Blackfield Road connects the Landauer House in the Blackfield district with the streets, park, and avenues leading into the city. Its narrative significance lies in that double function: it belongs to the family’s ordinary geography, yet becomes the road down which they depart from home as occupation closes around them.

A Route Through the City

When Viktor walks to his father-in-law’s house, he takes a long route rather than cutting through the garden and past the chata. He goes by way of Schwarzfeldgasse and Černopolní, along Blackfield Road, then descends by a street of steps toward Lužánky Park. The walk carries him from the Landauer family’s immediate surroundings into the city’s public spaces, where he pauses at the railings to watch children playing before continuing to the house.

The route also bears the marks of political change in its names. The park is called Lužánky in the present, the narration notes, though it was formerly known as the Augarten and may be called that again when disaster comes. Such shifts make the streetscape more than a fixed map: place names hold the possibility of historical reversal, and familiar geography can be renamed along with the order governing it.

The House and Its District

Blackfield Road lies in the Blackfield district, a pleasant residential area of bourgeois villas overlooking Lužánky Park and the city centre. The Landauer House, built for the prominent Landauer family and designed by Rainer von Abt, is identified as the architect’s masterpiece and his last European work before he fled to the United States in 1938. Its large living room, with two glass walls, south-facing light, and a view toward Špilas, sets the modernist house apart within the district.

The road’s setting therefore joins domestic life to the city’s architectural and social landscape. The house begins as a private family home, but its situation above the park and centre makes it visible as part of the town’s built heritage. Later, the same location is described as a children’s gymnasium, a change that exposes the conflict between the building’s historical importance and its use under a different political order.

Departure Along Blackfield Road

On Friday the seventeenth, a small convoy leaves the house and heads down Blackfield Road. Viktor and Liesel travel in the first car with the children; Katalin follows in a second car with Marika and the luggage, while Oskar and Hana bring up the rear. They drive on the right, following new regulations, through streets with almost no traffic or pedestrians. The apparent quiet resembles a Sunday morning, but the date and emptiness make the departure feel anything but ordinary.

Viktor asks the driver, Laník, where everyone has gone. Laník cannot say. The unanswered question fixes the road in a moment of disorientation: the convoy is still moving through a recognizable city, but everyday public life has already receded. Blackfield Road thus becomes the threshold between the family’s home and exile, carrying the Landauers away from the house whose later history will include confiscation, institutional reuse, and return as an architectural landmark.