Klaus Schmitt

Klaus Schmitt is a German jeweller’s son who remakes himself in Buenos Aires through charm, marriage, and commercial success, but carries forward a grievance shaped by family ruin and Germany’s defeat. His lasting significance lies in the way private disappointments become inherited political hatred: Klaus teaches his children to blame Jews for the family’s losses, and that bitterness takes root most powerfully in his eldest son, Jan.

Identity and family background

The youngest son of a prosperous Hamburg jeweller, Klaus grew up favored at home but poorly prepared for independence. His father died in 1913 without having made a career for him, and Klaus left school early without a trade or much inclination to learn one. When his elder brother Johann took over the family business and refused to give him a share of the inheritance, Klaus would not accept Johann’s offer of starting as an apprentice and gradually advancing, as Martin had done. Josef, Martin’s twin, had escaped the jewelry business by earning a law degree; Klaus, by contrast, had neither a profession nor the patience to acquire one.

Klaus was twenty-four when he emigrated. The First World War later shattered the family he had left behind: Martin died at Verdun when Jan was six months old, and Josef was already confined to a wheelchair when Klaus named a second son Martin in memory of his dead brother. Johann avoided the front, but Germany’s defeat ruined his business. In 1921, unable to meet the high interest on private loans he had taken after borrowing from banks, he closed the workshop and shop. His business passed to the Jewish lenders after he defaulted; two months later, Johann died by suicide.

Emigration and life in Buenos Aires

Klaus’s departure from Hamburg was enabled less by a skill than by his looks, which the narrative presents as a kind of personal capital. Tall, handsome, broad-shouldered, very blond, and blue-eyed, he arrived in Buenos Aires carrying the address of the Exportadora Europea de Granos y Semillas. At the company he met Helga, a lively, flirtatious secretary and the daughter of one of its German partners. He flirted with her for several months, but, intent on making the most of his physical attractiveness, chose instead to marry Marijke, who was pale and delicate and less conventionally attractive. She repaid his choice with absolute devotion, seeking no ambition beyond making his life pleasant.

The marriage and business gave Klaus a life far removed from the apprenticeship he had refused in Hamburg. Yet the security of that life did not dislodge his sense of injury. His family’s decline, his brothers’ fates, and Johann’s death became, in his telling, evidence not of errors and financial decisions but of persecution and betrayal. The narrative makes the contrast explicit: Klaus had once possessed the advantages of a favored son and a new start overseas, but he converted losses experienced at a distance into a durable accusation against others.

Grievance and inheritance

Klaus repeatedly lamented the deaths and misfortunes of his brothers, asking why Martin had died, why Josef had lost the use of his legs, and why Johann had taken his own life. He answered those questions with the claim that their suffering had served only to enrich Jews. The accusation erased the choices that had contributed to Johann’s bankruptcy: he and Klaus did not recognize their own errors as the cause of the collapse, instead blaming the lenders who acquired the business when the debts went unpaid.

The children heard these complaints many times and learned their father’s words by heart, but the inheritance was uneven. Klaus had three children and no more; all heard the same account of family disaster, yet Jan alone inherited his father’s debts, and only in Jan did Klaus’s hatred flourish. This distinction makes Klaus’s influence more specific than a general legacy of bitterness: the family narrative becomes a formative political inheritance, but it does not shape every child in the same way.

Hitler’s rise and Klaus’s death

When Adolf Hitler came to power, Klaus seemed to regain the youth and pride he had lost. His appearance recovered its former beauty and bearing, while his spirit recovered its pride. In March 1933, he told Jan that he did not expect to experience such happiness again in the rest of his life and could now die in peace. Jan laughed and answered by invoking their shared secret longing: they would return to Germany. The exchange binds the father’s political exhilaration to a personal dream of going back, though that dream is not fulfilled for Klaus.

In 1935, aged forty-six, Klaus died suddenly of a heart condition outside the warehouse; he had not known that he was ill. Jan grieved for him more than his siblings did, but Marijke grieved more than any of them. For many months she behaved as though the world had died with Klaus and lay buried in his grave. His death ended the possibility of his own return to Germany, while leaving the desire—and the grievance attached to it—in the household.

Marijke, Jan, and the unfinished return

In 1936, Marijke began to attend to Jan’s proposal that the family leave Buenos Aires. She was wealthy and bereaved, and her husband’s business partners had made a generous offer to buy her share. Although she agreed to return to Europe, she would not go to Germany, where she had no friends or family. She proposed Flanders instead, where her brother Geert had lived for years. Born in La Boca, she had her own roots in Buenos Aires, but her decision to leave was framed by widowhood and the reminders of Klaus that surrounded her there.

Jan protested, appealing to his father’s memory, but accepted Flanders surprisingly quickly. He reasoned that Antwerp would put him closer to his Hamburg cousins than Buenos Aires had. His willingness to redirect the journey reveals how Klaus’s yearning survives in altered form: the family does not simply return to Germany, but Jan treats a move to Flanders as a step toward the paternal homeland. The family’s departure is not effortless, however; Jan’s siblings do not make the journey easy for him. Klaus is already dead, yet his wish for return continues to govern the family’s choices, carried most insistently by the son who has also inherited his resentment.