The Bavarian Alps serve both as the setting for a final visit by Leni and Werner and as a landscape through which Werner recounts the Leader’s past. Their weekend in the mountains brings private intimacy and political storytelling together: a picnic becomes the occasion for Leni to question Werner about the figure whose history he presents as inseparable from the region.

Setting and Visit

On a sunny Sunday, Leni asks Werner to spend their last weekend together before he returns to Paris in the Bavarian Alps. They plan to visit its valleys, and the passage places them at a simple picnic, with a cloth spread on the grass and a modest meal. The visit is personal in its immediate purpose, but Leni’s curiosity soon directs their conversation toward the Leader.

The Leader’s Mountain Associations

Werner identifies the mountains as the location of the Leader’s vacation home. He also connects the area to the Leader’s clandestine period, when a peasant family had sheltered him. In Werner’s account, the Alps are therefore more than a retreat: they belong to the geography of the Leader’s earlier, less visible political life.

Werner recalls traveling between the Alps and Berlin along roads familiar to the Leader. He describes journeys to secret meetings, including flights in small aircraft, and remembers the Leader stopping for a frugal meal: bread, a hard-boiled egg, and fruit. The picnic in the present scene echoes that recollection, linking Leni and Werner’s shared meal to the story Werner tells about the Leader’s travels.

Narrative Function

The setting gives Werner a concrete route through which to relate the Leader’s history and public image. Leni asks first about the Leader’s personality and rise, then presses Werner for an account of his personal strength. The mountain visit thus shifts from a private weekend into an exposition of political belief, with the familiar road toward Berlin and the remembered picnic connecting the landscape to Werner’s account.