“Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer”

“Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer” is the slogan carried on a banner during a Nazi parade in the novel. Its appearance turns a claim of national unity into a street-level display of political force, set against the private home and later public uses of the Landauer House. The phrase’s meaning is unsettled by the novel’s successive transformations of that house: from a family residence to an instrument of racial classification, a children’s gymnasium, and finally a preserved architectural monument.

The Slogan in the Street

During the Landauers’ stay away from home, Martin asks Viktor whether the marchers are going to fight. Viktor dismisses the movement as manoeuvres. That evening, young men in lederhosen and knee-length socks and women in dirndls parade below the windows as a crowd applauds. The banner bears the slogan, while the marchers sing and a band accompanies them. When police confront them farther down the road, the banner is smashed and a scuffle breaks out; still, the parade continues, and people on the roadside cheer and wave. The scene makes the slogan more than a static declaration: it travels with a procession that persists even after its emblem is broken.

Liesel asks what will happen. Viktor, who has offered reassurance to Martin, snaps that he has no idea. The exchange places the family’s uncertainty beside the parade’s confident public spectacle. The slogan promises a single people, state, and leader, while the people watching the procession respond with applause and cheers; the scene gives no corresponding assurance about what this political unity means for the Landauers.

A Home Recast by Political Power

The novel’s later scenes make the slogan’s promise of unity collide with the house’s changing realities. The Landauer House begins to rise alongside Ottilie’s infancy: while the baby’s growth is marked by grasping, recognition, and laughter, the house advances through steel beams, poured concrete, and the enclosing of space. Construction is delayed by problems with materials and workers, and the family’s first view of the completed shell is apprehensive rather than celebratory. What looks from outside like a warehouse will become a home, but its domestic purpose proves vulnerable to forces beyond its walls.

Under Nazi rule, the house is transformed into a centre for racial measurement and documentation. Offices occupy the upper rooms; the kitchens become a laboratory, and a basement room is prepared for an X-ray machine. Curtains divide the Glass Room, while scales, height-measuring equipment, callipers, a photographic studio, and a camera turn its spaces into sites of examination and recording. The Bösendorfer piano remains, incongruously, and is restored by a Jewish piano tuner. In the garage, Hollerith machines replace the space once occupied by the family’s two cars, while soldiers carry files into the building. Against the slogan’s image of a unified national community, the house becomes a place where people are classified and documented by the regime.

The Glass Room’s Later Lives

The same Glass Room is later used as a children’s gymnasium. Tomáš calls it by that name, and the word he uses for room can also mean peace, quiet, or tranquillity; the phrase thus carries a private meaning at odds with the building’s earlier conversion to state purposes. He finds light and stillness there after work, sometimes watching Zdenka’s dance classes. The building’s use is irregular, but tolerated because some dancers are children of party officials. The room becomes, for Tomáš, a place of respite within a state-owned building and a setting for private life.

A newspaper correspondent later identifies the building as the Landauer House in the Blackfield district, overlooking Lužánky Park and the city centre. The article recalls that the prominent Landauer family commissioned Rainer von Abt to design it, and calls it his masterpiece and his last European work before he fled to the United States in 1938. Its account dwells on the living room’s 230 square metres, two glass walls, south-facing light, and view toward Špilas. It treats the gymnasium’s use of an architectural landmark as a public question, while acknowledging the importance of care for sick children. The house is therefore presented not as a space with one settled meaning, but as a contested inheritance: a place of modernist design, public service, and competing claims about how the past should be used.

Preservation and Historical Irony

By 1990, the house has been repaired, though badly; some original furniture returns from the Moravian Museum, and the bathroom fittings are updated. Most significantly, the Glass Room’s panes are replaced with plate glass, restoring the room’s lucid splendour. Visitors arrive in small groups, including trade-union delegations and dignitaries from fraternal Soviet states, followed by tourists and architecture students concerned with Rainer von Abt’s place in modernism. The house is increasingly treated as a monument, fixed in time even as its uses and occupants have changed.

Read against this history, “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer” belongs to a political spectacle whose claim to unity cannot account for the different lives and purposes the novel locates in the same place. The house is successively a family home, a tool of Nazi racial administration, a gymnasium for children, and an architectural heritage site. The slogan’s emphatic singularity stands beside a building whose meaning is repeatedly imposed, altered, and remembered.