“Good hunting”
Fatherland“Good hunting” is Admiral Dönitz’s terse send-off to the young Xavier March before a submarine patrol, recalled when a photograph of the moment is found conspicuously displayed amid the wreckage of March’s apartment. Its return turns a routine military farewell into an unsettling link between March’s past and the danger closing around him.
The wartime farewell
At twenty, March appears in a framed photograph with Dönitz, commander of the U-boat service. Five young crewmen stand beneath a submarine’s conning tower to meet the admiral before departure from Wilhelmshaven. Dönitz, remembered as ramrod-straight, iron-gripped, and gruff, tells March, “Good hunting.” The phrase is not a private benediction: he growls the same words to everyone.
The photograph also fixes the moment within March’s wartime circle. Rudi Halder stands to his left; the other three crewmen later die trapped inside U-175. What had been a brief send-off thus carries, in retrospect, the weight of a crew’s fate as well as the matter-of-fact language of military duty.
The photograph’s return
Years later, March finds his apartment ransacked while he has been under guard. Clothes, books, letters, photographs, crockery, and furniture have been heaped in the living room as if someone meant to make a bonfire. Upright on top of this pile is the photograph of March and Dönitz. March picks it up, carries it to the window, and blows dust from it; he had forgotten he owned it.
The remembered words surface with the image: “Good hunting.” Their recurrence is pointed by the photograph’s placement. March recognizes that the search took time and was carried out with anger and confidence that no one would interrupt it. He concludes that the Gestapo was responsible. The phrase itself is unchanged, but its setting has shifted from the departure of a submarine crew to the aftermath of an assault on March’s private life.
Meaning in the novel
Because Dönitz says the same thing to every departing crewman, the farewell belongs to a shared military ritual rather than expressing a distinctive bond. Its significance comes instead from its repetition and the photograph’s deliberate prominence: a phrase once associated with departure and a lost wartime crew now accompanies evidence of the regime’s reach into March’s home.
The novel places this image beside March’s recollection of White Rose graffiti near Werderscher Markt: “A police state is a country run by criminals.” That remembered accusation sharpens the contrast. “Good hunting” once sent March into military danger; now, beside the wreckage left by the Gestapo, it resonates as an ominous echo of a life whose dangers have not ended.
