Munich is a recurring point of connection between the novel’s political history and its later clandestine plot. In July 1936, it is the last staging point before Johannes Bernhardt reaches Adolf Hitler at Wahnfried with Francisco Franco’s appeal; in January 1949, it is the far end of a telephone line on which Rafael Cuesta asks Rolf for help. The city matters less as a setting for extended action than as a place from which power, assistance, and danger travel across borders.

The 1936 mission to reach Hitler

On 17 July 1936, the military uprising in Spanish Morocco offered Johannes Bernhardt, a German businessman and veteran Nazi Party member living in Tetuán, an opening after years of failure. He had emigrated to Spain in the first half of the 1930s, found no success on the peninsula, and settled in the Spanish Protectorate of Morocco, where he worked for a German import-export company. Alongside that job, he acted as the Nazi Party’s local representative and maintained excellent relations with Hermann Göring. When the uprising began, he moved quickly to offer himself as an intermediary between the rebels and Hitler.

Bernhardt’s proposal reached Francisco Franco, then the military commander of the Canary Islands and not yet the rebellion’s principal leader. Franco agreed to meet him in Tetuán on the morning of 23 July. Bernhardt’s next opportunity was logistical as much as political: he found a Lufthansa aircraft and persuaded its pilot, Alfred Henke, to fly him to Germany with Adolf Langenheim, head of the Nazi Party in the Protectorate, and Captain Francisco Arranz Monasterio, commander of the rebel air forces in Morocco. Before departure, the group posed beside the plane; Bernhardt held an envelope and smiled.

The flight itself nearly failed at several points. The Junkers Ju 52 left Tetuán at five in the afternoon on 23 July for Seville. At Tablada, Henke risked a forced landing because the airfield had no runway lights and the aircraft’s engine was damaged. After repairs, the party continued to Marseille to refuel, but could not pay because the French required francs and they could not exchange their money. They managed to continue; Henke initially resisted landing in Germany, fearing reprisals from Lufthansa for leaving his base without permission. Once they reached Stuttgart, the final leg to Berlin was straightforward.

From Munich to Wahnfried

In Berlin, Rudolf Hess received the delegation and chose to support its cause. Though Langenheim held the higher party office, Bernhardt presented himself as head of the expedition. Hess offered his private plane and accompanied the visitors to Munich, where a car was waiting to take them onward. They reached Wahnfried at dusk on 25 July, while Hitler was attending a performance of Wagner at the Bayreuth Festival.

The arrival at Wahnfried transformed Munich from a waypoint into a threshold to the meeting Bernhardt had sought. Winifred Wagner had prepared a small reception for Hitler’s guest, but Hitler was more interested in the letter Bernhardt carried from Tetuán than in the welcome. Written by Franco himself, the brief letter set out the rebels’ struggle against what it called corrupt democracy and communism, and requested air transport to bring the Moroccan forces rapidly to the peninsula, since the Spanish Navy could not be relied upon. Bernhardt had copied the handwritten letter but left room for a translation without ever writing one down. At the climax of his career, he read Franco’s words directly in his own language.

The Munich leg thus forms part of a chain of improvised mediation: Bernhardt’s local initiative brought the delegation to Hess; Hess’s aircraft and assistance carried it to Munich; a waiting car completed the journey to Wahnfried; and the letter put Franco’s military request before Hitler. The city is the hinge in that route, connecting an uprising in Morocco to the Nazi leadership gathered around Wagner’s festival.

The 1949 telephone call

Munich returns in a very different context at the end of 1949. Rafael Cuesta’s business with Steinbauer had begun on Monday, 17 January, when Steinbauer telephoned him at work early in the morning and summoned him for the following day at half past four, at 57 Juan Bravo Street. Rafael said he would still be working then and asked whether the meeting could be later. Steinbauer refused: the appointed time would not change. This strict arrangement belongs to the same clandestine business world in which Rafael later has to make a dangerous decision under pressure.

When a corpse threatens to expose the operation, Rafael considers asking communist friends for help, but rejects that option. They are already watched by the police, and involving them in a matter unrelated to their interests could put them in danger. If the Social Police arrested them before they disposed of the body, the entire operation could collapse. He next considers Meg Williams, but recognizes that asking her would require disclosing what Manuel had withheld: their connection with Scarface and their shared business with Lazar. He expects the truth might repel her or jeopardize her career, even though he suspects friendship could ultimately move her to help.

Only after weighing these alternatives does Rafael decide to trust the Nazis to solve a problem of their own making. La Meridiana’s scale of operations and Don Gabino’s government contacts have given it an automatic telephone exchange, allowing Rafael to call without an operator. He dials Munich with care, imagining the act as delicate as disarming a bomb. The distance offers some reassurance, but not enough to steady his physical anxiety as he listens to the intermittent signal.

Distance, contact, and risk

The man who answers is Rolf. Rafael addresses him by name and says that he is calling from Madrid. Rolf pauses, then asks whether there is a problem; he has understood the significance of the call before Rafael explains anything. Until then, Rafael had never called him. Rolf was always the one to telephone, a practice they had agreed was safer and cleaner, particularly because Rafael did not want La Meridiana to bear the cost of those calls. Their established pattern makes Rafael’s breach of it an immediate warning.

Across the two episodes, Munich’s narrative function changes without losing its association with consequential contact. In 1936, the city is a transport link on the route that carries Franco’s request toward Hitler, and the transfer from aircraft to Hess’s plane to a waiting car makes political access look both contingent and meticulously enabled. In 1949, it is not a destination for Rafael but the remote location of the person he urgently needs to reach. The journey has become a telephone call, yet the same structure remains: people and resources at a distance can determine what happens in Madrid.

Munich therefore anchors two different kinds of dependence. Bernhardt’s arrival there converts years of frustrated ambition into direct access to Nazi authority; Rafael’s call there reveals how an apparently routine clandestine relationship has acquired enough trust to sustain an emergency. In both cases, the city is less a backdrop than a relay point: a place where political and personal networks become actionable, with consequences that extend far beyond it.