World War II

World War II is both a historical catastrophe in the novel’s background and a force that continues to shape the lives and stories formed in its aftermath. Its effects appear in Vienna’s depleted population and damaged buildings, and in Garp’s fiction, where a café owner carries a wartime method of defense into ordinary life.

Historical aftermath in Vienna

Garp and Jenny Fields go to Vienna on Mr. Tinch’s recommendation. He remembers it as contemplative and artistic, but the city they encounter bears the weight of a history that has made that description only partly true. The account places the Spanish flu after the First World War, then describes the wartime losses that followed: forty percent of Vienna’s remaining male population would not survive World War II. The city’s apparent quiet is not simply an aesthetic quality; it is also the result of devastation and absence.

The occupation years had further consequences for the city’s population. Few Viennese were born in 1943, or during the period from the beginning of Nazi occupation in 1938 through the end of the war in 1945. The narrative notes that births following rape occurred, but that many Viennese did not want children until after the Russian occupation ended in 1955. After seventeen years of foreign occupation, Vienna could seem to Garp less like a living city than a museum containing a dead one. His sense of being unusually young there reflects the historical gap between his own age and a population shaped by war and occupation.

Ruins, memory, and Garp’s writing

The traces of World War II are material as well as demographic. At the Schönbrunn Zoo, Garp sees buildings that appear to be three-quarters destroyed and only partly restored for the animals. Their condition gives him the impression that the zoo remains lodged in Vienna’s wartime past. He also notices machine-gun damage in the stone walls of the lobby of the Schwindgasse apartment building. These surviving marks connect the city’s visible landscape to the history he reads at night, including accounts of the Nazi and Russian occupations.

That history becomes part of Garp’s work on “The Pension Grillparzer,” whose death themes seem to him connected to the city around him. He understands the relation between a city’s history and a family’s history through their shared vulnerability to separation by death. In his view, memory keeps the dead present, while a writer’s task is to imagine experience with the vividness of personal recollection. Vienna’s ruins therefore do more than establish a setting: they sharpen his developing idea of how fiction can make loss feel particular and remembered.

The café dog and a war-trained method

World War II also enters Garp’s storytelling through an unnamed dog in a postwar German city. Garp tells his children that the dog had been a guard dog during the war, fierce and intelligent, but not simply mean. He describes the animal as shaped by its master’s training: it could be neither nice nor mean, or sometimes both, because it had been taught to do whatever the master commanded.

When Helen Holm questions the dog’s age, Garp revises the account. The dog itself had not been in the war; its owner, who ran a café, had. The owner had trained it to kill anyone who entered the café after dark. During daylight, anyone could enter, but once it was dark even the owner could not go inside. Helen points out the practical drawbacks of the arrangement, including the possibility of a fire. Garp calls it a war method, making the café’s rule an unsettling domestic afterlife of wartime thinking: a system designed for danger persists even when it places the owner himself at risk.

Significance

The novel gives World War II no single, isolated episode; instead, the war recurs through population loss, occupation, damaged architecture, historical reading, and a story told within family life. These forms of recurrence show how the past remains present without becoming identical to the original event. Vienna’s stillness gives Garp room to observe and write, while the trained dog story transforms wartime experience into a rule governing everyday access and safety. Together, they make the war consequential not only as a historical period but as a source of continuing absences, memories, and habits.