Hamburg, the Schmitt family’s home and the destination Klaus and his eldest son Jan longed to return to, remains largely offstage in the novel. Its decisive significance lies in the family history carried away from it: wartime deaths, a failed jewelry business, and Klaus’s resentful explanation of that failure become an inheritance that helps form Jan’s politics and life. The city also gives the family’s story its imagined direction of return, a hope that is redirected toward Flanders and ultimately entangled with exile and assumed identities.

Family Origins and Ruin

Klaus Schmitt was the youngest son of a prosperous Hamburg jeweler who died in 1913 without having found a career for him. When Klaus was twenty-four, his elder brother Johann took control of the family business and refused to give him his share of the inheritance, arguing that the company needed continual investment. Johann offered Klaus the chance to begin as an apprentice and advance gradually, as their brother Martin had done; Klaus, who had left school early and had neither a trade nor a wish to learn one, rejected the offer and emigrated to Buenos Aires.

The family’s fortunes deteriorated amid the consequences of war. Martin died at Verdun a few days after Jan was six months old. Josef, Martin’s twin, was already confined to a wheelchair when Klaus named a second son after his dead brother. Johann avoided the front, but Germany’s defeat ruined him: in 1921 he closed the workshop and shop after defaulting on high-interest private loans taken to settle debts with banks. Rather than recognize his own financial errors, neither Johann nor Klaus blamed the business’s collapse on their decisions. They blamed the Jewish lenders who took the business after nonpayment. Johann died by suicide two months after losing everything.

The Inheritance of a Grievance

Klaus had no more children after the three already born, and they grew up hearing him lament the losses that had marked the family: Martin’s death, Josef’s injuries, and Johann’s suicide. Klaus repeatedly asked what those sacrifices had been for, then answered with the claim that their misfortunes had served only to enrich Jews. All three children learned his words, but the novel distinguishes Jan from his siblings: only Jan inherited Klaus’s debts, and only in Jan did his hatred take root. Hamburg thus persists not simply as a remembered birthplace but as the source of a family account of defeat that converts personal and economic losses into antisemitic blame.

When Adolf Hitler came to power, Klaus seemed, for a time, restored in spirit. In March 1933 he told Jan that he did not expect to feel such joy again and could die content; their shared, unspoken wish was to return to Germany. Klaus died unexpectedly in 1935, aged forty-six, before he could do so. In 1936 Jan persuaded his widowed mother, Marijke, to leave Buenos Aires for Europe. She agreed to go to Flanders, where her brother Geert lived, rather than to Germany, where she had no family or friends. Jan accepted the compromise because Antwerp seemed closer to his Hamburg cousins than Buenos Aires was. The city therefore remained an intended homecoming, not a destination the family reached in this account.

A Homeland Recast as Identity

Jan’s attachment to German family origins later appears in the identity he claims as a soldier. He explains that he was born in Buenos Aires but had always used the name Schmitt de Wandaleer, and describes himself as equally German and Flemish. A member of the Hitler Youth, he says he could have joined another SS division but chose the Flemish Legion out of pride in both sides of his ancestry. The declaration turns inherited family geography into political self-definition: Hamburg stands behind the German half of a lineage Jan presents as a source of pride, while his choice of unit makes that identity active rather than merely ancestral.

Family Memory Across Distance

The book’s later revelations about Guillermo’s family offer a striking contrast with the Schmitts’ inherited grievance. In Madrid, Guillermo finds a concealed family envelope containing the family record issued in the names of Guillermo García Medina and Amparo Priego Martínez, his son’s birth certificate, their wedding photograph, and Amparo’s note apologizing for what happened in March 1939. Years later, José Antonio discovers those papers while searching his mother’s underwear drawer for money. The documents disclose the parentage that official names and the family’s silence had obscured, allowing the son to understand that the doctor who visited him during illness and taught him chess was his father.

Hamburg and Madrid consequently mark different forms of family memory. Hamburg is recalled through Klaus’s story of ruin and blame, repeated until it becomes an inheritance for Jan; the papers in Madrid preserve evidence that can correct a hidden family history. Against a novel filled with migration, exile, and borrowed names, Hamburg remains a distant point of origin—powerful less as a depicted place than as the homeland imagined by a family that never makes its return there.