51 pages • 1 hour read
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Karl Stern, the narrator of this novel, is a teenage boy living in Berlin in the years just before World War II. He comes from a cultivated Jewish family and has been raised to have a cosmopolitan outlook. He and his family have always considered themselves to be German first and Jewish second, which is why the rise of Hitler and the increasing normalization of anti-Semitism come as such a shock to them. Karl is also aware he does not look especially Jewish, which makes his public outings more and more fraught and anxious as more and more rights are stripped away from Jews.He is never sure whether or not he will “pass” as a full German citizen.
Karl’s two main influences are his father and his boxing coach, and they represent two different sides of his nature. From his father Karl gets his sensitivity and his love of art, which is a source of embarrassment for him, as much as pride, especially given the increased demonization of artists and intellectuals in his city. At the beginning of the novel, he wants to emulate Max Schmeling, his boxing coach, more than he does his father; Schmeling is as adored and popular a figure in Nazi-era Berlin as his father is a shunned and marginal one, and Karl sees in Schmeling a way to be both a fighter and an appeaser: a way to defend himself without drawing mockery on himself. As the novel goes on, however, Karl’s understanding of his father deepens, even while he grows disillusioned with Schmeling. The very qualities that initially drew him to Schmeling—his combination of diplomacy and forcefulness—come to seem slippery and self-preserving.
While Karl has inherited his father’s artistic nature, their ambitions are slightly different, which is another source of discord between them. Karl wants to draw comics.His father regards these as a lowbrow, popular art form. Ultimately, Karl must learn to appreciate what his father has taught and given him, while still forging his own path in the world.
Max Schmeling was a real-life figure, and an elusive and complicated one. He was a champion boxer during World War II. The Nazis courted him, but Schmeling also sheltered two children during Kristallnacht. He twice fought the boxer Joe Louis, became friends with him later in life, and even tended to him in his old age. Following his boxing career, he was briefly a paratrooper in the war; later in his life, he became a Coca-Cola executive and lived to the age of ninety-nine.
Schmeling’s biography indicates, among other things, that he knew how to survive, and this facet of his character is the most prominent in the novel. During the years preceding World War II, he serves as Karl’s distant mentor, and finally as his and his sister’s benefactor; they are the two children he takes in during Kristallnacht. He does so only once Karl has directly and tearfully solicited him, and after previously ignoring multiple letters Karl has sent him. Schmeling is not without decency but is simply a creature of habit. He has become accustomed to his insulated celebrity lifestyle, and to the caginess and self-centeredness required to maintain it, and he does not see other, more desperate perspectives until they are right in front of him.
Karl spends some time drawing Max’s face, or studying drawings of his face, as a way of trying to understand him. While Max’s face and stance initially appear bold and fierce to Karl, the impression that he is finally left with is one of guardedness and wariness: “For the first time, I noticed that his hands were held up in a defensive pose, as if he cared as much about self-preservation as triumphing” (398).
Sigmund Stern, Karl’s father, is an independent, contrary, and somewhat mysterious character. He runs an art gallery, which is a mission for him as much as a job, and his focus frequently seems to be more on his work than on his children. He and Karl rarely have intimate conversations, and much of what Karl learns about him, he learns through other people. The Countess—an old army buddy of his father’s—reveals that Sigmund was not only a soldier in World War I but a war hero; from his mother, Karl learns that his father’s frequent standoffishness comes from a desire for Karl to be independent and make his own decisions.
After his experience of war, Stern is a pacifist. While he is proudly individualistic in his dress, manner, and livelihood, he also wishes—in regard to the Nazi-generated disturbances taking place all around him—to lie low and not rock the boat. He has seen what fighting and conflict can lead to, and he wants nothing further to do with them. Up until the very end of the novel, he stubbornly tells Karl and Karl’s mother that this state of affairs will surely pass and that there is little point in getting involved. When he does finally fight, however—which he does only when the Nazis have literally broken down his doorstep during Kristallnacht—he is heroic and fierce.
Rebecca Stern, Karl’s mother, is a soft and vulnerable character, who also has moments of incisiveness and forcefulness. She is prone to depression and melancholy, and for as long as Karl can remember, she has tended to disappear for long spells into her bath or her bed. Yet, perhaps because of this very morbidity in her nature, it is she, and not her husband, who first perceives the dangers of staying in Berlin under the Hitler regime. She sees before he does that they need to leave, and in their arguments, she is generally agitating for action—she also wants to visit Dachau, once her brother, Jakob, has been taken there—while her husband tells her to be “reasonable” and not to draw attention to herself.
After her husband has been taken away by the Gestapo, Karl and Max Schmeling find Rebecca sitting in her bathtub, fully clothed, paralyzed with fear and shock; even so, once she rouses herself, she has the presence of mind to take a stack of her husband’s art books with her.These are full of valuable art and will help furnish a new life for her children in the United States. This is an example of her unpredictability and also of her quick maternal instincts.
Hildy, Karl’s younger sister, is intense, sensitive, and lonely. She is more Semitic in appearance than Karl, which makes her public life more difficult, and she has also internalized the anti-Semitism all around her, to the point where she believes herself to be ugly.
At the beginning of the novel, Hildy is still a child and is easily consoled by Karl’s solicitous older-brother attentions, among them the Winzig und Spatz comic strips that he draws for her. By the end of the novel, she has become a young woman and,as such, ismore unpredictable and unknowable to Karl. Because she is a more introverted character than Karl, and perhaps also because she is female, it is hard for him to chart her growths and to tell what she knows and what she doesn’t. He is accustomed to thinking of her as his naïve and dependent younger sister, and he is startled when he reads her journal and registers her anger and independence of thought. He is also startled when it turns outthat she knew all along that the Countess was a man; as she tells her brother, “I’m not a fool, Karl” (373).
The Countess is a transvestite named Bertram Heigel. She explains Karl’s father to him, having known him as a soldier during World War I. She also takes in Karl and Hildy during Kristallnacht, once their parents have disappeared; it is she, and not Max Schmeling, Karl first thinks to call.
Karl thinks that the Countess, rather than Schmeling, has “more strength than anyone I’ve ever known” (398). He is referring to the Countess’s courage in coming to fetch him and Hildy during Kristallnacht, while dressed up as a woman; more generally, he is referring to the courage that the Countess displays simply in leading her life. Even when she sees members of her entourage disappear, having been cowed by the Nazis, she refuses to dim her flamboyance. Karl comes to understand that this type of emotional courage is at least as important as physical strength.