United States

The United States appears briefly but consequentially in Michael Berg’s account as both the place from which he sustains his distant contact with Hanna Schmitz and the setting for a journey undertaken after her death. While living there, he continued sending her cassette recordings; years later, he traveled from Boston to New York to deliver money according to her instructions. The country becomes a physical setting for an emotional recognition: Michael’s desire to return to Hanna is ultimately a desire for home, not a future they could have shared.

Michael’s Year in America

During a year in the United States, Michael sent Hanna recordings from there, maintaining the practice he had begun after their separation and her imprisonment. The distance did not interrupt the exchange, but neither did it turn the recordings into ordinary conversation. He read aloud, sent the tapes, and never wrote to her or included personal remarks on them. His voice crossed the ocean while the relationship remained deliberately wordless.

The timing of the tapes was irregular. When Michael was on vacation or especially busy, the next cassette could take longer; sometimes he sent one every week or two, sometimes only every three or four weeks. He did not establish a fixed schedule, and he did not stop when Hanna learned to read for herself. Reading aloud remained his way of speaking to her, and the recordings gave their contact a durable but one-sided form: Hanna could listen and respond in notes, while Michael kept his own life outside the recorded text.

A Journey from Boston to New York

In autumn, Michael finally carried out Hanna’s instructions by bringing money to the daughter of a woman who had survived the church fire. He was in Boston for a meeting and used the occasion to travel by train to New York, where the daughter lived. He had written to introduce himself as a legal historian, mention the trial, and ask for a chance to speak with her; she invited him to tea. He brought a bank check and the cash stored in the lavender tea tin.

The train journey made the American landscape a surface for memory. Woods in brown, yellow, orange, tawny red, chestnut, and scarlet recalled the autumn pictures Michael had seen in Hanna’s prison cell. As the carriage’s rhythm and rocking tired him, he imagined himself and Hanna living together in the autumn hills along the route. In this imagined domestic scene, Hanna was older than when he first met her but younger than when he met her again, and seemed more at ease in her body. The vision gives shape to his longing, but its details also expose its impossibility: Hanna spoke no English and could not drive.

Homecoming and Its Impossibility

Michael wakes from the imagined life knowing Hanna is dead. He recognizes that his desire had fixed on her without her being its true object: it was a desire to come home. That distinction gives the journey its emotional weight. New York is an actual destination, reached to fulfill Hanna’s instruction, while the home Michael imagines with her belongs to a life their circumstances could not support. The American journey thus joins practical obligation to an unattainable longing, without confusing the two.

The novel’s treatment of America also links distance with continued contact. Michael can send tapes across the country and later cross it by train, yet neither movement restores the past or makes a shared future possible. The tapes preserve a channel between prison and the outside world; the New York visit completes a specific obligation after Hanna’s death. In both episodes, America is not a new home for their relationship but a setting in which its limits become unmistakable.