Marijke de Wandaleer

Marijke de Wandaleer is the Argentine-born daughter of Flemish immigrants and the wife of Klaus Schmitt, but her most consequential role is as the mother who watches her eldest son, Jan Schmitt, turn a family’s longed-for return to Europe into an ideological homecoming she cannot share. She follows Jan across the Atlantic after Klaus’s death, only to leave him behind when his enlistment in the Flemish Legion makes plain what his new sense of belonging means.

Identity and Background

Marijke is the eldest of three children born to the De Wandaleers, Protestants who had left Antwerp for Buenos Aires in 1891. The family first found cramped quarters in La Boca, sharing a flat with two Italian families. Her parents, austere and puritanical, were distressed by the noise, singing, children, and smells of their crowded surroundings, and moved as soon as they could to a conventillo in San Telmo. A home of their own did not mean social separation: the courtyard remained shared with Italian and Spanish Catholic neighbors.

Marijke grew up pale and red-haired, usually alone. Her parents disapproved of her playing with the dark-haired, barefoot children who ran and shouted in the courtyard. She learned the songs O sole mio and Asturias, patria querida by heart, but never dared sing them aloud. The contrast between her private familiarity with the sounds of her neighborhood and her family’s distance from its people anticipates the tension between the places she inhabits and the belonging she is permitted to claim.

As Peter de Wandaleer prospered through an export grain business, the family moved to a three-room flat on Calle Perú, between San Telmo and the Centro district, not far from Plaza de Mayo. The business, established with two German partners and a Belgian from Louvain, became an important point of reference for immigrants arriving from northern and central Europe. Marijke’s early life thus joined an immigrant household’s efforts at security and respectability to a city whose mixed, noisy community her parents had tried to hold at a distance.

Marriage and Family

Marijke married Klaus Schmitt, a German immigrant whose family had been prosperous jewelers in Hamburg. Klaus arrived in Buenos Aires at twenty-four after his elder brother, Johann, took over the family business and refused to give him his share of the inheritance. He had left school early, had no trade, and did not want to begin as an apprentice. He did, however, possess striking physical beauty, which the narrative presents as a kind of unearned capital.

Klaus initially flirted with Helga, the cheerful secretary at the grain export company, but chose Marijke instead. The account describes her as pale and delicate, and not especially attractive by its standards; it connects her choice of husband to her answering his preference with unconditional devotion. She made it her ambition to make his life pleasant. This marriage gives Marijke a central place in the Schmitt household, but the narrative emphasizes the imbalance in their attachment: Klaus’s beauty and self-regard are set against the doglike loyalty with which she serves him.

Their eldest son, Jan, becomes the focus of Marijke’s life after Klaus’s death. By the time the family reaches Antwerp, her daughter Josefine’s departure leaves her with Jan as her only company. The emotional weight she places on him helps explain why she is willing to leave Buenos Aires for Europe at his urging, and why the direction of his politics eventually becomes more frightening to her than the distance from her birthplace.

Klaus’s Death and the Return to Europe

Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 exhilarated Klaus. The narrative depicts him as rejuvenated: his beauty and bearing seemed restored, along with the pride he had lost. In March of that year he told Jan that he did not expect to feel such happiness again in his lifetime and could die content. Jan laughed at the idea, since both father and son secretly hoped to return to Germany. Klaus never made that journey. In 1935, aged forty-six, he died suddenly of an unknown heart condition at the entrance to his warehouse.

Jan grieved more than his siblings, but Marijke’s grief was greater still. For months she behaved as though the world had died with Klaus and been buried in his grave. In 1936 she began listening to Jan’s proposal that they leave Buenos Aires. She was wealthy, exhausted, and lonely in the city where she had been widowed; her husband’s business partners offered a generous price for her share. Yet she did not agree to the destination Jan wanted. Though born and raised in Buenos Aires, she had forgotten that origin enough to declare that she would return to Europe, but not to Germany, where she had no friends or family. She chose Flanders, where her brother Geert lived.

Jan protested in the name of his father’s memory, then accepted Antwerp as a satisfactory compromise because he considered it closer to his Hamburg cousins than Buenos Aires. Marijke’s agreement was therefore neither a simple return to her own birthplace nor a full endorsement of Jan’s German longing. The family’s Atlantic crossing put them in Europe, but it carried them toward different ideas of home.

A Son’s Politics and a Mother’s Departure

In May 1936, only twenty days after Marijke arrived in Europe, the ultranationalist, pro-Nazi Flemish National Union won sixteen seats in the Belgian general election; the more powerful Walloon branch, the Rex Party, won twenty-one. Jan read the result as a promise of future glory and a sign that he could belong in Antwerp. He came to see the city as an adequate base from which to fight for a united Europe under the Führer, abandoning his earlier plan to move to Hamburg. For Marijke, the son she had brought across the ocean was finding not family but a political cause.

In 1939 Josefine fled, leaving a note in Spanish to say she would be all right with Martín and could not live there. Jan was furious, but Marijke forbade him to call the police. She preferred the distance to the hatred of two of her children. Her intervention makes clear that attachment to Jan did not mean unquestioning acceptance of his demands: when he wanted to punish his sister for leaving, Marijke chose separation over coercion.

Jan eventually enlisted in the Flemish Legion. During the enlistment interview, an officer asked why his name included both Schmitt and De Wandaleer. Jan explained that Schmitt was his father’s surname and De Wandaleer his mother’s. The officer recorded his languages as well as his name; Jan spoke German and Spanish fluently and could manage Italian. He objected that such skills would be of little use on the Russian front, but the officer said that his commanders would decide how to use them. The paperwork ended with Jan formally a soldier of the Flemish Legion, his full family name entered on the form.

On returning home, Jan embraced and kissed Marijke, telling her that his father would have been proud and asking her to say she was proud too. She returned his embrace and kisses but said nothing. She feared for his safety, yet what she saw in his eyes frightened her more deeply. The silent exchange is the decisive break in their shared journey: she is still physically beside her son, but cannot affirm the meaning he has given to his enlistment.

Separation and Narrative Significance

The enlistment makes Marijke reconsider the decision to leave Buenos Aires, the city where she was born, grew up, married, and had been happy. Her answer is immediate and practical: she buys a first-class ticket on the first transatlantic ship leaving Antwerp for the Río de la Plata. She never returns to Europe. The family’s return, once presented as a shared response to Klaus’s longing and Jan’s persuasion, ends with Marijke reversing the journey alone.

That departure marks the distance between Jan’s political idea of Europe and his mother’s lived attachments. He had treated Antwerp as a stepping stone toward German kin and a future shaped by Hitler; Marijke had chosen Flanders because her brother was there, while remaining rooted in the Buenos Aires of her birth and marriage. When her son’s commitment becomes visible, the city she left becomes the place to which she can return, and Europe becomes somewhere she cannot remain.

Marijke’s later life is not narrated directly in the available scenes, but the story’s subsequent migrations give her departure a wider resonance. In Geneva in 1939, Manuel Arroyo Benítez lives in exile and misses Meg Williams; in 1946 he enters Spain through Gibraltar under an American identity, after more than seven years away. In 1948 he reaches Buenos Aires with Clara Stauffer, whose reception committee includes Walter Kutschmann. Much later, after the Argentine dictatorship begins its terror on 24 March 1976, thousands seek a way out, and Spain becomes a destination for Argentine exiles, including Spanish Republicans forced to return as foreigners. Against these repeated crossings, Marijke’s one-way passage stands as an early, intimate instance of migration reversing direction: departure can be a choice, but it does not restore the life left behind.