World War II

World War II makes the Landauer House a measure of historical upheaval: built as a modern family home, it is repurposed by Nazi authorities, damaged during the war, and later revisited as both a place of memory and an object of political dispute. Its successive uses register how war reaches into domestic routines, public institutions, and the possibility of belonging.

The home before and during occupation

Before the house’s later transformations, its growth runs alongside that of the Landauer children. The construction advances through steel beams, concrete, and the enclosing of space, but delays and disputes over materials and workers stretch across summer and autumn. By winter, the completed shell initially looks less like a home than a warehouse. In the family’s daily life, meanwhile, the house accommodates small routines: Viktor and Liesel rise early, discuss the day, and prepare while the children get dressed under their nurse Liba’s care.

As the political situation worsens, the possibility of leaving becomes an urgent family question. Liesel points out that Liba is engaged, may be pregnant, and has given notice because her fiancé, Jan, is based in Prague. The loss of their nurse would make departure harder with the children, so Liesel suggests that Katalin might help: Ottilie and Marika get along, and Martin is fond of her. The conversation reveals how a decision about escape is bound up with practical care and the relationships that sustain the household.

The Landauer House is eventually transformed into a Nazi biometric research centre. Its upstairs rooms become offices, the kitchens are converted into a laboratory, and a basement room is prepared for an X-ray machine. The Glass Room is divided with curtains; measuring instruments are set before the onyx wall, while photographic equipment and lights turn the dining area into a studio. The original Bösendorfer piano remains, incongruously, amid the new apparatus. Documentation machines and boxes of files further remake the former garage and house into an institutional workplace. The change is more than a new use for the rooms: the household’s open modernist spaces are reorganized for measurement, photography, and records.

War in Město

As the war continues, residents of Město try to survive on potatoes, turnips, and beets. German troops move east; the defeated and injured return as what the narrative calls human wreckage. At the pub U Dobrého Vojáka, Laník hears that the Red Army is advancing. Workers from the armaments factory gather around Novotný, who follows the Soviet front and treats each advance as a personal triumph. The scale of the war arrives through rumors, maps, and vast distances that are hard for the men to grasp.

In November, fog and cold already constrain movement through the city. After an air-raid warning proves false, people emerge to resume queuing for food and working in factories. Then bombs fall without warning or the sound of approaching aircraft. Explosions tear up roads and damage churches, homes, shops, and part of the railway station. A bomb hits near the Landauer House, where Laník and his sister are sheltering in the basement. The blast shakes the building and breaks the Glass Room’s plate-glass windows. The house, once defined by its expanse of glass, is no longer a sealed refuge from the world outside.

Occupation’s aftermath and contested return

The end of the war does not immediately settle what will replace occupation. Russian soldiers occupy the Glass Room, while Laník is left in Liesel’s former bedroom, stripped of its furniture and reduced to bare walls and a bedframe. His encounter with Sergeant-Major Yevgeniya is framed by the uncertainty of the transition: the fighting is over, but the next order of life remains unclear. The former family home has become a space occupied by successive authorities and survivors, each with different claims upon it.

Years later, Město’s authorities invite the Landauer family to attend a handover connected to the house. Martin warns that accepting could amount to recognizing the city’s legal ownership. Veselý presents the invitation as part of a changed political climate and an effort to restore relations with the West and acknowledge past errors; Martin counters that the invitation also uses his mother in a political struggle. The proposed visit therefore makes return inseparable from the unresolved question of confiscated property.

The invitation also brings the family’s losses into the present. Liesel’s relatives had believed her dead after hearing of her arrest and deportation in 1942. Separation after the war and the Iron Curtain’s isolation had left them unable to learn what happened to her. Their Jewish relatives were murdered in camps, while the surviving family’s life in America had become remote from the country they had left. The possibility of reunion does not erase the years of uncertainty or the deaths that made return impossible for others.

Memory, use, and the Glass Room

When Liesel returns to the Glass Room, the gathering there feels oppressive rather than welcoming. She is crowded by people as a host begins a speech about the house’s place in European architecture, and she asks Hana to take her outside. Laník’s presence recalls her unease about him; Hana notes that he has become a Party official. The house is being publicly celebrated as architecture even as its history of surveillance, war, and political reuse presses into the visit.

The building later enters another life as a children’s gymnasium. Tomáš calls it the Glass Room, and the word he uses for room can also mean peace, tranquillity, or quiet. For him, the place is a space of light and stillness where he can be with Zdenka after work. Its use as a gymnasium also makes it a setting for the treatment of children disabled by disease and for dance classes held by Zdenka. The same room thus carries institutional work and private respite, while its name gathers an ideal of calm that the building’s history repeatedly unsettles.

After the fall of the Iron Curtain, the house is repaired, though badly; some original furniture returns from the Moravian Museum, and the Glass Room’s broken panes are replaced with plate glass. Visitors arrive first in organized groups and later as tourists and architecture students. Marie Delmas comes from Paris after recognizing the house in a book on modern architecture as an image tied to her own memory. When she and the older Ottilie meet again, the Glass Room is described as a place that seems to deny time. That image gives the building a powerful pull, but the family’s divided history and the disputes over ownership remain part of what its restored transparency cannot resolve.