Munich is a point of departure, not a refuge: the city connects private histories of family, love, and loss to the machinery of Nazi rule. From there, an official drives his four-year-old daughter Erika to Hartheim Castle, while other characters’ memories and disclosures make Munich part of the broader geography of precarious lives and forced movement.

Family Loss and Hartheim

The official’s account of Erika’s death begins with a winter journey from Munich. He and his family drove through difficult roads to a village in Upper Austria, arriving at Hartheim Castle while snow covered the grounds. An orderly seemed to be waiting for them. After the parents confirmed their identities and signed forms, they were taken to a waiting room; within minutes, a nurse led Erika away. The official says they had already said goodbye months earlier, but the brief, efficient procedure makes the final separation no less devastating.

Munich is therefore tied to the history of Nazi killing not merely as the origin of a journey, but as the place from which a family entered an organized process that disguised murder as clinical administration. The official’s recollection comes later, as he tells Hana about the castle. His measured details—the winter roads, the forms, the five-minute wait—reveal how institutional routine can contain an irreversible act.

The City in the Official’s Past

The same man describes a life before his work in racial research. He tells Hana that he had been a musician and that he and Hedda, his first cousin, played together at the Munich conservatory. Because they were relatives, their marriage required a dispensation from a Catholic bishop in Bavaria; some people condemned the relationship as incest. Hedda later died in an accident, and they had no children.

He also tells Hana that he transferred to Ernst Rüdin’s team at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Genealogy and Demography in Munich, where he specialized in human hybridisation before beginning his later task. Set beside his account of Hedda and Erika, this professional history exposes the distance between personal attachments and the racial classification system he serves. Munich marks both an earlier life shaped by music and marriage and a career that turns human difference into an object of measurement.

A City Recalled Through Other Lives

Munich enters the novel’s intersecting stories in fragments rather than as a sustained city portrait. Hana’s encounter with the official develops in the transformed Landauer House, where she confronts the racial logic he represents by telling him that her husband is Jewish. The contrast between the Glass Room’s ordered, balanced design and the official’s program of classification makes the city named in his biography part of a wider collision between private life and political doctrine.

Katalin Kalman’s earlier circumstances supply another counterpoint. When questioned about her connection to Viktor Landauer, she explains that he helped her financially when she could not find work or afford rent, and when she had to provide shelter, food, and clothes for her baby. Her account insists on the material pressures behind the arrangement: the security enjoyed by Liesel Landauer was not available to Katalin. Munich belongs to the wider geography of these unequal lives, even as the scene itself recalls Vienna and the Prater rather than staging an episode there.

Movement, Borders, and the Limits of Place

The novel’s later border scenes sharpen the significance of Munich as one place within a continental network of forced movement. At a railway checkpoint, Viktor presents passports and French transit and Spanish visas for his family, their nanny, and her daughter. Katalin’s refugee passport is a Nansen passport, but officials nevertheless take her and Marika away for questioning. Viktor protests that the papers are valid; an official warns him to return to the train or risk detention. The documents that make travel possible cannot guarantee safety, and the journey continues with the family separated from Katalin and Marika.

Across these episodes, Munich is linked to departure, not settled belonging. Its most consequential appearances lead toward loss: Erika is taken from her parents, the official’s earlier family life is recalled as already broken, and his professional path carries him into Nazi racial science. The city’s significance lies in how the novel places it among the routes by which intimate lives become vulnerable to institutions, borders, and the decisions of those who control them.