Germany

In the novel’s September 1938 crisis, Germany is more than the power whose threatened invasion brings Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler to the brink of war: it is the political ground from which that danger emerges and the home to which Paul von Hartmann must return after challenging it. The country’s expansionist plans make peace precarious, while Hartmann’s journey back to Berlin reveals a society in which ordinary gestures can acquire the meaning of opposition.

Germany and the September Crisis

The book introduces Germany through a collision of intentions. Adolf Hitler is determined to start a war; Neville Chamberlain is desperate to preserve peace. Their confrontation is to be decided in Munich, but the machinery of danger is already moving: Chamberlain’s plane judders over the Channel as Hitler’s train travels south from Berlin. Germany is thus present both as the origin of the threat and as a route toward the negotiations meant to contain it.

At a British Cabinet meeting, Chamberlain explains that the proposed orderly transfer of the Sudeten territory to Germany, subject to a plebiscite, has been overtaken by Hitler’s demand for action. Hitler will not wait even a week and intends to invade on Saturday. Chamberlain reports that he has warned Hitler that Britain may have to support France if France fulfils its treaty obligations to Czechoslovakia. Hitler, however, has answered that he is prepared for every eventuality and that the countries could be at war by the following Monday. Germany’s intentions turn a negotiated territorial question into an immediate threat of European war.

The British military assessment makes the stakes still clearer. The Chiefs of Staff judge that British and French pressure, whether by sea, land or air, cannot prevent Germany from overrunning Bohemia and decisively defeating Czechoslovakia. Restoring Czechoslovakia’s lost integrity, they warn, would require Germany’s defeat in a prolonged struggle that would become an unlimited war. Chamberlain sees a further political difficulty: Britain has already accepted that the three and a half million Sudeten Germans should have self-determination, so separating the Sudetenland from Germany would not even be an Allied war aim. Germany’s threatened action therefore confronts the opposing powers with the prospect of fighting a vast war without a settled account of what victory would restore.

Plans Beyond the Sudetenland

The evidence in the novel makes clear that the crisis cannot be understood as a dispute confined to the Sudetenland. A directive from Hitler, headed as a strategic concentration for war on two fronts with the main effort in the south-east, is brought to Hugh Legat. The paper is not an abstract forecast: it is a document associated with preparations for a military campaign, and its sudden appearance makes the danger tangible to the British official who receives it.

A second document takes Legat back to a meeting on 5 November 1937. It records Hitler’s view that incorporating Austria and Czechoslovakia into Germany would bring military and political advantages: shorter, better frontiers, forces freed for other purposes, and the possibility of forming as many as twelve additional divisions. The account also records alarm among senior commanders and Foreign Minister Neurath about the feasibility of Hitler’s strategy. They worried about French military strength, Czech border fortifications and the weakness of Germany’s motorised divisions. By the time Legat reads the memorandum, those who had voiced reservations have been removed and replaced, among others, by Joachim von Ribbentrop. The country’s growing military capacity and the narrowing space for internal caution are presented as connected developments.

Paul von Hartmann brings the implications of this evidence directly to Chamberlain. He argues that Hitler’s claim to have no further territorial demands in Europe is a lie: the plan is a war of conquest for living space, with the incorporation of Austria and Czechoslovakia only its first step. Hartmann warns that the war could begin within five years and argues that a firm British and French stand might prompt the German Army to move against Hitler to prevent a disastrous conflict. Chamberlain does not accept that calculation. He considers it politically impossible to ask Britain and France to fight over the self-determination of ethnic Germans, and chooses to continue the conference in the hope of averting war in the short term. Germany’s future is therefore bound to a dispute over whether concessions can contain Hitler or instead strengthen his position.

Resistance and the Cost of Understanding

Germany is also the setting of opposition to Hitler, though the novel does not present resistance as a force able simply to cancel his plans. Hartmann is a German diplomat and member of the anti-Hitler resistance; by taking the document to Chamberlain and urging him not to sign the agreement, he risks himself in an attempt to change the outcome. His warning depends on a political judgment about the German Army’s possible response, but Chamberlain’s refusal to stand firm leaves that hoped-for intervention uncertain. The resistance speaks from inside the country whose government it opposes, while its fate is affected by decisions made at the conference in Munich.

Hartmann’s understanding of Germany has also changed through what he has witnessed there. In a conversation with Legat, he recounts that a woman was said to have fallen from a third-floor window, but that a Star of David had been carved into her back before her fall. He rejects the idea that anti-Jewish persecution can be put aside as a separate evil that will simply pass. For him, the violence exposes a broader capacity for brutality: if the regime is capable of that persecution, it is capable of anything. Legat acknowledges that he now understands. The encounter turns Germany from a problem to be judged only by military calculations into a place where political ideology is already exacting a human cost.

Berlin After Munich

Hartmann’s return gives Germany a final, contrasting image. After leaving the Führerbau, he travels to the airport and boards a Foreign Ministry-chartered Junkers passenger plane. At each stage, including his landing at Tempelhof, he expects arrest. No plain-clothes men stop him; he walks through the terminal to the taxi rank without interference. His freedom is startling precisely because he has carried dangerous evidence to Chamberlain and spoken openly against signing the agreement.

Berlin is full of Friday-night revellers enjoying the unexpected peace. In Munich, Hartmann had felt contempt for people celebrating while danger gathered. On returning, he sees each raised glass, smile and embrace as a gesture against the regime. The change is not in the crowd’s outward behaviour but in the meaning he gives it: ordinary social life can register, to him, as a refusal to surrender entirely to dictatorship. Germany consequently remains unresolved at the novel’s close. The threat of conquest and the reality of persecution persist, but so do resistance and the possibility of recognizing a shared life as something the regime has not wholly absorbed.