Summary
Part 11: 1945
166: Berlin
In January 1945, Frau Elena and the remaining 4 girls in the house—the twins, Hannah and Susanne Gerlitz, Claudia Forster, and Jutta, who is 15—are brought to Berlin to work in a machine parts factory for 10 hours a day, 6 days a week. Frau Elena wears an old ski parka. They live in an apartment above an old printing factory, burning pages from misprinted dictionaries. They are served food in the canteen, with limited portions of butter. Mothers have no diapers for their babies. Most of the girls cannot read, so Jutta reads them the letters they get from their relatives at the front, and sometimes writes responses for them. All spring the bombers come, and most nights they go to a cramped shelter. They see bodies in the street, sometimes burnt, sometimes looking like they are just asleep. Claudia stops talking. The mail stops. In March, there are no materials left. Jutta hears of boys who deserted and were then shot in the streets. She recalls memories with Werner, in their wagon. She receives two letters in the fall in Zollverein announcing his death, listing two different places of burial in France. She dreams of him having gears and belts on a table, announcing that he is making something. By April, women are talking of how the Russians are coming to seek revenge on them. The only good thing that happens in this period is that Claudia finds a box of 15 pastries, which they all eat giddily. Jutta hears that women are making their daughters as unattractive as possible, or drowning them, to avoid a worse fate at the hands of the Russians. The Russians come to their apartment one day in May. Frau Elena prays, and tells the girls she will go first. Four Russians come in: two officers and two young boys. All of them take their turns with each girl. Jutta’s assailant says a list of Russian words out loud while he rapes her; she later decides he was saying the names of dead comrades. Before they leave, they shoot at the ceiling; plaster rains down. Frau Elena zips herself back into her parka, rubbing her arm in one spot as if trying to stay warm.
167: Paris
Etienne rents the same apartment in Paris where Marie-Laure and her father lived. He listens to the news about released prisoners; he petitions the repatriation authorities. They wait every day at the Gare d’Austerlitz train station. Sometimes Dr. Geffard comes to wait with them. He tells Marie-Laure that her return makes him believe that there is good in the world. She talks to officials at the museum, who assure her they are trying to find her father; they do not mention the Sea of Flames. In the spring, Berlin and Goring surrender. Parades happen spontaneously. Etienne tells Marie-Laure that they may never know what happened to her father. They wait at the train station all summer. One day in August, Marie-Laure leads them into the Jardin des Plantes. She cannot lift the hood of grief; yet she tells Etienne she would like to go to school.
Part 12: 1974
168: Volkheimer
Volkheimer, 52 years old, lives in an apartment in Pforzheim, West Germany, across from a billboard that reflects light into his apartment at night. He works as a TV antenna repairman. His apartment is barren, with only a few pieces of furniture and a TV. He has no family, no pets, and no plants. In his work he is quiet and solitary. He only feels at home on the windiest days. Sometimes in summer, his loneliness feels like a disease. He sees the eyes of men he killed. Before going to bed he checks his mail, which he has not checked in a week. There is a package with 3 photographs: 1 of a duffel, 1 of a small wooden house partially crushed, and 1 of a notebook. The letter explains that the organization is trying to deliver these items to the next of kin of an unknown soldier, and they believe Volkheimer knows who the soldier is. He thinks of how they were all only boys. He thinks of the boy with white hair and ears that stuck out. He thinks of how that boy asked him if it was decent to leave the dead prisoner outside like that. He knows who the items belong to.
169: Jutta
Jutta Wette, now married to Albert Wette, is an Algebra teacher in Essen. Her husband Albert is a kind, balding accountant, who loves running model trains in their basement. Jutta got pregnant at age 37, after years of believing she couldn’t have children. They have a son named Max who is 6 years old. He loves to ask questions no one can answer, and make paper airplanes. He has ears that stick out. On a Thursday in June, they go to the pool, and then drive home. At home Albert prepares dinner while Jutta corrects exams, and Max makes paper airplanes. A knock at the door makes Jutta’s heart pound. Max answers, and Jutta goes to meet a giant man at the door wearing a grey sweatsuit. He confirms that her maiden name is Pfennig. She knows that his business is about Werner. The giant ducks his head and comes inside their house, and Albert asks him to dinner. He slowly reveals the reason he came: he was contacted and he asked the organization if he could deliver the bag himself; he came several hours by train to bring it here. He tells them that he spent the last month of the war in Saint-Malo with Werner, and that he thinks Werner fell in love. Jutta has spent years trying not to think of the war, especially not of those last months in Berlin. She sometimes looks at older female colleagues and wonders what they did when the electricity was out. She wants Volkheimer to leave and take the bag with him. She rarely allows herself to think of Werner. Albert asks Max to take Volkheimer outside to the patio for cake. Inside Albert asks if Jutta is all right, and he tells her he loves her. She looks out the window and sees Volkheimer patiently teaching Max to fold an advanced version of a paper airplane, which flies straight and true. Jutta tells Albert that she loves him too.
170: Duffel
After Volkheiemer leaves, Jutta puts Max to bed, and Albert goes to run his trains in the basement. She can hear the noise of them even upstairs. She takes the duffel upstairs and sets it by her desk while she tries to grade exams. She loses focus. She remembers how, when she first married Albert and he would go on business trips, she’d remember the pain she felt after Werner left for Schulpforta. She opens the duffel bag and finds a package wrapped in newspaper: a small wooden model house no bigger than her fist. She also finds the envelope with his childhood notebook that she sent him. She opens it and looks at the models of inventions he drew and the questions he wrote, such as “why do some fish have whiskers?”. She closes the notebook as her memories come back to her. Then she reopens it and reads more. Between the last two pages she finds an envelope that says “For Frederick”—she knows this is for his bunkmate, the boy who loved birds. When her husbands comes to bed she pretends she is still grading exams.
171: Saint-Malo
Jutta decides to take her son to Saint-Malo during the summer break, convincing herself the trip is for him to see the sea and learn some French; she wants to go without her husband. Albert drives them to the train, and they depart. At one point a Frenchman with a prosthetic leg gets on the train and sits next to Jutta; she is worried he will accuse her of being the reason why he has a prosthetic leg, but he does not. They arrive in the night and check into a hotel in Saint-Malo. She is scared to try her French, so she skips dinner. In the morning Max pulls her around exploring the beach, looking up at the ramparts. Jutta cannot stop looking at the sea, thinking of the letter her brother wrote her, stating that the sea seemed to be be able to contain anything anyone ever felt. They climb the chateau and observe the old town, where she sees no traces of the bombings. They climb a quay in the Porte de Dinan, across from the old city. There are big steel caps where soldiers would have directed fire at the hill. There is a plaque in remembrance of a dead French boy, aged 18. Jutta thinks to herself that there are no plaques for the Germans who died here.
Jutta asks herself why she has come. On the second day, she takes the wooden house to the historical museum, and the man there brings her to see Number 4 rue Vauborel. The house now is divided into flats. She asks if there was a girl who lived there; he confirms that a blind girl lived there during the war, and that his mother told stories about her. She asks him why her brother would have had that model house, and the man suggests perhaps the girl would know. He offers to find her address. Max tries to get Jutta’s attention: he thinks he has found a way to open the house.
172: Laboratory
Marie-Laure LeBlanc works in the Museum of Natural History in the study of mollusks. She has published successful papers. As a graduate student she went to Bora Bora and Bimini and collected snails in reefs. She is not a collector like Dr. Geffard; she prefers to be among living creatures. She and Etienne traveled while he still could—to Sardinia, Scotland, and to London. He died at age 82 and left her plenty of money. They looked into what happened to her father, but the only information they found was that, at a camp in Kessel, Germany, he contracted the flu in 1943. Marie-Laure still lives in the flat where she grew up. She has had two lovers. One was a visiting scientist who never came back. The other was a Canadian named John, who scattered items about any room he entered. They separated undramatically when she got pregnant, and they have a 19-year-old daughter named Helene, who is petit, and an aspiring violinist. All three still eat lunch together every Friday. Marie-Laure still has things she cannot tolerate that remind her of the war: shoes that are too big, boiled turnips, and lists of names that remind her of lists of prisoner names on which her father's name never appeared. She still counts storm drains to move around towns. She occasionally walks to a brasserie where she orders duck in honor of Dr. Geffard. She is happy for parts of every day: when she receives a package of shells; when she thinks of reading Jules Verne to her daughter. She also sometimes gets overwhelmed with the feeling that the museum is like a mausoleum, with all of its dead items classified in different rooms. This feeling happens rarely: she is reassured by her own gurgling salt water tanks. One Wednesday in July, her assistant says there is a woman with a child there to visit her. She asks what she looks like; the assistant says she has white hair and is badly dressed, and says she got her address from a museum in Brittany. Marie-Laure feels vertigo. She hears the tinkling of 10,000 keys on hooks behind her. She feels the room has tilted and she will slide off the edge.
173: Visitor
Marie-Laure says to Jutta, “You learned French as a child.” Max introduces himself in German. Jutta tells her she brought something, and Marie-Laure knows it is the house. Marie-Laure asks her assistant Francis to take Max to see something in the museum for a moment. They leave, and, alone with Jutta, Marie-Laure touches the house. Jutta asks how her brother got it, wondering whether he stole it. Marie-Laure wonders if the house has ever been opened. She tells Jutta that her brother did not steal it: she and Werner spent a day together when she was 16. Jutta tells her he died. "Of course," Marie-Laure thinks: because he didn’t fit into the after-war stories, of French resistance heroes, or of blond Germans watching broken cities from tank hatches, or terrible psychopathic Germans who tortured Jewesses. She remembers that he told her that he and his sister used to pick berries by the Ruhr. Marie-Laure says his hands were smaller than hers; Jutta says he was always small for his age, and that it was hard for him not to do what was expected of him. Marie-Laure wonders if he went back into the grotto to get the house, and whether he might have left the stone there. Marie-Laure tells Jutta that he told her that he and Jutta used to listen to her great-uncle’s broadcasts together. At that moment Max and Francis come back. They decide to leave; Marie-Laure tells Jutta she will send her the last remaining copy of her grandfather's work, about the moon; she thinks that Max might like it.
174: Paper Airplane
Max tells Jutta what he learned at the museum. Jutta, tired, leans against a tree. They make their way back to their hotel. Max asks her if she showed the lady how the house opened; she says she thinks she already knew. She looks out over the houses in Paris, and thinks of the drawings she made as a child. A sports game is on TV. Max folds a paper airplane and launches it over the street. Jutta calls her husband.
175: The Key
Marie-Laure sits in her lab touching shells. She is filled with memories. She shakes the house, knowing it won’t give away if something is inside. She wonders what kind of boy Werner was; she remembers him paging through the book of birds. She imagines him going back into the old kennel, finding the house, solving it, and letting the diamond drop into the sea, or keeping it, or putting it back in the house. She thinks of how Dr. Geffard once told her that the diamond is so valuable and so beautiful, it is hard to turn away from. She twists the chimney, and slides off the roof tiles, the first one of them sticking. A key slides out into her hand.
176: Sea of Flames
The narrator describes the process of the formation of the diamond: “from the molten basements of the world," old, hard, made by magma, rocks, ice, lakes, trees rising and falling. A storm one day brings the stone out of a canyon, and it catches the attention of a prince; it is cut and polished and passed through the hands of men. Now, it is described as a lump of carbon no larger than a chestnut, covered with algae, crawled on by snails.
177: Frederick
Frederick and his mother live in the middle floor of a triplex apartment building. Frederick mostly sits on the patio and watches the wind blow plastic bags, or draws thick, heavy-handed spirals. The house is full of them; his mother has given up on throwing them away. She has few people who come over. She has felt she needed to hide since the war; like many widows, she was made to feel that she was an accomplice in an unspeakable crime. In the mail on Wednesday, a letter comes for Frederick. Inside the envelope there is a letter from a woman explaining the course of the smaller envelope from France, to a prisoner of war camp, to a storage facility in New Jersey, to an organization in West Berlin. She shows Frederick the envelope with his name written in cursive. It is night; she turns on all of the lights to feel less lonely, and she makes dinner. She blends vegetables and rice and feeds them to Frederick, who hums while he eats, happy. Afterwards, she opens the envelope, which contains two birds in full color: the Aquatic Wood Wagtail. She remembers the day she bought that book for her son, how she knew he would love it. The doctors tell her he retains no memories, just basic functions, but she wonders. She shows him the pages; he looks at them and then returns to drawing. After she does the dishes, she takes him outside on the patio, their nightly ritual. Starlings are flying outside, and she sometimes thinks he perks up when he sees them. Tonight, a huge owl lands on the deck railing, and she thinks, “You’ve come for me.” Frederick stares at it. Then it goes. She asks Frederick if he saw it. He says, “Mutti?” twice, and then asks her, “what are we doing?” She tells him that they are just sitting and looking out at the night.
Part 13: 2014
178
Marie-Laure lives to see the turn of the century. On a Saturday in March, her grandson Michel comes to get her from her apartment and takes her walking in the Jardin des Plantes. There is still ice on the ground, and when she reaches a puddle with a thin layer of ice, she stops and tries to lift it up whole. The boy is patient and waits for her. They climb to the northwest corner of the gardens, and sit on a bench. No one else is there, perhaps because of the cold. Marie-Laure states to him that he will be 12 next Saturday. He is excited because he will get to ride the moped. He plays a game on a device next to her, and then loses, telling her that he died but can start again. He asks her what she wanted for her 12th birthday, and she says that she wanted a book by Jules Verne. He asks if it is the same book his mother read him, with the complicated fish names and lots of mollusks. She thinks of the waves traveling into Michel’s machine, the torrents of text conversations, commercials, and mail, crossing in the air. She wonders if it is possible, too, that souls might travel those same paths—Etienne, her father, Madame Manec, the German boy named Werner Pfennig, passing in and out of the air, with a record of every life lived still reverberating. Michel walks her back to her building; they say goodbye. She listens to his footsteps fade, to cars and trains, and to people hurrying in the cold.
Analysis
Part 11 is a short section set in 1945 to summarize the rest of World War II for two of the surviving characters, Marie-Laure and Jutta. Chapter 66, set in Berlin, is one of the first sections in which the omniscient narrator takes on Jutta’s narration. The chapter explores the theme of darkness and light from a slightly different lens: up until now, passages about Jutta have fallen into the light/good side of this spectrum due to her opposition to the war and her apparent ethical purity. However, she, like Werner, is also surrounded by darkness: not because she is participating in the war as directly as Werner chose to, but rather because the darkness was inescapable for any German at that time. The chapter is an exposition of the type of life a German woman may have been subjected to at the time. The chapter is bleak, with a mood of despair and a tense suspenseful quality of waiting for something terrible to happen: the girls are starving, unsure of whether they will survive the constant bombing, and unsure of when the encroaching Russians will appear. In the end, the Russians do appear, and in a tone just as matter-of-fact and dark as the rest of the chapter, the narrator states bluntly: “The Russians come for them on a cloudless day in May,” and raped all of them.
Marie-Laure and Etienne have depressed and odd mood as well, as Marie-Laure returns to Paris and finds it different. Marie-Laure still copes with the loss of her father, never finding out any information about his disappearance. However, she has the will to survive through the strength she finds in two of the major themes: familial loyalty, through Etienne and her former mentor Dr. Geffard, and science and technology—for at the end of the chapter, she decides, despite her grief, to return to school.
In Part 12, 1974, the narrative of Volkheimer echoes the last version Werner saw of him: like Atlas, holding the world on his shoulders in the cellar of the Hotel of Bees; he still carries guilt, and his loneliness is compared in a simile to a disease. Jutta, too, is wracked with guilt, despite the fact that she was ethically against the Nazi party. However, as demonstrated by the lightness and darkness theme, there is a lot of gray area in between goodness and evil, and how people make their choices is what determines their destiny. Jutta, Volkheimer, and Frederick’s mother were all part of a greater whole of the German people whose collective choices lead to the damage done; thus, all of them feel guilt, regardless of their varying levels of participation.
Jutta’s son Max is in many ways an image of Werner, although the comparison is not directly made by Jutta and is only implied in the narration; it is implied in the imagery and description of Max, who has ears that stick out, and who has a curiosity and cleverness like Werner had as a child. In fact, Max is the one who discovers that the little house opens.
Memory is the heaviest theme of Part 12: Volkheimer, Jutta and Marie-Laure are called back into the time of the war by the objects that were included in Werner’s belongings. While memory during the war chapters was often used as a form of escape for the characters to more pleasant times, here it has changed. The times that these pieces—the miniature house, the notebook—call up are of a time that is not pleasant. They recall memories that the characters almost don’t want to have, thus the imagery surrounding them is of the memories escaping, overflowing, or of being very hot.
The very last chapter is from the familiar narrative of Marie-Laure, but this time she is an old woman, with her grandson of a completely different generation. This leads her to reflect on the transferring of information, which through this book has been mostly through radio. In 2014, however, technology has advanced, and now her grandson uses an electronic device to play a handheld game. In an interview, Anthony Doerr said, “Radio... was how larger political and artistic narratives entered the homes of people, and it held power over children in much the way tablets and smartphones hold power over children now” (Smith). Thus Doerr uses this last, more modern chapter to tie in a current thread of how internet plays a role in influencing the minds of youth. In addition, Marie-Laure ties in the theme of memory and imagination, as well as her ironic ability to see, as she wonders whether the souls of lost people use those same radio or cellular waves to travel through time and remain with us.
