Germany enters the novel not simply as a country on the map but as a force that redraws borders, classifies people, and makes ordinary places unsafe. Its expansion first appears through the announcement of Anschluss; it then becomes the looming threat behind Viktor’s preparations to leave, the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, and the danger that follows the family across Europe. In the later border scene, German officials show how political power reaches the intimate scale of a family’s papers and movements: even documents accepted for travel do not prevent Katalin and Marika from being detained.

Expansion and the collapse of security

The annexation of Austria is heard in the Glass Room, where the radio carries the sound of the crowd at Vienna’s Heldenplatz and Adolf Hitler’s announcement of union. Austria ceases to be an independent republic and becomes an eastern province of the German Reich, renamed Ostmark. The announcement makes expansion audible inside the Landauers’ home, joining distant political spectacle to the quiet of a room where the family listens.

Viktor responds by insisting that Germany’s actions are illegal, but he recognizes how powerless that argument sounds. The treaties of Versailles and Saint-Germain seem to belong to a remote past, unable to restrain the present. Liesel initially resists the prospect of leaving: the house, the city, friends, family, and business together constitute home. Viktor counters that the family is Jewish whether or not he wishes it, and that Nazi rules decide what that identity means. He lists the exclusions already imposed on Jews in Germany, including restrictions on professional work and business ownership, extra taxes, limits on marriage and social contact, and the threat of arrest. His fear is not confined to Germany: Austria has been absorbed, and the border territories separating the family from German power are already under German control.

Viktor therefore begins preparing for departure before immediate flight becomes necessary. He predicts that Germany will invade Czechoslovakia, explaining how the Sudeten German leader Henlein’s demands and his relationship with Hitler could provide either a political route to German entry or a pretext for invasion. Viktor does not want his family forced to flee in panic with only what can be gathered at the last moment. Preparation is his attempt to preserve some agency in a crisis whose direction he believes is already clear.

Dismemberment and occupation

The novel presents the destruction of Czechoslovakia through the image of a body dismembered by different powers. Germany’s troops enter towns including Eger, Karlsbad, Teplitz, and Liberec as the Czechoslovak army stands down. Poland takes part of Czech Silesia, Hungary takes parts of Slovakia, and refugees scatter along roads and across fields with handcarts and bundles. The account stresses that this is war without fighting, a rehearsal for the violence still to come. By autumn’s end, the republic has been reduced to what the narration describes as a ruined trunk, replaced by a short-lived, diminished state.

German power also appears in the arrival of Adolf Hitler in the city. A crowd watches his open-topped car pass from the station toward the centre along Masaryk Street. Some onlookers weep, but the scene does not establish whether their tears express joy or misery. The uncertainty echoes the earlier newspaper photographs whose tears German and Czech papers interpret in opposite ways: public response is visible, but its meaning is contested.

Rule, classification, and the house

Germany’s power is not represented only by troops and territorial change. Under occupation, the Landauer House is converted into a biometric research centre. Its rooms are reorganized for administrative and scientific work: offices occupy the upper floor, the kitchens are being turned into a laboratory, and a basement room is prepared for an X-ray machine. Measuring equipment stands before the onyx wall; the dining area becomes a photographic studio, while large Hollerith machines and files fill the former garage and main building. The remaining Bösendorfer piano links the transformed institution to the house’s earlier life, but the rooms now serve a project of measurement and recordkeeping.

This conversion gives physical form to the racial classifications Viktor had feared. His earlier account of restrictions on Jewish life is no longer only a warning about what Germany might do: occupation brings the machinery of classification into the family’s former home. The house’s modern openness is turned toward institutional observation, while its domestic spaces are repurposed to record and organize information about people. The contrast is not merely between private and public use; it is between a home made for family life and a regime that treats human identity as something to be measured, filed, and governed.

Borders and family separation

The family’s flight exposes the difference between possessing travel documents and being permitted to move. At a German checkpoint, Viktor lays out papers for himself, Liesel, their two children, the children’s nanny, and the nanny’s daughter. The official examines their passports and French and Spanish visas, then demands their tickets. The procedure turns escape into a test administered by an armed authority, with the family waiting to learn whether its carefully assembled papers will suffice.

Katalin and Marika are singled out. When Viktor tries to explain Katalin’s position, the official tells him that he was not asked to speak. After consultation, an official leads Katalin toward a hut; Marika cries out for her mother, and Liesel holds the child close and says that she is with the family and will be cared for. The scene makes the threatened separation immediate: Marika is not simply a name on a travel list but a child left beside Liesel while her mother is taken away.

Viktor protests that Katalin’s papers are in order and identifies her document as a Nansen passport, accepted for entry into France and travel to Spain. The official nevertheless orders him back onto the train and warns that he could be detained. The crowd’s pressure to move on helps the authorities make the separation seem like a temporary administrative delay, but the family has no power to insist on that interpretation. Germany’s reach is registered here in a small, consequential act of discretion: the official can set aside the practical meaning of valid papers and separate mother and daughter from those travelling with them.

Changing uses and the afterlife of German power

The later history of the house registers another transformation. After serving the occupation’s biometric project, it becomes a children’s gymnasium, and a later account debates whether a building regarded as an architectural treasure should be used for treatment. In 1990, the house is described as fixed in time, repaired imperfectly, and visited by groups from fraternal Soviet states and occasional visitors from elsewhere. Its Glass Room is restored by replacing the removed window panes with plate glass. These later uses differ sharply from the house’s role under German occupation, yet its changing functions keep political history attached to the physical space.

Germany’s significance in the novel lies in this movement from distant expansion to intimate consequence. Annexation and occupation alter the map, but their effects are measured in a family’s argument over whether to leave, in the conversion of a home into an instrument of racial administration, and in a checkpoint where documents cannot guarantee that a mother and child will remain together. The recurring transformation of places and permissions shows how political power operates not only through conquest, but through the reorganization of everyday life.