Summary
The speaker now recounts the words of a consul—a type of diplomatic official. Banging on a table, the consul announced that, without a functional passport, the refugee was considered officially dead. Of course, this official designation isn't a reflection of any material reality. The speaker and the person he's addressing remain very much alive. The speaker then recalls appearing before a committee, which offered him a chair to sit in but no actual help. Instead, ignoring the urgency of the refugees' situation, the committee asked them to return in a year. But, the speaker reflects, this is of no help at all when they need somewhere to go right this second. Next, the speaker recalls attending a public meeting, where a speaker expressed concerns that refugees would steal people's livelihoods if permitted to settle. The speaker bitterly notes that the speaker was in fact referring to them and their loved one. Finally, the speaker describes a sinister sound of ambient thunder in the sky. The thunder is actually the sound of Hitler's voice, announcing that "they"—that is to say, the refugees, the Jews, or other groups victimized by Nazi fascism—"must die." When Hitler talks about this vague "they," he's in fact thinking about the speaker and the speaker's loved ones.
Analysis
After the deliberate lack of specificity and fairytale-like ambiguity of setting that characterized the first several stanzas, this middle section of the poem suddenly becomes very specific. One way to look at this is Auden easing his audiences into a hard topic. He takes an unpalatable, depressing situation, especially for readers in his time (the 1930s) who might not be familiar with Jews and might in fact have some hesitancies about the refugees in their midst. By slowly shifting from an almost archetypal narrative to a very discrete one, Auden establishes a connection between his audience and his subject early on. Furthermore, he creates an unpleasant feeling of surprise as his register shifts from the mythical to the political. This mimics the unpleasant shock his speaker describes, of being ousted from a comfortable home and immersed in a new and alienating world.
The most shocking moment of historical specificity in these stanzas is the use of Hitler's name, but Auden builds up to that moment. Throughout these four stanzas, even before using the name of this infamous individual, he carefully evokes the atmosphere of Europe on the eve of World War II. What this means, for the most part, is evoking the feeling of being trapped in a particular type of bureaucracy. What makes this bureaucracy so maddening is its total disconnect from the reality of life and the needs of any actual people: it exists, it seems, to fulfill its own terms rather than to help anybody. Therefore, the refugees are subject to absurd situations, like being officially "dead" despite not being dead at all, simply because their documentation makes it so, or like being politely told that a committee will help them in a year's time even though they urgently need immediate help. Here, once again, the poem's form and meaning coalesce. In a world where written documentation has become an oppressive, stifling force, this speaker's voice emerges through a form rooted in the oral—that is to say, the non-written—tradition. Oral storytelling becomes a way for Auden's refugee speaker to affirm their existence and aliveness despite being told by a writing-obsessed bureaucracy that they are officially dead, or that they should simply disappear. This is made all the more poignant by the fact that it was African American artists who invented the blues form. For many years, African Americans were systematically kept from reading or writing, making oral music, poetry, and narrative all the more essential to their cultural survival. This poem is about Jews in Germany, not Black people in the U.S., but Auden suggests that oral narrative has a kind of cross-cultural power, protecting these two groups from two very different forms of oppression.
The bureaucratic systems described in this poem seem rigid and inflexible, unable to serve the needs of real people. There is, here, a parallel between those unhelpful systems and the actively destructive forces that have put the speaker in this position in the first place. When describing both the anti-refugee speaker at the public meeting and Adolf Hitler himself, the speaker seems sadly surprised, even perplexed, to realize that the sinister forces these people describe are none other than the speaker and their loved one. Here Auden points to the bizarre way that Jews under Nazism—and the refugees produced by Nazism—were scapegoated and demonized, imagined to be powerful and frightening when in fact they were almost totally powerless. In these cases as well as in the cases of bureaucratic inflexibility, the refugee imagined by society has almost nothing to do with the desperate individual at the center of the poem. "He was talking of you and me, my dear, he was talking of you and me," the speaker muses. The repetition of the phrase "you and me" reminds readers that the refugees in question are individuals, in contrast to the ambiguous, scary "they" evoked by the town-meeting attendee.
Meanwhile, the speaker says of Hitler that "We were in his mind, my dear, we were in his mind." This, too, is an expression of shock that the vague and sinister "they" Hitler describes is none other than the speaker and their loved one. But this sentence also hints that Hitler is, oddly, actually frightened of or at least preoccupied with the speaker. Even though the speaker and refugees as a whole hold no power and only want a place to live, Auden hints, their oppressors are actually obsessed with them. Once again, the way that other people and organizations view the speaker has absolutely no basis in reality.
