Agneta’s Affair with Adrian and Her Pregnancy

Agneta’s affair with Adrián, who is living under the assumed identity of Alfonso Navarro López, grows inside her marriage to Jan Schmitt and culminates in a pregnancy that neither lover has planned openly. The relationship offers Agneta affection and renewed hope after years of frustrated ambition and domestic burden, but its future is abruptly denied: when she tells Adrián she is expecting his child, he leaves Berlin without saying goodbye. Their private attachment therefore becomes a turning point in the larger story of assumed identities, escape, and the incompatible futures people try to build after war.

Background and Circumstances

Agneta’s life has already been reshaped by political commitment and family duty. Before the war forced her to abandon her studies, she devoted herself to the Nazi Party and rose to become an Untergauführerin in Schöneberg, responsible for three thousand girls. Her ambition to advance in the BDM was at odds with her mother’s expectations and with the prescribed domestic future of marriage and motherhood. When an accident left her mother, Beate, dependent on her care, Agneta’s political prospects narrowed further: she tried to maintain her party work, but eventually yielded to her mother’s demands.

After the war, Agneta and her parents take in Jan Schmitt, the fugitive whom she has concealed. Her father, Rudi, agrees to help on the condition that Jan is only an ordinary soldier with no criminal responsibility; Agneta can assure him truthfully that she has never heard of Klooga. Beate supports her daughter’s decision, viewing the protection of Jan as a final chance to serve a Reich she had loved. Jan becomes Agneta’s boyfriend and lives with the family, but the arrangement also places Agneta within a household where her care and loyalty are continually relied upon.

A Relationship Takes Shape

The affair develops gradually through Adrián’s presence in the household. He makes himself useful, taking on repairs and domestic tasks, and his attention contrasts with Jan’s absences and failures to share the work. Agneta initially resists believing that Adrián has remained in love with her through more than three difficult years. When she accepts his constancy, the affection that had once seemed unwelcome begins to feel like a new possibility. The narrative emphasizes this shift as a change in Agneta’s own expectations: the relationship is not simply a continuation of an old attachment but a feeling she allows herself to reconsider.

A birthday gift gives that change a tangible form. Adrián presents Agneta with a bracelet he has made from the linked pieces of a broken necklace, and she promises to wear it every day. On the penultimate day of May 1948, in Schöneberg, the two embrace; the episode marks Agneta’s first unashamed return to the memory of the young woman she once was. During the summer she continues to wear the bracelet while staying at the house by Wannsee that Jan has rented with a police colleague. Its recurrence connects the modest handmade object to the private hope she has begun to protect.

The relationship becomes more consequential as Adrián’s visits grow less frequent. Agneta misses him from the day he moves out, and her disappointment is sharpened by the contrast between his tenderness and Jan’s unreliability. When Jan returns late and drunk after leaving to buy bread, Adrián helps bring a loaf home, but cannot prevent the quarrel that follows. Jan refuses to spend his Sunday getting a Christmas tree for their son. Adrián later brings a large fir and offers to help decorate it; the episode allows him to occupy, briefly and knowingly, the caring role Jan has neglected. The old song he sings recalls the earlier May encounter and turns the tree into part of their courtship rather than a merely domestic errand.

Intimacy and Pregnancy

By the winter, Agneta and Jan appear to have returned to their earlier ease, but their renewed harmony rests on an unspoken arrangement: Jan believes Agneta has stopped interfering in his affairs, while she is preoccupied with Adrián. In the spring, she notices that Jan seeks her less and suspects that he may be unfaithful; the possibility no longer matters to her as it once might have. The affair has changed her attachment to her marriage, even though she remains within it.

On 25 July 1949, Agneta wakes with nausea and realizes that she may be pregnant. Rather than dwelling on blame or panic, she calmly considers the timing and returns to bed, where she initiates intimacy with Jan. The episode shows her acting decisively under pressure and makes clear that the pregnancy will be difficult to assign within the household. The narrative does not present the child as a simple revelation that resolves the affair; it becomes a problem Agneta prepares to manage.

When she tells Adrián, they are together in the Grunwalds’ marital bed. She believes she is carrying his child and speaks of raising it with Jan, who will never know the child’s parentage. Her proposed plan is to leave their outward life unchanged: the child will be born and loved, and the secret will remain concealed. Adrián recognizes that he loves Agneta, but not enough to submit to this future. His private response is to take responsibility for making the situation disappear, rather than accept the family arrangement she offers.

Departure and Consequences

Adrián leaves Berlin without saying goodbye to anyone, including Agneta, who is certain she is expecting his child. His departure cuts off the possibility of a shared decision and leaves her plan for the baby suspended. For Agneta, the pregnancy belongs to a hopeful domestic future she believes can be sustained without exposing its secret; for Adrián, the same disclosure becomes a point at which his obligations and escape plans part company.

The affair thus joins intimate feeling to the book’s wider pattern of concealment. Adrián’s life depends on false papers and an assumed identity, while Agneta proposes another concealment, one embedded in marriage and family. Her readiness to imagine a life for the child contrasts with his refusal to remain for it. The relationship briefly gives Agneta a reason to recover a neglected sense of possibility, but its ending leaves her to face the consequences without the man whose return had awakened that hope.