Sevilla is both a concrete wartime transit point and part of the novel’s geography of return and displacement. In July 1936, an emergency landing there briefly threatens Johannes Bernhardt’s mission to secure German support for the military rebels; soon afterward, German transport aircraft use the city to bring Moroccan troops from Africa to the peninsula. Later references to Sevilla sit within a history in which homecoming is complicated by years of exile, false identities, and renewed flight.

The July 1936 flight

On 23 July, Bernhardt flew from Tetuán toward Germany with Adolf Langenheim and Francisco Arranz Monasterio, hoping to place the rebel cause before Hitler. The Junkers JU-52 first headed for Sevilla. At Tablada airfield, pilot Alfred Henke risked an emergency landing: the runway had no beacon lights, and one of the aircraft’s engines was malfunctioning. The problem was repaired at the airfield, allowing the flight to continue toward Marseille and, eventually, Germany.

The stop in Sevilla was one precarious stage in a journey repeatedly threatened by practical obstacles. In Marseille the party could not readily obtain the francs demanded for fuel, and Henke initially feared landing in Germany because he had left his Lufthansa base without permission. The flight nevertheless reached Stuttgart, and from there Berlin was straightforward. Sevilla thus enters the account not as the destination of Bernhardt’s mission but as the place where a damaged aircraft and an unlit runway might have ended it.

The airlift to the peninsula

The mission’s consequence was far larger than Bernhardt’s passage through the city. After hearing the delegation’s appeal and receiving a hand-drawn map of the war’s situation, Hitler ordered twenty transport aircraft, with crews and as much military equipment as they could carry, to Spain. Over the following week, those German Junkers transported about fifteen thousand soldiers from Morocco to Sevilla.

In this sequence, Sevilla is the receiving point for an operation that helped move the conflict’s forces from North Africa into Spain. The scale of the transport gives the airfield episode a sharp reversal: what began as a risky landing on a poorly lit runway becomes part of a sustained military airlift. Bernhardt’s intervention also left a lasting political debt; Francisco Franco would never forget the favor he had rendered.

Return, exile, and the meaning of home

The city’s later associations belong to a broader pattern of movement rather than to another detailed episode set in Sevilla. In September 1946, Manuel Arroyo Benítez entered Spain through Gibraltar under the cover of an American visiting his parents’ homeland. After more than seven years away, the sight of laundry on the rooftops of La Línea and the wind from the Strait stirred a powerful sense of homecoming. His return contrasts with Bernhardt’s 1936 journey: one crossing served a military mission, while the other brought an exile back under an assumed identity and at personal risk.

The book also recalls the loneliness of Arroyo’s earlier exile in Geneva. In the summer of 1939 he returned to a city where he had once been happy with Meg Williams, but she was gone; diplomatic meetings and reports under the name Felipe Ballesteros Sánchez filled his days, while his secure life in neutral Switzerland remained, in his view, a privilege beside the suffering of other Spanish exiles. These journeys frame Sevilla’s place in the larger geography of the novel: Spain can be the destination longed for after exile, but return does not undo displacement or restore the life left behind.

A crossroads across generations

The account extends this history of forced movement into 1976. After the Argentine dictatorship began its campaign of illegal detention and disappearance on the night of 24 March, thousands sought ways to leave the country. Spain became the second-largest destination for Argentine exiles, even as republicans who had fled Spain in 1939 were themselves forced, nearly four decades later, into another exile that brought them back as foreigners and empty-handed.

Sevilla’s significance is therefore carried by its place in a network of routes: the wartime flight from Tetuán, the troop transport from Morocco, the later return of exiles to Spain, and the repeated experience of being driven from home. The city is not simply a point on a map. It marks how military logistics and private longing can use the same geography, while the meaning of arrival changes with the traveler’s identity and history.