Stuttgart is the city in which Max Vandenburg was born and grew up, but it becomes, under Nazi rule, a place of exclusion, concealment, and departure. Its decisive significance lies in this reversal: the city is first associated with Max’s childhood and friendships, then with the legal and social machinery that strips Jews of belonging, and finally with the dark hiding place from which he must leave for the uncertain protection of Hans Hubermann’s address in Molching.

Birthplace and Early Belonging

Stuttgart is identified as Max Vandenburg’s birthplace, and he grew up there before persecution made ordinary belonging impossible. As a boy, Max loved fistfighting and had his first bout at eleven, beginning a pattern of physical courage and rivalry that shaped his early life. His repeated fights with Walter Kugler eventually changed into genuine friendship by 1933, when both were seventeen. Stuttgart therefore carries the memory of a social world in which Max could be known as a boy, a fighter, and a friend rather than reduced to a racial category.

That earlier belonging is sharply contrasted with the city’s later political reality. Max and Walter continued to hold jobs until Max was dismissed with other Jewish employees from the Jedermann Engineering Factory in 1935, soon after the Nuremberg Laws forbade Jews from holding German citizenship and prohibited marriage between Jews and Germans. The laws did not merely regulate public life; they recast Stuttgart’s Jewish residents as people who no longer properly belonged to the nation in which they had been born. Walter’s continued friendship with Max becomes a remnant of the older Stuttgart, while the star on Max’s sleeve marks the new order imposed upon it.

City of Persecution and Departure

The narrative connects Stuttgart to a wider system of forced classification. Liesel Meminger cannot remember her father and knows only that he was labeled a communist; as she gradually links that word with a bonfire, dead letters, her mother’s suffering, and her brother’s death, she reaches the Führer as the figure behind those losses. Stuttgart belongs to the same political world in which such labels become dangerous identities. The city is not presented as a neutral backdrop but as one of the places where Nazi categories determine who may work, marry, remain visible, or survive.

Max’s departure from Stuttgart is therefore both an escape and, in his own understanding, a desertion. After more than six months in hiding, he and the people assisting him examine the paper given to him when he deserted. It contains a single name and address: Hans Hubermann, 33 Himmel Street, Molching. The address offers a route away from Stuttgart, but it also records the cost of leaving: Max is not simply fleeing a building or a patrol; he is abandoning the city in which his childhood, work, friendship, and former identity were rooted.

Darkness, Waiting, and the Book

Before Max reaches the Hubermanns, Stuttgart appears as a city of darkness. A few hundred miles northwest of Himmel Street, he sits on a suitcase in a dark room because those helping him have decided that darkness makes it harder to find a Jew. He has eaten little beyond the foul taste of his own hungry breath, waits for voices to pass, and experiences time as an oppressive suspension. The city’s darkness is practical concealment, but it also expresses the condition forced upon him: survival depends upon becoming difficult to see.

When Max finally leaves, Stuttgart opens behind him in mockery. He watches its lights diminish from a handful to nothing while stale bread disintegrates in his stomach. He tells himself to look proud rather than afraid and to read the copy of Mein Kampf he is carrying, even though the book is an instrument of the ideology driving him out. That object turns the departure into a bitter contradiction: Max must use Hitler’s book as part of the secret passage to safety, carrying the text of his persecutor through the landscape that no longer welcomes him.

Stuttgart and the Hidden Network

The city remains connected to Max after his departure through Walter Kugler, whose friendship makes the journey to Molching possible. Walter sends Hans a letter promising that he will try to send supplies whenever possible, including a map of Molching and Greater Munich and a route from Pasing station to Hans’s front door. The instructions transform Stuttgart from a sealed place of waiting into the starting point of a clandestine network extending toward 33 Himmel Street.

That network depends on performance as much as movement. Once Max arrives at the Hubermanns’ kitchen in November 1940, the family must behave as though nothing extraordinary has happened, even though a twenty-four-year-old Jewish man is hidden in their home. Hans must continue his public routines, including playing the accordion often enough to avoid suspicion. The logic governing the hidden room in Molching is already present in Max’s experience of Stuttgart: fear must be contained, appearances must be maintained, and ordinary gestures must conceal an altered reality.

A Counterpoint to the Street of the Dead

Stuttgart’s significance is intensified by its contrast with later scenes in Molching. In Munich Street, Liesel and Hans watch Jewish prisoners being driven along the road: starving figures with dirt molded to their bodies, staggering under soldiers’ hands. The prisoners are described as a catalog of colors, yet the scene ends in death for many of them. Stuttgart is the city from which Max escapes before he becomes one of those publicly exhibited bodies; Munich Street is where the consequences of the same political system pass directly before the Hubermanns.

Through this contrast, Stuttgart becomes more than a biographical location. It marks the earlier stage of persecution, when Max can still flee with a suitcase, a book, and a route supplied by friends. The later procession reveals what happens when escape fails. The city’s narrative role is thus double: it preserves the memory of Max’s former belonging while standing at the threshold of the system that converts Jewish citizens into fugitives, hidden bodies, and eventually starving prisoners marched through public streets.