Tetuán is a crucial point of departure and return in the novel: in July 1936, it is where Johannes Bernhardt turns his ties to the Nazi Party into a mission to secure German assistance for the Spanish military rebels; a decade later, it lies across the landscape from which Manuel Arroyo Benítez first glimpses Spain on his clandestine return. In both episodes, geography meets political contingency: Tetuán is not merely a setting, but a threshold where movement and identity are reshaped by war and exile.

Bernhardt’s base in Spanish Morocco

In the first half of the 1930s, the German businessman Johannes Bernhardt emigrates to Spain without finding success there. He goes to the Spanish Protectorate in Morocco and settles in Tetuán, where he can manage no more than a job with a German import-export company. Yet he is also a veteran Nazi Party member and the party’s representative in the city through its foreign organization. His contacts include Hermann Göring, giving him political access that contrasts sharply with his otherwise disappointing commercial prospects.

The military uprising in Morocco on 17 July 1936 gives Bernhardt the opening he has been seeking. He quickly approaches the rebel officers and offers, without guarantees beyond his own insistence, to act as an intermediary with Hitler. Tetuán’s position in the unfolding crisis makes that offer actionable: on the morning of 23 July, Francisco Franco, then commander of the Canary Islands and not yet the rebellion’s principal leader, agrees to meet him there.

The mission launched from Tetuán

Bernhardt’s next move is to assemble a delegation and a way to reach Germany. He secures a Lufthansa aircraft and persuades its pilot, Alfred Henke, to fly him, Adolf Langenheim, and the rebel aviation officer Francisco Arranz Monasterio toward Berlin. Before departure, the group poses for a photograph beside the aircraft, Bernhardt smiling with an envelope in his hand. The envelope contains a handwritten letter from Franco, which Bernhardt will deliver to Hitler.

The Junkers Ju 52 leaves Tetuán’s airfield at five in the afternoon on 23 July, beginning a hazardous journey across Europe. The plane makes a forced landing at Seville’s Tablada airfield, whose runway has no landing lights; an engine fault adds to the danger. After repairs, the travelers continue to Marseille, where a fuel stop nearly ends the mission because the French require payment in francs and the delegation cannot exchange money. They eventually get past that obstacle and reach Stuttgart, despite Henke’s initial reluctance to land in Germany without permission from Lufthansa. From there, the flight to Berlin is uneventful.

In Berlin, Rudolf Hess receives the delegation and backs its cause. He lends them his private plane and accompanies them to Munich; a car then takes them to Wahnfried, arriving on the evening of 25 July. The route from Tetuán has carried Bernhardt from a precarious post in Morocco to the Wagner family home, where Hitler is attending a performance of Siegfried.

Franco’s appeal and the city’s wider significance

The letter Bernhardt carries is brief, handwritten by Franco, and composed in Spanish. It frames the rebellion as a fight against democracy and communism, then presents the transport of Moroccan troops to the Peninsula as an urgent military problem because the Spanish Navy cannot be relied upon. Franco asks Hitler for ten large transport aircraft, twenty 20-millimeter anti-aircraft guns, six Heinkel fighter planes, as many machine guns and rifles as possible with ample ammunition, and aerial bombs of up to 500 kilograms. The appeal closes by invoking Spain’s record of honoring its commitments.

Tetuán’s significance in this episode lies in the conjunction of location, timing, and political initiative. Bernhardt’s residence there gives him proximity to the uprising’s military leadership; his party connections help him frame himself as a channel to Hitler; and Franco’s meeting turns that claim into a concrete mission. The journey launched from the city becomes a direct conduit between the rebels in Morocco and the Nazi leadership in Germany.

A landscape of return

Tetuán also belongs to a later and very different passage through exile. On 10 September 1946, Manuel Arroyo Benítez enters Spain through Gibraltar. France’s border with Spain is closed, and crossing the mountains with a clandestine guide would risk an injury that could prematurely end his mission. As he descends from a British military aircraft, he sees the Campo de Gibraltar and the clothes drying on rooftops in La Línea. The sight awakens a powerful sense of home after more than seven years away, though his American passport and cover identity require him to present himself as a visitor to his parents’ country.

This return gives the geography around Tetuán a counterpoint to Bernhardt’s 1936 departure. For Bernhardt, Morocco is the base from which he carries a request for foreign military aid; for Arroyo, the Spanish-African threshold is part of a covert route back into a homeland he has been forced to leave. The novel uses such crossings to show how the same borderlands can serve very different purposes: political access, clandestine passage, and the uncertain recovery of belonging.