Years of Struggle

The Years of Struggle is the regime’s retrospective name for its formative Nazi period, a past that the novel shows persisting in monuments, portraits, political records, and displaced works of art. Rather than presenting that history as safely concluded, the narrative makes its objects carry competing claims: official commemoration turns the past into a legend of national sacrifice, while material traces reveal political violence, theft, and concealment.

A Founding Era Recast as Monument

The regime gives its origin story monumental form in the Arch of Triumph, begun in 1946 and completed for the Day of National Reawakening in 1950. Its official account says the design was inspired by the Führer and based on drawings he made during the Years of Struggle. The enormous structure is not merely a memorial: its scale makes the regime’s preferred history physically dominate the city.

The coach passes through the arch’s stone-ribbed tunnel, longer than a football pitch and higher than a fifteen-story building. The Roll of the Fallen names three million soldiers said to have died defending the Fatherland in the wars of 1914–1918 and 1939–1946. Xavier March looks away as his father and both grandfathers are among those commemorated. The monument thus joins a personal family loss to the state’s sweeping account of sacrifice, while leaving the political meaning of that sacrifice under official control.

The tour continues along the Avenue of Victory, where Speer’s ministries, offices, stores, cinemas, and apartment blocks form a monumental corridor toward the Great Hall of the Reich. Visitors admire the spectacle; March’s son, Pili, repeats the guide’s description of the view as one of the world’s wonders. The scene makes the Years of Struggle part of a living public landscape: the movement’s past is converted into an origin story for the immense capital built in its name.

Portraits and the Political Past

In Josef Buhler’s house, the past appears in intimate, carefully preserved objects. A wedding photograph shows Buhler and his wife descending between SA men holding oak boughs; he wears an SA uniform, and the couple do not smile. The heavy silver frame bears a swastika. Beside it stands a photograph of Buhler bowing as he shakes hands with Adolf Hitler. Its inscription is dated May 17, 1945, fixing the leader’s personal recognition of Buhler to a specific moment in the regime’s history.

These photographs make political allegiance part of domestic display. Their ceremonial poses and symbols preserve the public image of power, but the surrounding house is cold and musty, and the images are clouded by grime. March must wipe the glass to read the dedication. The physical act of recovering the inscription foreshadows the novel’s wider method: political history survives not only in official narratives but also in neglected, tangible evidence that must be examined closely.

Art as Evidence of Plunder

The recovered collection at Buhler’s property makes the costs of the regime’s historical order visible through provenance. Investigators identify works including Raphael’s and Rembrandt’s Portrait of a Young Man, Rubens’s Christ Carrying the Cross, a Venetian Palace by Guardi, Krakau Suburbs by Bellotto, eight Canalettos, and at least thirty-five engravings by Dürer and Kulmbach. The inventory is incomplete; the works are listed amid an assessment that remains provisional, so the collection’s scale exceeds what has yet been securely identified.

The Veit Stoss altarpiece supplies a more specific history. It was removed from the Church of Our Lady in Krakau in November 1939. Globus says the collection came mainly from Warsaw and the General Government, while Buhler had recorded works as lost or destroyed. The difference between the objects’ presence in the house and their official description as missing or destroyed turns the collection into evidence of both appropriation and bureaucratic concealment.

The paintings retain physical marks of their displacement. March sees powdery masonry attached to some panels, remnants of monastery and castle walls from which they were torn. A depiction of Saint Sebastian, its varnish cracked while the colors remain bright, carries the smell of must and incense. The work is at once an artwork and a fragment of a violated place: its damaged edges preserve a provenance that official records have obscured.

The missing Lady with an Ermine extends the same history beyond the objects physically recovered. The book March reads says Leonardo’s portrait belonged to the Polish Prince Adam Czartoryski, was photographed in Krakau in 1932, and disappeared during the war. Reich authorities had failed to locate it, and its whereabouts remained unknown. The account links a celebrated Renaissance painting to a broken chain of custody, making disappearance itself part of the history the regime cannot fully control.

Space, Memory, and the Novel’s Present

The novel sets monumental public history against the guarded spaces where power investigates, stores, or suppresses information. Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse is described as the country’s black heart: the Gestapo is at number eight, Reinhard Heydrich’s personal headquarters at number nine, and the SD headquarters in the nearby palace, joined by underground passages. A tourist avenue makes the regime’s history available as spectacle; this connected police complex makes its present power operational and hidden from the tour-bus view.

The state’s archive is another hidden space. Sixty meters below ground, its cool, dry air and dimmed lights protect records; Halder says it was built to withstand a direct hit from an American missile. March points to a steel door covered with warnings barring unauthorized entry. The contrast between a guarded archive and public monuments frames the struggle over memory as a struggle over access: the regime can display its chosen past in stone while restricting the records that might contradict it.

At the novel’s end, a different crossing gives the past an immediate consequence. Charlie reaches the Rhine and crosses into Switzerland; March, watching, knows that she has escaped. The image of the white Swiss cross and the morning light does not undo the regime’s monuments or recover the missing works. Instead, it closes the narrative on a threshold between the state’s controlled territory and a possible escape from it. Across the novel, the Years of Struggle persist not as a settled past but as an active contest over what can be displayed, concealed, recovered, or carried beyond the border.