49 pages • 1 hour read
Armando Lucas CorreaThe German Girl
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 29-32Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 29 Summary: “Hannah, 1940-1942”
Hannah’s mother returns from Cuba with her newborn son, Gustav. Hortensia says he looks like “a grouchy old man” (236). The baby changes Alma’s behavior. She allows the windows in the house to be open and the kitchen radio to be turned on to soap operas. On New Year’s, Alma, Hannah, and baby Gustav fall asleep together early in Alma’s room. While Hannah and her mother speak to Gustav in English, Hortensia speaks to him in Spanish. By the time he is two, he already seems to be more Cuban than German. He displays his emotions openly rather than reservedly. Hanna observes that “to him, Spanish was the language of affection, games, tastes, and smells. English meant order and discipline. Mother and I obviously were part of the latter” (241). His name slowly becomes Gustavo instead of Gustav. A few years pass. Hannah is “as tall as an adult woman” (242), but is taunted by boys in her class who still see her as a Polack. One afternoon, the family lawyer, Señor Dannón appears at the house with important news. It is implied that her father has been forced into a concentration camp back in Europe. Although she doesn’t fully understand it, Hannah weeps at the news.
Chapter 30 Summary: “Anna, 2014”
Anna runs around and plays in the streets of Havana with Diego, much as Hannah used to run around the streets of Berlin with Leo. They climb the seawall called the Malecón and then up Paseo to Calle 21. A kind of revolutionary speech is playing through the city’s loudspeakers, but Diego says that such things are normal in Havana. At breakfast the next day, Aunt Hannah tells the story of her father being rounded up in France and transported to Auschwitz, where “he let himself die” (248). After Alma received news of his death, she shut herself up in the house once more, closing all the curtains and not playing music. She blamed Cuba for not accepting all the passengers on the St. Louis and insisted that the country would “pay for the next hundred years” (251). Anna asks what happened to Leo, and Aunt Hannah says that “Leo and his father never left the St. Louis” (252).
Chapter 31 Summary: “Hannah, 1950”
Gustavo begins to grow apart from the family, even from Hortensia; “he displayed all the vitality, lack of inhibition, and spontaneity that Cubans have” (253). He listens to guarachas, the fast-paced Cuban style of music. Hannah studies to be a pharmacist at Havana University. Hannah remembers Leo and what she calls his “betrayal” (255). He never disposed of the cyanide capsules like he said he had. Although she admits that she “would never know what really happened the day the St. Louis sailed off back toward Germany” (255), Hannah envisions Leo’s father poisoning Leo and himself with the cyanide capsules while still onboard:
He pressed his son’s delicate jaws together. He heard the small glass capsule crack, and the sound echoed deep inside his mind. The boy’s eyes opened, but his father did not have the courage to watch his son’s life ebb away (257).
Chapter 32 Summary: “Anna, 2014”
Anna sees a photograph of a man in a photo from 1963. Aunt Hannah tells her that this man’s name is Julian. They met when they were both studying in Havana. When Anna asks if he was her boyfriend, Aunt Hannah merely laughs. They look at what used to be Gustavo’s room. Aunt Hannah says, “It was our fault we created such a monster!” (261).
Chapters 29-32 Analysis
In these chapters Hannah’s brother Gustavo is brought from New York to Cuba; he seems far more Cuban than German. This makes him less a member of Hannah’s family than of Hortensia’s, who seems to be the one to primarily raise him. Hannah says that “Gustavo even slept in Hortensia’s room, or went with her to spend weekends at her sister Esperanza’s house, where they also didn’t celebrate birthdays, Christmas, or the New Year” (241). Hortensia feeds him Cuban food and sweets and speaks to him in Spanish, which is the language he comes to associate with warmth and affection. Other signs that Gustavo is more Cuban than German range from his taste for the guaracha music that his mother despises to his Cuban personality traits, such as spontaneity and lack of inhibition. He slowly drifts away from his biological family and enters the Cuban world more and more deeply. All the tensions and challenges in being forced to move from one country to another are represented through Gustavo’s disconnection with his own family and their culture. Hannah says, “We had not succeeded in transmitting to him a single habit or tradition of our own” (241). To Gustavo, “home” is not his family’s home but the one he finds and creates in Cuba.
The two men Hannah loves most die in these chapters, her father and Leo. Her father is said to have “let himself die” in a concentration camp (248). Hannah then goes on to say, “In our family, we don’t kill ourselves; we let ourselves die” (248). This is a crucial distinction. Where men on the St. Louis like Mr. Moser commit suicide out of despair, forcefully and intentionally ending their own lives, Hannah’s father merely “lets” his own life go out of weakness. Rather than orchestrate his own death, Hannah’s father lets the natural process of death overtake him instead.
