Berlin

Berlin enters the memoir as the destination of an extraordinary plan rather than as a place the narrator is shown visiting. In 1938, after returning from Sweden and going back to Nice, he learns that his mother expects him to travel to Berlin and assassinate Adolf Hitler. The city becomes the imagined setting for a mission she believes will save France and civilization, while the account focuses on the plan’s grand expectations and the narrator’s preparations, not on an arrival there.

The proposed journey

The narrator’s mother presents the plan after welcoming him home in tears. She has imagined what would happen if he were caught: France, England, and America would demand his release under threat of war; Germany would be plunged into confusion; and he would enter Paris as a national hero. In that vision, Berlin is the starting point of a chain of events that ends in public acclaim. These are his mother’s confident predictions, not outcomes the memoir says came to pass.

The city imagined from a distance

The narrator is reluctant to set out in the middle of summer. He imagines travelling third class on an overcrowded train, enduring a sleepless night, and waiting in Berlin’s streets for Hitler to appear. He would rather remain by the Mediterranean and thinks October, at the beginning of the academic year, would be a better time. When he learns from the papers that Hitler is at Berchtesgaden, he finds the prospect of the Bavarian Alps more appealing than the air of a city in mid-July. Berlin is thus evoked through an anticipated wait and an alternative destination, not through a description of its streets or buildings.

Preparations and narrative significance

Despite his hesitation, the narrator feels he cannot disappoint his mother. He makes plans, relying on his pistol-shooting ability and training in Lieutenant Sverdlovski’s gymnasium. He retrieves a revolver from the family box in the cellar, attends to his travel arrangements, puts his manuscripts in order, writes farewell letters, oils the pistol, and borrows a jacket from a larger friend to conceal it. These preparations show how his mother’s imagined mission takes hold of their homecoming: Berlin becomes the far-off destination around which he organizes practical steps, even as the account leaves the journey’s completion unresolved.