European Community

The European Community is a twelve-nation political bloc whose presence in the novel links international diplomacy to the visual order of Nazi-dominated Berlin. It is presented both through an ordinary, faded flag outside a cheap hotel and through an official account of consultations with the Reich—while the swastika above the capital’s European flags is twice their size.

Diplomatic Role

In a Foreign Ministry announcement, the Reich says it has consulted extensively with its allies in the European Community before issuing an invitation on behalf of the Führer to the president of the United States. The invitation is framed as a bid to promote greater understanding between the American and German peoples, and the announcement reports that the American administration has accepted: Herr Kennedy intends to meet the Führer in Berlin in September. The Community thus appears as part of the diplomatic setting for a proposed high-level encounter between the Reich and the United States.

The statement’s language presents the Community as an allied partner in a purported international desire for peace and security. That account comes from the Reich Ministry for Foreign Affairs, however, and functions as an official public announcement rather than an independent description of the bloc’s aims or actions. The novel gives no account here of how the member nations reached their position or what influence they exercise over the Reich.

Flags in Berlin

The Community’s twelve gold stars on a dark blue field appear on a flag outside the Prinz Friedrich Karl Hotel in Dorotheen-Strasse. The flag hangs limply from a pole above the entrance; March suspects that the hotel manager, Herr Brecker, bought it secondhand in hopes of attracting foreign customers. The shabby clientele and bored staff offer little sign that the attempt has succeeded. In this setting, the flag is an everyday commercial ornament, detached from any evident bustle of international exchange.

A later view of the European Parliament gives the flags a more overtly political arrangement. The standards of the twelve member nations are lit by spotlights, but the swastika flying above them is twice the size of the others. The contrast makes the Community’s formal presence legible while showing its subordinate place within the capital’s Nazi symbolism: its flags are displayed, yet the regime’s emblem dominates them.

Narrative Significance

The two appearances of the Community flag set ordinary and official images against each other. At the hotel, the flag is a faded-looking bid for foreign custom; near the European Parliament, the member nations’ standards are staged beneath an oversized swastika. Together with the Foreign Ministry’s description of the Community as an ally consulted before a diplomatic initiative, these details establish the bloc as present in the Reich’s public and diplomatic life without suggesting that it stands on equal symbolic footing with the regime.