Old Town is presented as a place where displacement and environmental deterioration have become part of the everyday landscape. Its primitive housing sends Buna-Werke personnel into a dormitory settlement on the rural eastern outskirts, while the town itself offers Angelus Thomsen temporary rooms in a property emptied of its former owners. Later, its deserted streets and a local delegation’s alarm over unusable water give the setting a double character: a lived-in town and a place increasingly emptied and damaged by the institutions around it.

Housing and Displacement

Old Town’s housing stock is described as so primitive that Buna-Werke personnel had to build a separate settlement in the rural eastern suburbs. The settlement had lower and upper schools, a clinic, shops, a cafeteria, a taproom, and scores of housewives. The list suggests a self-contained community assembled to compensate for the town’s inadequate accommodation, rather than a solution to the conditions that made it necessary.

Angelus Thomsen finds more suitable rooms at 9 Dzilka Street, up a steep lane off the market square. They are furnished in a conspicuously chintzy style, but their comfort is inseparable from dispossession: after their owners were forcibly displaced, the property had served as a builders’ squat for nearly a year. The chronic mouse infestation is one material residue of that intervening use. On her second visit, the young charlady Agnes brings Max, a large black-and-white cat, to hunt the mice; his visits and the suggestion that he needs only occasional milk turn the consequences of displacement into an intimate domestic routine.

Streets and the Domestic Interior

The Old Town is not shown as a bustling civic centre. After watching Max restrain and kill a small grey mouse, Angelus Thomsen goes down the slope into streets described as empty, as though a curfew were in force. The movement from the confined rooms to the vacant town joins two kinds of vulnerability: the mouse’s helplessness before the cat and the apparent absence of ordinary public life outside.

The episode gives the town’s quiet a moral as well as physical dimension. The mouse’s complete defencelessness is set against the cat’s indifference and power; the streets outside offer no reassuring human counterpoint. Old Town is thus rendered not simply as a location on Thomsen’s route but as a space in which unequal power appears at both domestic and civic scales.

Water, Waste, and the Wider Environment

Old Town’s civic representatives summon Angelus Thomsen to hear their complaint about the water. They report that it remains undrinkable however often it is boiled, that pieces in it have begun to ferment, and that the water table has been breached. Thomsen acknowledges that there is no alternative and anticipates an overwhelming smell. The exchange makes environmental damage concrete through the residents’ failed attempts to make the water safe and through the approaching stench; the problem is not an abstraction but a threat to daily life.

The account does not identify a single cause for the breach or specify how its effects are distributed among residents. It does, however, place the town’s complaint alongside Thomsen’s work within a broader landscape dominated by Buna-Werke and the camp. At the industrial site, he watches designers, engineers, and administrators from IG Farben plants pick their way past wounded, unconscious, and dead prisoners with notebooks and measuring tapes. The contrast is sharp: technical work proceeds amid human devastation, while Old Town’s delegation describes the consequences of a damaged water supply in terms of what people can drink and endure.

Narrative Significance

Old Town’s details resist separation into a respectable civic surface and a distant machinery of violence. The forcibly emptied house, its persistent mice, the nearly deserted streets, and the compromised water place dispossession and deterioration within ordinary surroundings. Thomsen’s rented rooms offer shelter, but their history prevents that shelter from seeming innocent; the municipality’s appeal makes equally clear that the damage extends beyond a private interior.

The location’s force comes from this accumulation rather than from a single dramatic event. Domestic infestation, civic scarcity, and industrial brutality belong to the same narrative geography, though the text does not claim that each has one immediate cause. Old Town becomes a measure of how coercive systems alter not only the people they directly control but also the conditions of habitation, public life, and the environment around them.