’s dispossession.

Memory and Public Recognition

Decades later, the unresolved past resurfaces in an attempted public rehabilitation of WH 1. His son arranges for the news to be withheld until the last moment, and the gathering catches WH 1 by surprise. Gerhard Leyendieker delivers a speech that moves from Hamburg’s port and its commercial traditions to the honoree’s supposed life’s work, but the account of WH 1’s postwar career is thin. The occasion therefore carries an implication its organizers do not openly confront: the praise of his career brushes against the history of his position during the Nazi era.

WH 1 does not experience the ceremony as reconciliation or honor. He has spent years cultivating hatred and recording insults and slights in a book, assigning them points and imagined punishments. When he sees Leyendieker again after a quarter-century, the public gesture feels to him like an affront rather than recognition. The scene sets official rehabilitation against private memory: time has passed, but the event cannot make the past mean the same thing to everyone involved.

Across these histories, the Second World War persists not as a single shared memory but as radically unequal inheritances. Norbert’s combat recollections and Frida’s scar register suffering; WH 1’s wealth and later resentment reveal the afterlife of persecution and appropriation. Their juxtaposition makes the past legible in the present while refusing to treat the end of war as the end of its consequences.