World War I

World War I is a defining rupture in the lives of Liesel Landauer and Viktor Landauer: it takes Benno from his family, links the future couple through a chance meeting at the front, and remains present when the threat of another war returns. The novel treats the conflict not only as a past military catastrophe but as a human and political inheritance, carried in grief, memory, and arguments over what might be built after destruction.

Loss and the journey south

On a journey through Carinthia and into Italy, Liesel and Viktor detour to a war cemetery by the Tagliamento River. They find a cement tablet bearing Benno’s name, though his body is not there: it lies among his comrades in the nearby ossuary. The memorial gives Liesel a place to encounter the absence that the war left behind, and her happiness with Viktor is interrupted by the thought that Benno did not live to witness it.

Viktor had been the last person from home to see Benno alive. At the cemetery he puts his arm around Liesel and offers the thought that her brother is with her in spirit. The gesture matters partly because Viktor believes in neither spirits nor their continuation after death; his words are a concession to her grief, not a statement of his own faith. After he kisses her cheek, the couple return to their journey, and their light-heartedness gradually comes back, but the scene makes their present happiness inseparable from the life Benno lost.

A chance meeting at the front

The novel later returns to Viktor’s wartime recollection as German troops mass on the border and Czechoslovakia mobilises its army. He remembers serving in a bureaucratic position behind the front line, at a military headquarters in Graz near the Italian border, and watching thousands march away to die. Benno was one of them, a soldier in a unit mustering near the parade ground.

The meeting between the two men happens by chance. They recognise each other with astonishment, talk about home, their parents and family, and Liesel, who was then fourteen or fifteen. Benno tells Viktor that his sister has a crush on him. Viktor had not imagined that Benno’s sister might admire him, and the knowledge changes how he understands the possibility of being loved. The conversation is brief: Benno’s unit is waiting, and Viktor watches him climb aboard a lorry and turn to wave. The men and vehicles move up the hill from the camp; no one from home sees Benno again.

Memory against renewed danger

The recollection returns in a present moment of mounting political danger. Viktor hears the preparations for war as echoes of the earlier conflict: mobilisation, engines, marching troops, and the prospect of lives being sent toward death. His position behind the front line had not insulated him from the war’s effects. He remembers the mass departure and, above all, the chance encounter that joined Benno’s last days to the history of his own relationship with Liesel.

Yet Viktor’s response to the renewed danger has altered. He has almost ceased to care about the preparations beyond the hill, or cares more about the life around the family chata. Two days later, he watches Liesel and Kata playing with the children. Liesel and Kata run with the girls, then encourage five-year-old Martin; when he runs into Kata’s embrace, she lifts him above her head as the children laugh. The contrast does not erase the approaching threat. It sets the fragile domestic scene—one shaped by the losses of the previous war—against the sound of another conflict gathering.

Political meaning and historical inheritance

The war also enters a family dispute about the end of the monarchy and the new political order. Liesel’s mother blames socialism for the monarchy’s fall and describes the state that followed as something imagined by foreigners. Liesel answers that the war killed the monarchy just as it killed Benno. For her, the older generation’s belief that war could be played at as in earlier centuries is exposed by its consequences: people die, lives are ruined, and countries are destroyed.

Liesel’s argument turns remembrance toward the future. She proposes that a new country might be built, and insists that socialism builds things. The exchange leaves her mother appalled, while Liesel’s father listens with an enigmatic smile. World War I thus remains more than a private source of bereavement: it is also evidence in a contested account of political responsibility and reconstruction. Its dead cannot be restored, but the possibility of building something new becomes one answer the novel places against the destructive inheritance of war.