Herrenvolk and Untermenschen

“Herrenvolk and Untermenschen” is the racial opposition between those Nazi ideology casts as a master race and those it degrades as subhuman. In the novel, the phrase is not merely a label: it is the destination of a bureaucratic and scientific process that measures, records, and classifies people, while claiming that the work is objective. The machinery of precision gives hierarchy an appearance of fact; the people subjected to it remain anxious, exposed, and vulnerable to power.

From examination to racial classification

At the biometric centre, visitors arrive in groups of roughly a dozen, sorted by sex and approximate age. Staff usher them in politely, speaking Czech or German as needed, and describe their work as scientific. In the Glass Room, forms collect birthplaces, languages, religion, race, and nationality, as well as medical histories and conditions attributed to ancestry, including alcoholism, criminality, and mental retardation. The language of confidentiality and pure science makes the process sound protective, though the information is being assembled for racial classification.

The examination proceeds through a chain of standardized tasks. Subjects match shapes and patterns, submit to blood tests and blood-pressure readings, and stand at measuring instruments while an examiner adjusts their posture and a recorder writes down results. Height, hip and chest diameter, limb measurements, and head dimensions are recorded; skin and eye colour are compared against charts and model eyes. Finally, subjects are photographed naked under bright lights. Reassurances that there will be no pain do not erase the unequal terms of the encounter: the institution controls the forms, the measurements, and the camera, while those being examined stand exposed before its judgment.

The narration links this clinical routine directly to its ideological end. Stahl watches the examinations and becomes enthralled by the systematic measurement of what, in the racial scheme, is supposed to distinguish human from subhuman. The room’s exactness and the procedures’ repetition do not establish the validity of the categories; they show how a hierarchy can be made to look like the outcome of neutral observation.

The promise and failure of racial science

When Heydrich visits the centre, the gap between scientific method and racial doctrine becomes explicit. Stahl explains that particular diseases cannot serve as a simple test of Jewish identity: not all Jews have them, and people with those diseases are not all Jewish. The centre instead measures minute variations in phenotype and uses data-processing machines to search for combinations that might yield a racial diagnosis. The caveat exposes the uncertainty at the heart of the project, even as the institution continues to pursue the classification it has already decided to seek.

The numerical returns and punched cards extend the same ambition beyond the examination room. A monthly report divides assessed people into categories, while Roma and Jews are counted separately in an addendum. Cards are duplicated and sent onward for machines to sort and analyse, with patterns and correlations imagined as keys to human race and identity. The abundance of numbers lends the enterprise administrative weight, but the categories remain products of a persecuting system rather than discoveries made independent of it.

Who is allowed to define whom

The novel also sets this classification against individual lives that resist reduction to a single category. When Katalin explains that Viktor helped her financially, she places the relationship within the circumstances of poverty: she had struggled to find work, pay rent, secure somewhere to sleep, and buy clothes for her baby. Her account answers an accusation from a position shaped by both economic insecurity and motherhood, rather than accepting the more comfortable observer’s assumptions about shame and choice.

At the refugee gathering in the Glass Room, people brought before an audience are made into a spectacle. Among them is Katalin with her young daughter, Marika; the narration first describes the mother’s disdainful gaze and only then identifies her by name. Later, when officials examine Katalin’s passport and visas, they lead her away toward a hut. Liesel pulls Marika close and says the child is with her and will be cared for. The scene makes the consequences of official control immediate: documents and administrative decisions determine who may remain with a child, while the people caught in the process have little power to contest it.

A more direct challenge comes when Hana tells Stahl that her husband is Jewish. His stated position is that Jews should be isolated; her answer makes clear that the policy reaches into the life he shares with her. The exchange turns the doctrine from an abstract classification into a threat to a marriage and a test of his own complicity. Against the institutional gaze that sorts people into racial types, Hana speaks from a relationship the system would reduce to a category.

The expression’s significance

The phrase crystallizes the violence concealed by the centre’s orderly surfaces. Its examiners work in pairs, measurements are standardized, and records are treated as confidential; yet the process ends with people photographed naked and data arranged for racial diagnosis. The appearance of precision is not separate from the ideology of superiority and subordination. It is one of the means by which that ideology seeks authority.

By placing the phrase beside the lives, bodies, and relationships caught within the classification system, the novel reveals the distance between a person and the category imposed upon them. Refugees are not simply entries on a form, and a Jewish identity is not an abstract variable when it shapes danger, belonging, and family life. “Herrenvolk and Untermenschen” thus names not a legitimate account of human difference but a hierarchy whose supposedly scientific procedures help make persecution governable.