Ostsee

The Ostsee is a recurring setting where the narrator’s bond with a dog takes vivid, physical form and where the family later establishes a country retreat. Its role shifts from open water for swimming to the coastal landscape beside a dilapidated thatched cottage, marking a turn away from the father’s failed sailing venture.

Swimming and Shared Experience

On trips to the Ostsee, the family parked on a meadow converted into a car park. The dog could barely stay on the back seat until the car door opened: it squeezed out, ran straight to the sea, and plunged headfirst into the water. It dived and resurfaced with none of the awkwardness of a dog paddling; from shore, its passage through the rippled blue looked more like a dolphin’s.

The narrator followed in a swimsuit and diving goggles, and the two swam together to the first sandbank. Underwater, the narrator saw the dog’s floppy ears stick out from its head like fins as it looked back, seeming to grin. The sea is not merely scenery in this recollection: swimming makes it the medium of an intimacy the narrator otherwise pursued through feeding the dog and patiently removing burrs from its tail.

A Change of Direction

The family’s later connection to the Ostsee followed a nautical defeat. After the father’s disastrous sailing outing, he withdrew his affection from the sea and turned decisively toward the land. He found an advertisement in the Schleswiger Nachrichten, and the family bought a small, run-down thatched cottage by the Ostsee without much deliberation.

The purchase gave the family a place in the coastal countryside, but it also began a different kind of project. The cottage was in need of extensive repairs, and the family’s gradual pursuit of a self-sufficient rural life would be set against the sharply different circumstances of their long-established neighbors. The Ostsee thus remains present even as the father abandons sailing: the family moves from attempting to master the water to making a home on its shore.

Narrative Significance

These two appearances give the Ostsee contrasting functions in the family story. In the swimming memory, it is an inviting expanse that the dog enters eagerly and the narrator follows, creating a scene of shared play and closeness. Later, after the father’s sailing plans have failed, the coast frames a move toward land and domestic labor. The sea’s importance lies in both experiences: it offers an immediate space for companionship, then remains the geographical setting for the family’s altered ambitions.