Proud City, Cheerful Country

Proud City, Cheerful Country is the official slogan attached to Munich during the Oktoberfest in the novel. It turns a citywide celebration into a public image of national unity, even as the story sets that cheerful language against the threat of war, private memories of loss, and the remaking of the city by the Third Reich.

Slogan and Public Spectacle

The slogan appears as Paul von Hartmann’s train arrives in Munich. The annual Oktoberfest is already under way, and the Party presents the gathering of foreign leaders as a further reason for civic joy. With only hours’ notice, it calls on residents to welcome Adolf Hitler and his guests; schools close, workers receive time off, and station posters lay out the hotels and routes the delegations will use. The phrase therefore belongs not simply to the festival but to an organized public display, in which a city’s customary celebration is joined to political pageantry.

Cheer Against the Prospect of War

The slogan’s confidence is sharply at odds with the crisis surrounding the visit. An epigraph attributes to Hitler, speaking in February 1945, the judgment that Germany should have gone to war in 1938 and that September would have been the most favorable date. The book’s opening reflection that what lies in the past once lay in the future makes that retrospective assessment part of the phrase’s context: the festivities take place at a moment whose dangers are not yet past for the characters, though the reader can see them from a later vantage.

Ralph Wigram had obsessively warned of Hitler’s danger. After Germany reoccupied the Rhineland in 1936, he urged the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, to act, but Baldwin feared that even a small risk of war was unacceptable so soon after the First World War. Wigram returned home in despair, and his warning that bombs might fall on his house precedes his death nine months later. Against this history, the slogan’s buoyant assurance reads as a public face set over a political future that Wigram had already tried to make visible.

Private Memory and the Meaning of War

The novel also places public language beside the personal memories it cannot contain. When Hugh Legat sees balloons rising over London, a bystander uses an expression about the balloon having gone up. Legat remembers his father using the same phrase while home on leave during the Great War: his father then returned to France, and Legat, aged six, never saw him again. A casual idiom thus opens onto a childhood parting and the enduring cost of war, an intimate counterpoint to the Munich slogan’s collective cheer.

Neville Chamberlain explains his own determination to preserve peace through the losses of that same war. Too old to fight, he says he suffered from witnessing the deaths of three-quarters of a million men from Britain and the grief borne by their families and friends. He describes his promise to do anything, or sacrifice anything, to prevent another catastrophe. His account gives the political crisis a human scale that the slogan’s polished optimism leaves outside its frame.

A City Remade

For Hartmann, the celebratory language is also inseparable from the altered city in which it is displayed. He has avoided Königsplatz for years because he remembers it as a picnic place shared with Leyna and Hugh: a checked blanket beneath the trees, Leyna in a white dress, and Hugh reading. On returning, he finds the park cleared and converted into a vast parade ground, its grass replaced by granite slabs and its trees by flagpoles bearing enormous swastikas. Temples of Honour and the Nazi Party administration buildings dominate the space.

The contrast between the remembered picnic and the regimented political landscape gives the slogan an unstable meaning. Munich is called cheerful while its familiar public space has been transformed into a setting for displays of power. The phrase condenses the novel’s contrast between festival and spectacle, civic belonging and political staging, and reassuring public language and the historical danger pressing in around it.