Hans Hubermann’s accordion

Hans Hubermann’s accordion is not merely a musical instrument in the story: it is the object through which friendship, debt, survival, and remembrance become physically present. It earns money in Molching, animates the Hubermanns’ kitchen, preserves Erik Vandenburg’s memory, and finally lies injured beside Hans’s body after the bombing of Himmel Street. Its significance rests in this accumulation of lives. The accordion belongs to Hans in daily use, but its history reaches backward to the battlefield and forward into Liesel Meminger’s vision of him playing one last time among the ruins.

Identity and Practical Use

The accordion accompanies Hans’s ordinary life as a painter and musician. His painting is his trade, while the instrument gives him a way to earn a little money in the pubs of Molching, including the Knoller, particularly during winter. Music is therefore not an ornamental talent detached from poverty; it is part of the household economy and one of the means by which Hans remains useful to his family.

At home, the instrument repeatedly interrupts domestic routine. Hans sometimes brings it into the kitchen and plays through breakfast, even when the performance is meant partly to irritate Rosa Hubermann. Liesel Meminger experiences the music with an almost physical immediacy: Hans’s right hand moves across the tooth-colored keys, his left hand strikes the buttons, and the scratched black case moves as his arms compress the dusty bellows. The silver, sparkling C-major button particularly attracts her attention. The scene transforms a familiar object into something newly perceptible. The accordion appears to breathe because its bellows draw in and expel air, and the narrative insists that this breathing makes the instrument seem alive.

Erik Vandenburg and the Instrument’s History

The accordion first belonged to Erik Vandenburg, the German Jew who taught Hans to play. Their friendship developed during military service because neither man was deeply interested in fighting. They preferred rolling cigarettes to rolling through snow and mud, shooting craps to shooting bullets, and building companionship through gambling, smoking, and music. The instrument thus originates in a relationship founded on shared refusal: the two men are connected not by martial enthusiasm but by a common desire to survive the war without being absorbed by its violence.

Erik does not survive. He is found in several pieces on a grassy hill, with his eyes open and his wedding ring stolen. Hans, however, does not go into battle that day, and the narrator presents his survival as an escape from death’s expected claim. Erik’s remaining possessions are reduced to a few personal items and the fingerprinted accordion. Everything except the instrument is sent home because the accordion is considered too large. It remains at the base camp on Erik’s makeshift bed, almost as though reproaching the men who are still alive, and is given to Hans because Hans is the only man from their immediate circle to survive.

Hans carries the accordion through the rest of the war. Its physical continuity counters the fragmentation of Erik’s death: the man is scattered, his belongings are divided, but the instrument remains whole enough to travel with Hans. In that sense, it is both a possession and a surviving witness. It preserves the trace of a dead friend without pretending that the friend can be restored.

Memory, Obligation, and Return

After the war, Hans tracks down Erik Vandenburg’s family in Stuttgart. Erik’s widow tells him that he may keep the accordion. Her apartment contains other accordions, and looking at this particular one distresses her too much; the other instruments already provide enough reminders, as does the profession of teaching that she once shared with her husband. Hans explains that Erik taught him to play, apparently hoping the fact might ease the burden of the object’s transfer.

The widow then asks Hans to play. He presses the buttons and keys through a clumsy performance of the Blue Danube Waltz, Erik’s favorite piece, while she silently weeps. The accordion therefore mediates a difficult exchange between the living and the dead. It cannot return Erik, and Hans cannot repay the gift by restoring what the war destroyed. What it can do is carry Erik’s music into the widow’s presence, allowing grief to be acknowledged through an act of performance rather than reduced to an explanation.

The instrument also becomes entangled with Hans’s relationships in Molching. His smoking, music, and gestures of care repeatedly take the form of exchange. When Liesel is distressed after being required to salute Adolf Hitler and say “Heil Hitler,” Hans receives tobacco and rolls a cigarette; later, a cigarette becomes an olive branch between them, and Liesel reaches over to roll it. The accordion is not present in that particular reconciliation, but it belongs to the same economy of small material acts through which Hans communicates affection, apology, and solidarity when direct speech is difficult. Its music gives form to the quiet, practical tenderness that defines his role as Papa.

The Accordion in Crisis and Loss

Hans continues to associate the instrument with the life he once shared with Erik. Before leaving for training, he tells Liesel, “I played an accordion, Liesel. Someone else’s.” The phrasing keeps ownership morally unsettled: the accordion is in Hans’s hands, but its origin remains another man’s. His later drinking with Alex Steiner at the Knoller, after a decade without alcohol, occurs on the eve of departure and recalls the social world in which music and friendship briefly make war seem distant.

During the family’s hiding of Max Vandenburg, the household becomes governed by strict limits of trust. Hans states that they trust only the people they have to, naming the three members of the immediate household. Extra food is prepared for Max, accompanied by an apology that the ritual is not his religion. The accordion belongs to this same protected household, a domestic object whose meaning has expanded beyond entertainment. It stands for Hans’s past, but it also helps define the home Max has entered: a home held together by repeated gestures, inherited obligations, and objects that carry stories beyond their owners.

The instrument’s most devastating appearance comes after the bombing of Himmel Street. Liesel asks an older member of the LSE to retrieve her Papa’s accordion. After several minutes of confusion, the damaged case is brought to her. She opens it, removes the injured instrument, and places it beside Hans’s body, addressing him with the simple words, “Here, Papa.” The object’s condition mirrors the destruction around it. Once an instrument whose bellows could seem to breathe, it is now wounded and silent beside the man who made it live.

Symbolic and Narrative Significance

The accordion is repeatedly defamiliarized through its material behavior. Its scratched yet shining surface, dusty bellows, keys, buttons, and especially its apparent breathing prevent it from disappearing into the background as an ordinary household possession. The narrative makes the reader attend to the mechanics of music so that the instrument becomes a visible participant in family life. Its liveliness is not magical in practical terms; it comes from the coordinated labor of Hans’s hands and arms. Yet that physical process becomes a way to represent the human capacity to make life audible under conditions designed to destroy it.

Its meanings also arise through contrast. The accordion is associated with pubs and breakfast, with cigarettes and friendship, but also with a battlefield death, a grieving widow, a hidden Jewish refugee, and a bombed street. The same object can support modest income, irritation, reconciliation, remembrance, and final mourning. It therefore links the smallest domestic routines to the largest violence of the war without making those spheres identical. The instrument does not erase death; it carries death’s remainder through continued use.

At the end, the narrator promises a vision seen many years later in Liesel Meminger herself. As she kneels beside Hans, she watches him stand amid broken houses, strap on the accordion, and play with kindness in his eyes and a cigarette hanging from his lips. He makes a mistake and laughs in retrospect; the bellows breathe again. This imagined performance does not undo the bombing or deny Hans’s death. Instead, it gives Liesel a final form of contact with the father whose music had taught her that an object could seem alive. The accordion survives as damaged matter, inherited memory, and the instrument through which Liesel can still hear Hans playing for her one last time.