Flandes appears in the novel as both a family refuge and a political destination: Jan Schmitt persuades his widowed mother to leave Buenos Aires for the region, then uses the move to pursue a German-and-Flemish identity and enlist in the Flemish Legion. The place’s promise of return and belonging is soon overtaken by war, as Jan invites Adrián Gallardo to go with him to Ukraine.

Family Destination and Imagined Return

After Klaus Schmitt died in 1935, Marijke was left wealthy, grieving, and surrounded in Buenos Aires by reminders of her widowhood. In 1936, Jan persuaded her to return to Europe. She would not agree to Germany, where she had no friends or family, and instead chose Flandes, where her brother Geert lived. Jan objected in his father’s name, but quickly accepted the alternative: Antwerp, he reasoned, would bring them closer to his Hamburg cousins than Buenos Aires had.

The choice carried different meanings for mother and son. For Marijke, Flandes was a place where a brother and an established family connection offered a practical alternative to Germany. For Jan, it was a step toward the return to Germany that he and Klaus had privately longed for. His quick acceptance of his mother’s choice shows how readily he could treat Flandes as a route toward that larger ambition, even when it was not the destination he had wanted.

A Political Identity Made of Two Lineages

Years later, Jan presented himself to a military officer as both German and Flemish. He explained that he had been born in Buenos Aires and had always used the name Schmitt de Wandaleer there; his German father had died seven years earlier, but his two surnames, he insisted, expressed pride in both inheritances. He also declared his membership in the Hitler Youth and said he had chosen the Flemish Legion over other SS divisions because of those two lineages.

Flandes thus becomes more than the destination of a family migration. In Jan’s account of himself, Flemish affiliation sits alongside German identity and Nazi allegiance, joined together as a deliberate political self-presentation. The region’s place in his story is mediated through this claim of belonging: he invokes it not as a detailed portrait of a lived community, but as one half of the ancestry he says defines him.

From Family Move to Wartime Escape

The family’s move to Flandes belonged to Jan’s earlier hope of reconnecting with Europe and Germany. By the time he encounters Adrián after the war has turned against them, that hope has become a means of escape. Jan offers Adrián a place in the Flemish Legion and urges him to go east to Ukraine with him, promising that they will continue fighting the Russians and that the conflict is not over.

Adrián accepts because he believes the offer might let him escape the fate represented by his pursuer, Alfonso Navarro. In this moment, Flandes names the Legion Jan proposes to join rather than a secure home. The progression is stark: the European destination once negotiated within a family becomes a military affiliation, and that affiliation supplies a path onward to another battlefield.