The Glass Room

The book and its setting

Simon Mawer’s The Glass Room is a historical novel first published in 2009. It was shortlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize and is among the author’s best-known books. Its central presence is not simply a human protagonist but a modernist house in Brno, Czechoslovakia: the Landauer House, especially its expansive glass living room. The design is based on the real Villa Tugendhat. In an author’s note, Mawer distinguishes the fictional story from the house and its setting, which are not fictional.

The novel begins in the years between the world wars. Viktor Landauer, a wealthy industrialist, and his wife, Liesel, meet the architect Rainer von Abt while honeymooning in Venice. They commission him to create a home embodying their confidence in modern life and the future. Von Abt thinks of himself as a poet of space and structure, and the resulting house is a striking composition of clean lines, plate glass and an onyx partition. Its transparent central room becomes the novel’s defining image: a place of openness and elegance, but also one in which people can be exposed to view and where the meaning of what is seen may shift.

A house through history

As Nazi power grows and the Second World War approaches, the Landauers’ security and optimism collapse. They are forced to leave their home, while the building remains in Brno and passes into new hands. Over the decades, political upheaval changes the house’s occupants and uses. The narrative reaches into the postwar and Cold War years, following the building and the people connected to it through a long period of European history. Rather than treating the house as a static backdrop, Mawer makes it a continuing witness: private lives change, regimes change, and the same rooms acquire new meanings.

This structure allows the intimate story of a family to intersect with a much larger history of persecution, displacement and social transformation. The house can offer shelter and a sense of belonging, but it cannot protect its owners from political violence. Its glass walls suggest clarity and rational order, yet windows also reflect, refract and distort. The novel uses that tension to question whether modernist faith in reason and progress can endure the realities of war, and how memory alters what individuals and communities believe they have seen.

Themes and significance

Architecture is both the book’s subject and its narrative method. The Landauer House preserves traces of its inhabitants even as its purpose is repeatedly changed by events outside its walls. Its glass room embodies openness, modernity and an ideal of the future, while its fragility makes that ideal vulnerable. The onyx partition introduces weight and division into an otherwise airy space. Through these details, Mawer explores the unstable relationship between private life and public history, the loss of home, cultural and personal identity, and the ways memory is shaped by time and circumstance.

The novel grew out of Mawer’s engagement with Villa Tugendhat and the history and setting of the building that inspired it. Its lasting distinction lies in bringing architectural history into a broad family saga without reducing the house to scenery. The Man Booker shortlist brought the book considerable attention, and it remains a prominent example of Mawer’s ability to combine historical fiction with questions about how people inhabit places and how history transforms them. The Glass Room is at once a story of a marriage and a family, a portrait of a modernist ideal under pressure, and an account of a European home repeatedly remade by the twentieth century.

About the Author

Simon Mawer

Early life and education

Simon Mawer was a British novelist, born in England on 18 September 1948. He attended Millfield School in Somerset and Brasenose College, Oxford, where he studied zoology. Before becoming widely known as a novelist, he spent much of his working life teaching biology. His teaching posts included schools in Guernsey and Malta, as well as St George’s English School in Rome. He lived in Italy. His scientific education and professional experience informed a career whose fiction frequently takes an intellectual subject—biology, history, religion or architecture—and connects it to the pressure of personal life.

A literary career

Mawer published his first novel, Chimera, in 1989, when he was forty. The book won the McKitterick Prize, awarded to a first novel by an author over forty. He followed it with The Bitter Cross (1992) and A Jealous God (1996). His fifth work, Mendel’s Dwarf (1997), brought him wider recognition on both sides of the Atlantic. The novel engages with genetics and the legacy of Gregor Mendel, and it reached the final ten for the 1997 Booker Prize. It also became a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 1999.

His subsequent novels included The Gospel of Judas (2000) and The Fall (2003). The latter won the 2003 Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature. Swimming to Ithaca (2006) was partly inspired by Mawer’s childhood experiences on the island of Cyprus. In 2009 he published The Glass Room, a historical novel centred on a modernist house in Brno and the people whose lives are altered by the upheavals of the twentieth century. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize that year. Mawer also wrote nonfiction, including a work on Gregor Mendel. His agent’s biography describes a body of work comprising eleven novels and two nonfiction books.

Reputation and legacy

Across his fiction, Mawer often combines historical narrative with biographical and intellectual elements. His novels return to questions of family and collective past, personal and national identity, memory, and the search for a place in history. Scientific ideas are not merely technical subjects in his work; they provide ways to consider inheritance, responsibility and the limits of human control. His long experience as a biology teacher and his education in zoology gave this interest a grounding in the natural sciences, while his novels range widely across periods, locations and forms of belief.

Mawer died on 12 February 2025, aged 76. His reputation rests on a sustained career that began with an award-winning first novel and grew through works recognized by major literary prizes. Mendel’s Dwarf established his international standing, The Fall received a major award for mountain literature, and The Glass Room brought him to the Booker shortlist. The last of these remains especially distinctive for making a building a witness to historical change. Taken together, his novels are valued for joining substantial historical and intellectual questions to the intimate circumstances of individual lives.

StoryFlow

The House Becomes a Glass Dream

This flow traces how an architectural commission becomes an ideal home, then a threatened and repeatedly transformed historical place.

The Landauer Family’s Flight

This flow follows Viktor and Liesel’s movement from early caution to escape from occupied Europe and the uncertain life that follows.

The Changing Fate of the House

This flow follows the building’s successive transformations from modern home to confiscated institution, wartime shelter, and public heritage site.

Knowledge Graph

Storylines

Thirty years after the family’s departure, in 1968

Liesel's Return

Blind and accompanied by her daughter, Liesel returns to the modernist house she and Viktor once built. She knows the approach and interior by memory, navigating the forecourt and stairs until she reaches the Glass Room, where the space summons vivid images of her former life. Hana recognizes her, and their embrace reunites two women whose friendship survived war, distance, and decades of separation. The return frames the house as both a physical place and a vessel for memory.

1928, immediately after Liesel and Viktor’s wedding

The Wedding Journey

Liesel and Viktor leave for their honeymoon in [Vienna](entity:location-recall-location-8daae28d814e) and then drive south in a Landauer car. At the Sacher Hotel, their first lovemaking is unexpectedly awkward, while their conversations reveal Viktor’s ambition to build a new kind of house and his impatience with inherited styles. In [Venice](entity:location-recall-location-venice-0377938b8d6a), they visit a cemetery by the [Tagliamento River](entity:location-recall-location-tagliamento-river-1ba25b29af6d) and mourn Liesel’s brother [Benno](entity:character-recall-character-benno-798c3859b8f6), whom Viktor last saw during the war. Their shared grief briefly deepens their intimacy before the city’s light and the journey’s excitement restore their spirits.

During the honeymoon in Venice, 1928

Meeting Rainer

At a Venetian gathering, Liesel challenges an Italian admirer of Fascism and modernity. [Rainer von Abt](entity:character-recall-character-rainer-von-abt-47c5641bdf40) interrupts, mocking the idea of destroying [Venice](entity:location-recall-location-venice-0377938b8d6a) in the name of progress; his blend of wit, provocation, and architectural conviction immediately intrigues the couple. The next day he takes them to an exhibition and shows them his pavilion model. Viktor recognizes that von Abt is an architect, though von Abt insists he is a poet of space and form. Their conversation plants the idea of a house built around light and open space.

Late summer 1928

The House Commission

Viktor asks von Abt to design the couple’s future home on a hillside overlooking [Město](entity:location-recall-location-m-sto-420e7fd82c6a). The architect resists the ordinary demands of a client and describes a commission as a chance to create an artwork and a way of life, not simply a structure. After studying von Abt’s work and sketches, Viktor and Liesel formally appoint him. The commission transforms their abstract dream of a modern home into a project with plans, costs, and deadlines.

Late summer 1928

Liesel's Pregnancy

During a visit to the building site, Liesel tells von Abt that she is expecting a child. He immediately sketches a house with an infant on its terrace, treating the family’s future as part of the design itself. On the sloping meadow, Liesel remembers childhood visits with [Benno](entity:character-recall-character-benno-798c3859b8f6) and the illness that kept her apart from him before he went to war. Von Abt listens, photographs the site, and declares that he will build the house upside down, a promise that leaves its meaning unexplained.

1929, during Liesel’s first pregnancy

The House Takes Shape

Von Abt’s plans place the bedrooms at street level and the principal living space below, suspended from a steel frame and opened to the garden through vast glass panes. Liesel embraces the radical design, while Viktor worries about its cost, its coldness, and whether a home can feel like an office or factory. Liesel insists that the house is where she wants to live with her husband and daughter. Her confidence helps turn Viktor’s earlier modernist conviction into a shared commitment to the unfamiliar structure.

April 1929

The First Birth

While the steel frame rises on the hillside, Liesel gives birth to [Ottilie](entity:character-recall-character-ottilie-dc0fed340453) in a clinic using the Twilight Sleep method. Morphine eases the pain, while scopolamine erases her memory of the delivery. The birth gives the still-incomplete house a human future: the child imagined in von Abt’s drawings is now real. Liesel’s experience of motherhood begins alongside the construction of the family’s new home.

Winter 1929–1930, as the house nears completion

The Onyx Dispute

When the shell of the house is ready, Viktor and Liesel inspect its bare rooms and try to imagine their future life there. Von Abt proposes an onyx partition for the Glass Room, a striking but extraordinarily expensive feature that Viktor initially resists. Liesel persuades him that the stone’s beauty and symbolic meaning justify the expense. After an encounter with Kata in [Vienna](entity:location-recall-location-8daae28d814e), Viktor reverses his decision and tells Liesel she may have the wall, explaining his change of heart only with the word “fingernails.”

During a business trip to Vienna, before the Landauer House is finished

The Affair Begins

In the [Prater](entity:location-recall-location-prater-518ca9dd0a74), Viktor meets Kata, a young woman who tells him she works with hats and sometimes accepts money from men to supplement her wages. They ride the [Wiener Riesenrad](entity:location-recall-location-wiener-riesenrad-c88f32c2aea5) together, then go to a hotel, where she is frank about the transactional nature of their encounter. Viktor nevertheless stays to talk with her and later seeks her out again. Their brief commercial arrangement begins to acquire emotional weight for him, creating a secret life that runs alongside his marriage to Liesel.

During a later Vienna visit, when Ottilie is about seventeen months old

Kata's Daughter

Viktor meets Kata again at [Die Goldene Kugel](entity:location-recall-location-die-goldene-kugel-d37426e10f70) and follows her to her small attic apartment. There he discovers that she has a young daughter, [Marika](entity:character-recall-character-marika-ddc3a2bf8a9d), whom she had not told him about; the child’s sudden appearance makes the private arrangement feel less separate from ordinary life. Kata explains that she sometimes brings clients home and that a neighbor watches Marika. Viktor gives her a large cheque intended for her and the child, asking her to stop seeing other men. He leaves feeling both elated and remorseful, unable to return to his former sense of control.

Late 1930, before the family’s housewarming

The Glass Room Completed

The builders install the onyx partition, furnishings, curtains, and glass walls, turning the bare structure into the luminous Glass Room. Light shifts across the stone, chrome, and ivory floor, making the room seem at once precise and dreamlike. Viktor and Liesel move into the house and regard its openness as a new way of living. The Maillol sculpture of a pregnant woman provides the one deliberate figurative ornament, a reminder that the abstract space is meant to be inhabited by a family.

December 1930

The Housewarming

The Landauers host a party that becomes an informal public unveiling of the house. Artists, architects, musicians, journalists, and industrialists admire the building, while von Abt presents it as a work of art that demands an equally artful life from its inhabitants. Viktor quotes André Breton’s vision of living in a glass house and speaks of openness. [Vítězslava Kaprálová](entity:character-recall-character-v-t-zslava-kapr-lov-a1229e10b272) plays Ravel, and Hana, watching the guests and the winter sky, warns Liesel that the good times cannot last.

Early 1931

A Public Defense

An architectural journal questions whether the [Landauer House](entity:location-recall-location-landauer-house-918b6d333800) is habitable, criticizing its expense and open-plan arrangement. Liesel answers the debate in a letter, describing the house as a collaborative project and defending the curtains and flexible spaces as practical as well as beautiful. Viktor teasingly challenges her claims about privacy, and they make love in the Glass Room with its curtains drawn. The scene briefly joins the house’s ideal of openness to the private life it was built to hold.

After the housewarming, in the early 1930s

A Second Pregnancy

Liesel becomes pregnant again while Viktor’s company promotes the Landauer Popular as a car that might bring ordinary families into the modern world. In the Glass Room, she moves through the house in white, while Hana confides that she has been trying unsuccessfully to conceive. Viktor continues his affair with Kata in [Vienna](entity:location-recall-location-8daae28d814e). The contrast between Liesel’s idealized, visible domestic life and Viktor’s concealed relationship grows, even as the couple’s outward routines remain intact.

After Liesel’s second pregnancy, early 1930s

Martin's Birth and Liesel's Illness

[Martin](entity:character-recall-character-martin-f5cb6653498c) is born by forceps delivery after a difficult labor. Liesel develops a high fever and slips into delirium, leaving the doctors and family fearful that she may die. Hana devotes herself to caring for Liesel, proving that her friendship is more than a social pleasure. Liesel survives but returns home weakened and emotionally altered, and her intimacy with Viktor becomes more remote.

The mid-1930s, before the political crisis

Life in the Glass House

The narrative follows an ordinary day in the Landauer home: the children move between German and Czech, Liesel tends the garden and practices piano, and Viktor leaves for the factory. Their routines make the house feel like a carefully designed world, but news from [Germany](entity:location-recall-location-a3c24dd56e42) increasingly intrudes. Viktor recognizes that Nazi measures against Jews are becoming law and begins to feel his own Jewish identity as a fact others can use against him. He argues for a charity event at the house, while Liesel worries about renewed public intrusion.

Mid-1930s, during a dinner at the Landauer House

The Nazi Guest

A German industrialist, Schreiber, arrives wearing a Nazi badge and praises the house as an expression of German culture. He presses Viktor to accept a duty to German blood and German nationalism. Viktor rejects the premise, declaring that he is a Jew rather than a German. The exchange exposes the danger beneath the couple’s internationalist ideal: their house may be admired, but their identities are already being sorted by a hostile political order.

After the dinner with Schreiber, before the German occupation

Hana's Confession

After a difficult affair with [Miroslav Němec](entity:character-recall-character-miroslav-n-mec-fcac0283d907) ends, Hana confides in Liesel at the house. She admits that she has loved Liesel for years and asks whether a woman can love another woman fully and sexually. Liesel is startled but reassures Hana that she could never hate her. They share music and talk through the night, while Liesel recognizes that Hana’s love adds an unspoken complexity to the friendship and to her own feelings.

Later in the 1930s, before the Anschluss

Mandl's Dinner

At a dinner in the Glass Room, arms dealer [Fritz Mandl](entity:character-recall-character-fritz-mandl-6e9f2996f5fb) arrives with his wife Eva, whom Hana recognizes as the actress Hedy Kiesler. Mandl is embarrassed by his wife’s film career and boasts that Hitler has made him an honorary Aryan. Viktor questions the security of such an exemption, while Hana points out that German racial laws condemn relationships across religious lines. The discussion exposes the hollowness of Mandl’s confidence and the growing threat to Jews and their families.

Autumn 1937

Funds Moved to Switzerland

As violence and antisemitism intensify, Viktor quietly transfers money from his [Prague](entity:location-recall-location-prague-cf59465294ca) and [Vienna](entity:location-recall-location-8daae28d814e) accounts into a Swiss account. He does not tell Liesel at first, treating the move as prudent preparation rather than a decision to leave. The hidden transfer foreshadows the family’s flight and shows that Viktor has begun to act on the danger even while Liesel still hopes their life at home can continue.

Before the German annexation of Austria

Hana Frees Eva

Hana later tells Liesel that she helped Eva escape from [Fritz Mandl](entity:character-recall-character-fritz-mandl-6e9f2996f5fb). After arranging a meeting at the Sacher, Hana smuggles Eva out through a back entrance, helps her change clothes in a waiting taxi, and gets her onto a train. Eva wants to resume her acting career, while Mandl has kept her under close control and tried to destroy copies of her film. Hana’s intervention gives Eva a chance to choose her own future and deepens the intimacy between Hana and Liesel through the story’s retelling.

March 1938

Anschluss

Radio broadcasts report the German takeover of [Austria](entity:location-recall-location-89f4a73979b6), and Viktor wonders where Kata has gone. Refugees cross into [Czechoslovakia](entity:location-recall-location-91214c889381), bringing the consequences of Nazi rule directly into the streets of [Město](entity:location-recall-location-m-sto-420e7fd82c6a). Viktor tells Liesel that the family may have to emigrate, explaining that Jews in [Germany](entity:location-recall-location-a3c24dd56e42) and Austria face escalating restrictions and dispossession. Liesel resists the prospect of abandoning home, the business, and their community, while Viktor insists that waiting could leave them trapped.

Spring 1938, at a refugee committee meeting

Kata Returns as a Refugee

At a meeting in the Glass Room, refugees are brought before a committee to describe what has happened in [Austria](entity:location-recall-location-89f4a73979b6). Among them is Kata, now a widow and a seamstress, with her daughter [Marika](entity:character-recall-character-marika-ddc3a2bf8a9d). Viktor recognizes her, and she recognizes him, though neither can safely acknowledge their past. Kata recounts the destruction of her workplace and the violence that forced her to flee [Vienna](entity:location-recall-location-8daae28d814e). Liesel offers shelter in the family’s garden cottage, creating an unexpected reunion between Viktor’s secret past and his household’s public response to persecution.

Spring 1938, shortly after the refugee meeting

Kata Settles in the Chata

Kata and [Marika](entity:character-recall-character-marika-ddc3a2bf8a9d) move into the Landauer family’s small garden cottage. Liesel arranges practical help and work for Kata, while Viktor finds himself alone with the woman he has long missed and admits that he has thought of her constantly. Kata warns him that she stopped seeing him because she feared losing what little power she had. Their renewed attraction remains dangerous and unresolved, now entangled with the family’s plans to escape and the refugee’s dependence on their protection.

Spring and summer 1938

The Company Transfer Plan

As the threat of invasion grows, Viktor proposes transferring ownership of [Landauer Motors](entity:organization-recall-organization-landauer-motors-9d857159de7c) to Liesel’s father while continuing to manage the company. He hopes to protect the business and leave himself free to flee if the country becomes unsafe for Jews. Liesel remains skeptical, but Viktor sees preparation as essential. His plan demonstrates the widening gap between his urgent reading of events and her hope that their home and country can endure.

Summer 1938

Viktor's Second Life

Kata and [Marika](entity:character-recall-character-marika-ddc3a2bf8a9d) become part of the household’s daily orbit, and the children play together in the garden. Viktor watches from the Glass Room, longing for Kata while keeping up the appearance of a respectable family life. He leaves her a note asking to see her, then struggles with the difference between his outward plans and his private desire. The house that was meant to embody transparency becomes a setting for concealment.

Late summer 1938

The Nanny Proposal

When Liba announces that she will marry and leave the household, Liesel suggests that Kata take her place as governess and that [Marika](entity:character-recall-character-marika-ddc3a2bf8a9d) come with the family. She frames the offer as both practical and a moral obligation to people they have come to know. Viktor is startled, then visits Kata to convey the proposal. He admits that he wants more than to help her, while she challenges him to leave his wife if he truly loves her. He cannot do so, but begs her to come with them.

September 1938

The Munich Crisis

As the crisis over the [Sudetenland](entity:location-recall-location-531d3d07fd7e) deepens, Viktor, Liesel, Hana, and [Oskar](entity:character-recall-character-oskar-ea89577afe7e) listen to Neville Chamberlain’s radio address. Chamberlain’s words reduce the threatened country to a distant quarrel, and the group understands that the great powers will not defend it. The [Munich](entity:location-recall-location-d277927d86b1) settlement leads to the dismemberment of [Czechoslovakia](entity:location-recall-location-91214c889381). German troops enter the border regions, Poland and Hungary take territory, and refugees stream away from the advancing forces. Viktor concludes that the remaining state cannot be defended.

Winter 1938–1939

Preparing to Leave

After the dismemberment, Viktor insists that the family must leave before German forces take the rest of the country. Liesel grieves the possibility of abandoning the house and her family, while Viktor argues that their Jewish identities make them vulnerable regardless of their citizenship or beliefs. He books a flight for March and arranges documents and transport for the household, including Kata and [Marika](entity:character-recall-character-marika-ddc3a2bf8a9d). Hana and [Oskar](entity:character-recall-character-oskar-ea89577afe7e) remain behind, unwilling or unable to leave with them.

March 1939, as German troops enter Město

Hana's Farewell

On the day the Landauers prepare to leave, Hana arrives distraught and drunk, describing the occupation and the collapse of ordinary life. She asks Liesel how she can bear to abandon the house, the country, and her friends. Hana tells Liesel that she loves her above all others. Liesel answers with affection but cannot promise to stay; the family is leaving with Kata and [Marika](entity:character-recall-character-marika-ddc3a2bf8a9d). Their farewell turns the coming flight into a personal separation as well as a political one.

March 17, 1939

The Flight from Město

The family’s convoy heads for the Černovice airfield through a strangely quiet city. German troops block their way near the station as [Adolf Hitler](entity:character-recall-character-adolf-hitler-e6e3f1777476)’s motorcade passes, and Viktor negotiates permission to continue rather than let the delay cost them their flight. At the airfield, the family boards a Swissair plane for [Zurich](entity:location-recall-location-36d13535e481). As the aircraft lifts away, Liesel sees the [Landauer House](entity:location-recall-location-landauer-house-918b6d333800) below and weeps at the thought that she may never return.

After the Landauers’ departure, 1939

The House Is Confiscated

While the family is in exile, an official informs caretaker [Laník](entity:character-recall-character-lan-k-18eb3bbda911) that the house has passed into government hands. Laník asks what will happen to him and his sister, but the official offers no certainty and suggests that the building may be demolished. The family’s lawyers later confirm that the house has been confiscated because Viktor is Jewish. Liesel breaks down when she learns that the home she and Viktor built may be destroyed, mourning not only the building but the life and love attached to it.

After the German occupation, 1939

Stahl Takes the House

[Werner Stahl](entity:character-recall-character-werner-stahl-156bcc9f24e3) arrives at the [Landauer House](entity:location-recall-location-landauer-house-918b6d333800) and persuades [Laník](entity:character-recall-character-lan-k-18eb3bbda911) to let him inspect the property. He sees a modern, glass-walled space suitable for his proposed research and learns that the owners were Jews who have emigrated. The house is converted into a center for racial biology and biometric measurement. Staff install measuring equipment, a photographic studio, and Hollerith machines, transforming a home designed to celebrate open space into an instrument for classifying human beings.

From 1939 onward during the German occupation

The Biometric Examinations

The center brings groups of people into the former Glass Room for questionnaires, blood tests, measurements, and nude photographs. Scientists record physical features and family histories, claiming that the data will reveal racial distinctions. Stahl watches the examinations and treats the subjects as specimens, while the precise procedures expose the moral fraud of the center’s claims to objectivity. The house’s carefully designed proportions become a stage for the Nazi classification of people as worthy or unworthy.

During the occupation, before Operation Barbarossa

Hana Meets Stahl

Hana encounters Stahl at the Café Zeman and learns that he directs the research center in the [Landauer House](entity:location-recall-location-landauer-house-918b6d333800). She tells him that she was a close friend of Liesel and agrees to visit the center, partly from curiosity and partly to remain connected to the house. Stahl’s attention to Hana shifts from scientific interest to sexual fascination. Their meetings become an exploitative relationship in which Hana seeks help for her Jewish husband, [Oskar](entity:character-recall-character-oskar-ea89577afe7e), while Stahl imagines that his racial theories can account for the attraction he feels.

During Hana’s relationship with Stahl

Hana's Examination

Hana undergoes the center’s examination, challenging Stahl as he measures and photographs her. She questions whether his scientific procedures can capture the complexity of a human being and mocks his assurances that the records are confidential. Stahl is unable to keep his desire separate from his work. Afterward he studies Hana’s file and photographs, finding that no measurements can explain the woman he has encountered.

During the occupation, after Hana’s examination

Hana and Stahl's Affair

Hana and Stahl meet privately, and she uses his desire to secure money and assistance for [Oskar](entity:character-recall-character-oskar-ea89577afe7e). She asks him about his family and learns that his wife, [Hedda](entity:character-recall-character-hedda-e2455d4e5369), died by suicide after their daughter [Erika](entity:character-recall-character-erika-bd4ba8b24ed6) became severely disabled. Stahl describes Erika’s terminal inherited disease and confesses that he and Hedda took her to [Hartheim Castle](entity:location-recall-location-b864d2396655), where she was killed. His account reveals both the private trauma behind his racial obsessions and his participation in the Nazi killing of disabled children.

Several years before Stahl meets Hana

Erika Is Killed

[Erika](entity:character-recall-character-erika-bd4ba8b24ed6) develops infantile amaurotic disease after an apparently normal infancy, losing her sight, movement, and ability to respond. Stahl and [Hedda](entity:character-recall-character-hedda-e2455d4e5369) learn that the illness is incurable and will end in her death. When Erika is four, her parents take her to [Hartheim Castle](entity:location-recall-location-b864d2396655), where she is killed by injection. Hedda cannot live with the decision and later takes her own life, leaving Stahl to turn private grief into a brutal theory of racial degeneration.

During Hana and Stahl’s relationship, after his confession

The Camp Story

Hana and Stahl continue their relationship in the Glass Room, where the setting’s ideal of transparency is contradicted by secrecy, desire, and fear. Hana’s boldness unsettles Stahl, who experiences attraction and repulsion as if they were evidence of racial difference. Hana’s encounters with him are tied to [Oskar](entity:character-recall-character-oskar-ea89577afe7e)’s safety, but she also finds herself drawn into an intimacy that neither can control. Their relationship places private desire inside the same house that is being used to measure and classify people.

During the German occupation, after the invasion of the Soviet Union

Hana Announces Her Pregnancy

After [Germany](entity:location-recall-location-a3c24dd56e42) invades the Soviet Union, Hana confronts Stahl at the center and tells him that she is pregnant, insisting that the child is his. She wants to keep the baby and asks him to help her decide what to do. Stahl strikes and rapes her, responding to the news with violence and racial contempt. He later gives her money and leaves her at home, where she tells him that the child is the only future she has.

After Hana tells Stahl she is pregnant, during the occupation

Hana Is Arrested

[Stahl reports Hana to the SS security service](entity:action-recall-action-7f636e072cf8), describing her as subversive and friendly to Jews. He then turns to other work, trying to suppress the personal consequences of his actions. His betrayal helps bring about the arrest of Hana and [Oskar](entity:character-recall-character-oskar-ea89577afe7e). Stahl’s decision demonstrates how easily his private fear and resentment become instruments of the state’s persecution.

At Ravensbrück, during the war

Hana Gives Birth to Světla

Hana later tells Zdenka that she gave birth to a daughter, Světla, while imprisoned at [Ravensbrück](entity:location-recall-location-06d9c1b89e3e). The women in her barrack helped her, and for a brief time the child’s existence gave Hana a reason to survive the camp. The baby was taken away after failing to feed, and Hana never saw her again. She had kept this history secret for decades, carrying the loss as both an intimate wound and a fact of the larger machinery of persecution.

During the war, after the arrest of Hana and Oskar

Oskar's Deportation

Hana’s husband, [Oskar](entity:character-recall-character-oskar-ea89577afe7e), is sent to [Terezín](entity:location-recall-location-f3da3aea4d2f) and later transported to [Auschwitz](entity:location-recall-location-3c4eaac5dda5). Hana survives [Ravensbrück](entity:location-recall-location-06d9c1b89e3e), but she never learns with certainty what happened to him during the war. The loss explains why Hana later speaks of her husband with enduring love and guilt. Her efforts to protect him through her relationship with Stahl ultimately cannot prevent his deportation.

After the war begins, while the Landauers are in exile

The Family Leaves Europe

The Landauers move from [Switzerland](entity:location-recall-location-6e6c25b1c44d) through [France](entity:location-recall-location-4f282e1af8a7) and toward [Spain](entity:location-recall-location-0fe76f866976), trying to reach a route to the Americas. Liesel continues to write Hana, though wartime censorship and broken lines of communication make every letter uncertain. The family’s destination shifts toward [Cuba](entity:location-recall-location-b871768274f6) and ultimately the [United States](entity:location-recall-location-5d55e9152db1). Liesel’s departure from Europe becomes a permanent exile, with the Glass Room and the people who remain behind receding into memory.

During the Landauers’ journey through France toward Spain

The Bayonne Detention

At [Bayonne](entity:location-recall-location-2aceed9a5c19) station, German officials inspect the travelers’ documents and separate [Katalin](entity:character-recall-character-katalin-e39147da8831) and [Marika](entity:character-recall-character-marika-ddc3a2bf8a9d) from the rest of the family. Viktor argues that their refugee papers are valid, but the officials take mother and daughter away for a procedural inquiry. Viktor attempts to intervene and is beaten with a rifle butt. The train leaves without Katalin and Marika, carrying the Landauers onward in fear and grief; the separation becomes a lasting rupture in the family’s story.

During the family’s flight from Europe, after the Bayonne separation

Hana's Letter Arrives

As Lise Lander prepares to leave [Switzerland](entity:location-recall-location-6e6c25b1c44d), a delayed letter from Hana Hanakova arrives. Hana Hanakova writes that she is pregnant and wants the child, explaining that she has always believed herself barren and that the pregnancy has become her reason to hope. Lise Lander writes

During the war, after the family leaves Switzerland

The Crossing to America

The Landauers travel by train through [France](entity:location-recall-location-4f282e1af8a7) and [Spain](entity:location-recall-location-0fe76f866976) toward [Bilbao](entity:location-recall-location-00ac960a262f), where a ship will carry them across the Atlantic. The crowded journey is marked by delays, changing borders, and the fear that official papers may fail them. [Liesel Landauer](entity:character-recall-character-liesel-landauer-586d46b8b35e) realizes that she never posted her last message to Hanna

During the war, after the center’s research is judged unproductive

The Centre Closes

The Bohemian and Moravian Republic Protectorate Office orders the Biological Measurement Research Department closed because it has failed to identify reliable racial distinctions. The staff pack their equipment and files, and the [Hollerith tabulating machines](entity:object-recall-object-hollerith-2591b65e45ef) are sent onward to a camp complex near [Auschwitz](entity:location-recall-location-3c4eaac5dda5). The closure exposes the weakness of

During the later war years

The House Stands Empty

The Landauer Modernist House passes through several uses and then stands empty. Rain, frost, and neglect damage its structure, while a bomb blast cracks and eventually destroys part of the glass frontage

During the final years of the war

Laník Hoards Supplies

[Laník](entity:character-recall-character-lan-k-18eb3bbda911) and his sister live in the service rooms and basement while the main house remains largely unused. As shortages worsen, he accumulates food, cigarettes, fuel, and other goods, treating scarcity as an opportunity to build a private reserve. His stockpile gives the siblings some security but also ties their survival to the house they once served. Laník’s careful hoarding contrasts with the Landauers’ lost world of abundance and with the larger collapse of ordinary life in [Město](entity:location-recall-location-m-sto-420e7fd82c6a).

November 1944

The November Bombing

A bombing raid strikes [Město](entity:location-recall-location-m-sto-420e7fd82c6a) through fog, tearing up roads and buildings. One bomb lands in the Landauer garden, narrowly missing the house and the basement where [Laník](entity:character-recall-character-lan-k-18eb3bbda911) and his sister have taken shelter. The blast shatters the Glass Room’s plate glass and damages its interior. Laník patches the openings with tarpaulins, leaving the once-luminous space dim and wounded.

Spring 1945

The Soviet Capture

As the Red Army advances toward [Město](entity:location-recall-location-m-sto-420e7fd82c6a), German forces withdraw and fighting moves through the city. [Laník](entity:character-recall-character-lan-k-18eb3bbda911) and his sister shelter in the basement while artillery and gunfire pass overhead. Soviet soldiers arrive on horseback, led by the decorated sergeant-major [Yevgeniya](entity:character-recall-character-yevgeniya-30ed76284732). Laník offers them slivovice, and the soldiers occupy the Glass Room, turning it into a bivouac and weapons-cleaning space. The occupation ends one regime but introduces another uncertain order.

After the war, under communist rule

The House Becomes a Gym

The former [Landauer House](entity:location-recall-location-landauer-house-918b6d333800) is adapted for the children’s hospital as a physiotherapy gymnasium. [Tomáš](entity:character-recall-character-tom-0cdbba84192a), a pediatrician, begins using the Glass Room to watch and treat children whose bodies have been damaged by polio. The room’s light and space offer a kind of release from the children’s restricted lives, though Tomáš prefers to think of it as an eternal present rather than a place shaped by history. The building’s domestic past remains largely unknown to its new users.

About two years before the late-1960s events

Tomáš Meets Zdenka

[Tomáš](entity:character-recall-character-tom-0cdbba84192a) meets [Zdenka Vondráková](entity:character-recall-character-zdenka-vondr-kov-fe77cbc60b1d) in the physiotherapy department, where she works with children after abandoning her ambition to become a ballet dancer. Their conversations reveal opposing temperaments: she believes in hope and progress, while he distrusts the future and insists on inhabiting the present. They begin seeing one another and fall into an affair. Zdenka’s former dance ambitions and Tomáš’s medical work converge in the Glass Room, which becomes both a place of treatment and their private refuge.

Early in Tomáš and Zdenka’s relationship

Zdenka Dances Ondine

After work, Zdenka changes into a translucent green costume and dances Ravel’s “Ondine” in the Glass Room. [Tomáš](entity:character-recall-character-tom-0cdbba84192a) sees her as a water nymph trapped inside a glass tank and falls deeply in love with her. The dance renews the meaning of a place that he regards as a featureless present. For Zdenka, movement carries her lost ambitions; for Tomáš, her body becomes a mythic image that helps him evade the demands of commitment.

During Tomáš and Zdenka’s relationship, before their trip to Paris

Tomáš Takes Another Lover

[Tomáš](entity:character-recall-character-tom-0cdbba84192a) begins sleeping with [Eve](entity:character-recall-character-eve-09bb1968b5f4), a journalist who has her own apartment and treats their encounters with practical detachment. Eve also has a relationship with her editor, and she accepts Tomáš’s confession that he has another lover without jealousy. Tomáš keeps the affair from Zdenka, believing that she would be devastated. His betrayal contradicts the mythic ideal he has built around her as Ondine and introduces a real risk of the curse he fears.

Later in the 1960s

Paris Together

[Tomáš](entity:character-recall-character-tom-0cdbba84192a) arranges for both himself and Zdenka to attend an international conference on polio in [Paris](entity:location-recall-location-657453741ed3). Zdenka believes their joint selection is a remarkable coincidence, unaware that Tomáš helped secure her place. They share five days in the same hotel, living together with an intimacy that feels almost marital. Zdenka wants to stay in the West and build a life with him, but Tomáš returns to his preference for the present and avoids making a future with her.

After the Paris conference

The Paris Separation

Back in [Město](entity:location-recall-location-m-sto-420e7fd82c6a), Zdenka confronts [Tomáš](entity:character-recall-character-tom-0cdbba84192a) about their future and his emotional coldness. She argues that they could marry, seek housing, and grow old together, while he insists that the future is an illusion. They agree to a break, and their relationship drifts apart. Their memories of [Paris](entity:location-recall-location-657453741ed3) differ, making the trip seem less like a shared foundation than a contested dream.

Late 1960s, before the return visit

The Heritage Inquiry

[Eve](entity:character-recall-character-eve-09bb1968b5f4) comes to the hospital to report on the [Landauer House](entity:location-recall-location-landauer-house-918b6d333800) and the proposal to restore it as an architectural museum. [Tomáš](entity:character-recall-character-tom-0cdbba84192a) dismisses the building’s past as irrelevant, while Zdenka is drawn to the house’s story and begins to understand it as more than a gymnasium. A representative of the heritage committee, Hana, visits the building and tells Zdenka that she knew the Landauer family. Zdenka learns that Liesel and Viktor were forced into exile and that Hana herself survived the camps.

Late 1960s, after Hana first visits the gymnasium

The Committee Visit

A journalist and photographer return to the house with Hana and Zdenka. The group tours the building while Hana and [Laník](entity:character-recall-character-lan-k-18eb3bbda911) recount its history, and [Tomáš](entity:character-recall-character-tom-0cdbba84192a) watches from a distance, uncomfortable with the past becoming present in the room. The photographer captures a group image of Tomáš and [Eve](entity:character-recall-character-eve-09bb1968b5f4) holding hands behind a chrome pillar. Zdenka does not notice the significance at the time, but the photograph preserves proof of the affair that Tomáš has concealed.

After the committee visit

Hana's Love for Zdenka

Hana gives Zdenka the photographs from the visit. When Zdenka sees [Tomáš](entity:character-recall-character-tom-0cdbba84192a) and [Eve](entity:character-recall-character-eve-09bb1968b5f4) holding hands in the group picture, she realizes that Tomáš has been unfaithful. Hana comforts her, then admits that she has fallen in love with Zdenka. The confession surprises Zdenka but does not repel her; Hana leaves her free to decide whether their friendship should change.

Soon after Hana confesses her love to Zdenka

Hana's Hidden Daughter

Hana returns to the Glass Room and tells Zdenka the secret she has never shared: in [Ravensbrück](entity:location-recall-location-06d9c1b89e3e) she gave birth to a daughter, whom she named Světla. The baby was taken away after failing to feed, and Hana never saw her again. The revelation overwhelms Zdenka, who sees the difference between [Tomáš](entity:character-recall-character-tom-0cdbba84192a)’s abstract denial of history and Hana’s lived trauma. She embraces Hana, offering the comfort that the older woman has never before been able to ask for.

1968, during the Prague Spring

The Landauers Are Invited Back

A Czechoslovak embassy official visits the Landor family in [Falmouth](entity:location-recall-location-f355fc88f1d2) to invite Liesel and her daughter to [Město](entity:location-recall-location-m-sto-420e7fd82c6a) for the house’s proposed public handover. Liesel is blind, and her son [Martin](entity:character-recall-character-martin-f5cb6653498c) objects that accepting could imply recognition of the city’s ownership. A personal letter from Hana changes the balance. Liesel had believed Hana dead, and the news that she is alive gives Liesel a reason to accept the invitation despite the political uncertainty.

Before the 1968 return visit

Liesel Writes to Hana

Hana receives a letter from Liesel explaining that she has gone blind and that Viktor died in a boating accident in 1958. Liesel writes of the family’s American life and her wish to see the house again, while telling Hana that the old friendship remains central to her memories. The letter also confirms that the family changed its name to Landor in the [United States](entity:location-recall-location-5d55e9152db1). Hana reads it aloud to Zdenka, who shares her grief and affection for the absent woman.

1968, after the Prague Spring reforms begin

The Return to Město

Liesel and [Ottilie](entity:character-recall-character-ottilie-dc0fed340453) travel back to [Město](entity:location-recall-location-m-sto-420e7fd82c6a) for the house’s public opening. At the restored [Landauer House](entity:location-recall-location-landauer-house-918b6d333800), Liesel is surrounded by officials and visitors and recognizes Hana by her voice and movement. The reunion restores the women’s intimacy, but the house is now a public monument and the city’s political future is uncertain. Liesel meets Zdenka and [Tomáš](entity:character-recall-character-tom-0cdbba84192a), learning that the former living room has become a hospital gym.

1968, during Liesel’s visit

A Fragile Political Spring

Liesel asks [Tomáš](entity:character-recall-character-tom-0cdbba84192a) whether the country’s political opening will last. He compares the reform period to patients with encephalitis lethargica who briefly awakened under L-Dopa before slipping back into sleep. His bleak answer anticipates the Soviet invasion and the end of the reform experiment. Outside the official speeches, Liesel and Hana walk down through the garden and remember what the house and their friendship once meant.

After the Landauer women’s return, in the late 1960s

The House's New Life

Officials and heritage advocates propose restoring the [Landauer House](entity:location-recall-location-landauer-house-918b6d333800) as a museum, while the hospital continues to use it for physiotherapy. A newspaper article describes the building’s architectural significance and its transformation from a private home into a public institution. The debate captures the novel’s tension between preserving a place as heritage and keeping it alive through use. For the former family, the house is neither merely a museum nor simply a gym, but a repository of human lives that cannot be recreated.

March 1990, shortly after the fall of the Iron Curtain

Marie's Journey

[Marie Delmas](entity:character-recall-character-marie-delmas-e134803f0edb) travels from [Paris](entity:location-recall-location-657453741ed3) to [Město](entity:location-recall-location-m-sto-420e7fd82c6a) after seeing a photograph of the [Landauer House](entity:location-recall-location-landauer-house-918b6d333800) in a library book. She has spent most of her life as a concierge and knows little of her origins, but the image awakens a childhood memory and an unexplained pull toward the building. In Město, the streets and the house seem smaller than in her recollection. As she approaches, fragments of German and memories of a mother and children begin to return.

March 1990, during Marie’s visit to the house

Mother and Daughter Reunited

Marie enters the [Landauer House](entity:location-recall-location-landauer-house-918b6d333800) with a private tour group and recognizes pieces of a childhood she had never understood. The bathroom, terrace, stairs, and Glass Room trigger memories of living there with her mother, who had worked as a nanny. [Ottilie](entity:character-recall-character-ottilie-dc0fed340453) recognizes Marie as [Marika](entity:character-recall-character-marika-ddc3a2bf8a9d), the child who once lived in the garden cottage with Kata. Marie and Ottilie embrace, bringing together two lives separated by exile, lost identity, and decades of silence.