Zurich becomes the Landauers’ first substantial refuge after their flight from Město, but it is never simply a new home. In the city, Viktor tries to establish a future through business, while Liesel waits, writes, and practices the piano; their household sustains itself through routines even as the possibility of return recedes. Zurich is therefore both a place of temporary stability and a stage in an exile that will carry the family farther west.

Arrival and the narrowing prospect of return

At first, Liesel still imagines the stay as temporary. In a letter to Hana, she asks after the friends left behind and the house, asking Hana to visit it from time to time. She says that she misses Hana and believes the upheaval cannot last. That expectation does not survive long. The children find places in nearby schools and settle in quickly, while Viktor begins making plans that assume a future elsewhere.

The contrast between the children’s adjustment and Liesel’s continued hope gives the Zurich period its emotional tension. Practical life takes shape around them, but Liesel keeps the thought of home alive. Her suggestion that they may be back before Christmas, and that everything may settle down, is a recurring attempt to make uncertainty temporary. Katalin answers with a different understanding: one can only go forward. Her reply names the direction of events before Liesel can accept it.

Viktor’s work and Liesel’s daily life

Viktor’s plans give the family a practical foothold in Switzerland. He develops a project to manufacture instruments for cars and aircraft, combining Swiss expertise in clocks and watches with his own knowledge of the motor industry. He spends many days in Zurich and sometimes in Geneva, meeting potential investors, seeking partners, and establishing contacts. His activity is not evidence that the family has found a settled home; it is an effort to create a livelihood under conditions in which return is becoming less plausible.

Liesel’s days take a different shape. She waits for Viktor’s return from the cities, writes letters, and practices the piano. Almost as soon as the family arrives, she hires a Bösendorfer grand like the one that had stood in the Glass Room and finds a piano teacher. The teachers available in the city include Jewish refugees struggling to make a living, so the ordinary act of arranging lessons is bound up with the precarious circumstances of displaced people around her.

Liesel also refuses to let Katalin remain confined to the status of a servant. From the start, she invites her down from her room to join her in the sitting room, suggesting that they might keep one another company. The invitation changes the terms of their daily relationship: rather than preserving a formal employer-and-employee distance, Liesel seeks companionship within the household.

Companionship in exile

Katalin is initially hesitant. She comes from a different world and must adjust to this new experience, but she and Liesel begin to talk about the places they have left, the dream of return, and the vague aspirations that accompany ennui and exile. Their conversations take place against the uncertainty of displacement; even the possibility of going back is discussed as a hope rather than a plan.

The two women do not experience exile in identical ways. Liesel is the one who repeatedly proposes that they may soon be home, while Katalin challenges the premise that the past can be resumed. Their exchange gives the Zurich household a private debate about time and loss: Liesel tries to preserve a route back, and Katalin insists on the necessity of moving forward. Their companionship does not resolve the uncertainty, but it allows Liesel to share the waiting rather than remain alone with it.

Refuge, work, and a contested identity

Zurich also becomes a point of contact for other displaced professionals. When Rainer von Abt visits, he rejects the description of himself as a refugee. He has a project in Zurich involving a bank’s new headquarters, and he reports that the German government wants him to design entire towns. He says that Albert Speer has been urging him to accept, but he refuses to do the work and says that, when he is finished in Switzerland, he will go to America. His position contrasts with the Landauers’ more immediate dependence on refuge: he has professional options and can describe his movements as choices, even while his own future remains unsettled.

For Liesel, Rainer’s visit revives memories of the house in Město and of the optimism with which it was planned and built. At lunch, the conversation turns to the lost home and the people associated with it. Liesel wonders whether that former happiness was real or only a memory made indistinct by distance. Rainer answers that he built the house to make her happy. Her suggestion that he stay and build another glass house exposes the distance between the life they once made and the life available to them now. In Zurich, architecture and professional work can be discussed, but neither can simply restore the household they lost.

From temporary refuge to onward flight

The family’s stay in Zurich eventually ends, and their next move makes the provisional nature of the city explicit. Liesel writes to Hana that she has received letter number eighteen, while number fifteen seems to have gone missing; she gives Hana the new address only for the moment and cannot say where they will be a week later. The uncertainty of their route is now reflected in the uncertainty of their correspondence: letters may fail to arrive, and addresses may soon be obsolete.

After the stillness of Zurich, the family moves west to Le Grand Hôtel Vevey, not to another house but to a hotel. The children are fretful about leaving new friends behind, while the adults are hopeful. Liesel again has a view of a lake, but it is a different, larger lake, with another country across it. The onward route is planned by train, from Geneva across France to Bilbao, where transatlantic liners depart. The movement carries the family farther from what Liesel knows, and makes clear that Zurich was not a destination but one interval in a continuing flight.

Narrative significance

Zurich’s significance lies in the contrast between the life its routines permit and the permanence they cannot provide. Schools, business meetings, music lessons, letters, and shared conversation form a daily world; each offers a measure of continuity without reversing the family’s displacement. The hired Bösendorfer recalls the instrument in the Glass Room, but resemblance is not recovery. Liesel can recreate one element of the former household while the house itself and the life attached to it remain elsewhere.

The city also brings competing responses to exile into close contact. Viktor invests in a new professional future, Katalin urges movement forward, and Liesel continues to hope for return. Rainer’s plans add another version of displacement, in which architectural work and the possibility of America remain available even as the old European world is being abandoned. When the Landauers leave Zurich for Vevey, the city’s role is complete: it has offered temporary routines and relationships, but not the return Liesel imagined or a permanent home.{}