Austria is the setting of a decisive rupture in the novel: its annexation by Nazi Germany ends its independence, sends refugees across the border, and makes the danger to the Landauer family impossible to treat as distant. The change is heard in the Glass Room before its consequences can be fully measured. From there, the family confronts a transformed political map, the vulnerability attached to Jewish identity, and the growing likelihood that home will have to be left behind.

Annexation and the Glass Room

Reports of unrest and resistance circulate before the news is clear. Rumours describe fighting in Vienna, but denials follow; newspapers then show German troops crossing the border. The uncertainty gives way when the family hears Austrian radio announce the annexation. The crowd at Vienna’s Heldenplatz, its bands and drums, and Adolf Hitler’s voice reach the quiet of the Glass Room. Austria is no longer an independent republic: it has become an eastern province of the German Reich, renamed Ostmark.

The broadcast turns an international event into a domestic crisis. Viktor paces through the Glass Room with a newspaper, invoking the treaties of Versailles and Saint-Germain as if their authority has already receded into history. He knows that calling the annexation illegal cannot undo it. His question about what may happen next registers not only the failure of treaties to protect Austria, but the family’s inability to know where the new political boundary will lead.

Refugees and the threatened home

The annexation is followed by the arrival of refugees fleeing Vienna and other Austrian cities. They cross the southern border with whatever they can carry, travelling by train, car, and on foot with handcarts and suitcases. Their presence makes the political upheaval visible throughout the city: people seek shelter where they can, and Viktor insists that something must be done. The Glass Room’s spaciousness becomes a reproach to its owners, since those in flight cannot simply enter and find refuge there.

Liesel initially argues that the crisis belongs to governments, not individuals, and insists that the family’s home, city, friends, and business are reasons not to leave. Viktor answers by naming the identity she would prefer not to make decisive: he is Jewish, as are the children, whatever labels others may impose on them. He lists the restrictions already confronting Jews in Germany, from exclusion from professions and businesses to extra taxes, arrest, and limits on social contact. His fear is that those measures will travel across the border and reach their family.

Viktor points out that Austria has already come under Nazi rule and that German power is close to their supposedly safe house, with the border territories between them already absorbed into Germany. Looking out through the windows, he sees no change in the children playing or in the city, even as he understands that everything has changed. He does not want the family driven into a panicked departure with only what can be grabbed at the last moment. Instead, he has begun moving funds and proposes Switzerland, not Palestine, as a destination. Austria’s fate thus changes the family’s decision from an argument about belonging into a practical question of preparation and escape.

A wider collapse

The later dismemberment of Czechoslovakia extends the pattern that Austria’s annexation has established. The narrative describes the Great Powers watching as the country is partitioned, its army standing down while German troops enter northern towns and Poland and Hungary take territory. Refugees flee again, by crowded trains and roads, in what the account calls the effect of war without the fighting. Austria’s loss of independence is therefore part of a broader unravelling: borders change, the protections they seemed to promise fail, and civilians are forced to move through the aftermath.

The novel also makes borders material through the family’s later journey. At a checkpoint, a German official demands documents and tickets from Viktor’s group. Katalin and her daughter Marika are separated from the others despite Katalin’s refugee passport and visas. Viktor protests that her papers are in order, but an official orders him back to the train and warns that he may be detained; the family must continue without knowing whether the separation will be temporary. This episode gives concrete form to the danger anticipated in the Glass Room: documentation may establish a person’s status on paper without securing passage or keeping a family together.

The house under successive regimes

The Landauer House’s later history extends the political transformation of home beyond the family’s departure. First, the house grows alongside the family: construction proceeds through steel beams, concrete, and delays caused by materials and labour. When the shell is completed, it initially appears stark and unfinished rather than welcoming. Its domestic life and architectural ideal are vulnerable from the beginning to forces beyond the owners’ control.

Under Nazi rule, the house is converted into a biometric research centre. Former living spaces are assigned to offices, laboratories, photography, and measurement; devices are set up against the onyx wall, and the Glass Room is divided by curtains. The surviving Bösendorfer piano stands incongruously amid the new apparatus. What had been a modern family home is reorganized to serve the racial classification and administrative machinery of the regime that has absorbed Austria and expanded into the surrounding region.

Later, the Glass Room serves as a gymnasium where Tomáš works with children affected by disease and where Zdenka holds dance classes. Tomáš calls it the Glass Room, a name whose Czech word for room can also mean peace or quiet, and experiences the space as a place apart from the demands of his work. A newspaper debate over the building’s use as a children’s gymnasium identifies it as a modernist masterpiece in the Blackfield district, overlooking Lužánky Park and the city centre. The shift from private residence to research centre to public-use space shows that a building’s meaning is not fixed by its design or former ownership alone.

After the fall of the Iron Curtain, the house is repaired and opened to visitors, though some repairs are poor and the bathroom fittings are updated in a way that damages them. Restored plate glass returns the Glass Room to its lucid appearance; visitors include delegations from fraternal Soviet states and, later, tourists and architecture students. Marie Delmas comes from Paris after recognizing the house in a book on modern architecture. In this final change of use, the house becomes a site of architectural memory and personal recognition, while its successive repurposings preserve the history of how political power and daily life have occupied the same space.