49 pages • 1 hour read
The German Girl
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Chapters 37-40Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 37 Summary: “Hannah, 1964-1968”
The family’s lawyer, Señor Dannón, comes to visit for a last time. His legal practice has been taken over. That night Hortensia receives a call from her sister and leaves the house. Later, she calls and says that a woman named Catalina will be taking over her duties. Catalina is a “descendant of African slaves mixed with Spaniards during the colonial period” (301). She fills the house with sunflowers and also plants mint, basil, and star jasmine on the patio. A week later, Hortensia and her sister Esperanza appear late one night without warning. Soldiers arrested Esperanza’s son Rafael because he is a Jehovah’s Witness. He has been forced to work at a labor camp on the island. Esperanza tells Hannah’s mother that her son Gustavo was a member of delegation “concerned about the prisoners’ conditions” and begs for help saving Rafael’s life (303). She wants Alma to talk to Gustavo on their behalf. Hortensia and Esperanza leave, and Alma goes to bed.
Chapter 38 Summary: “Anna, 2014”
Aunt Hannah explains to Anna and her mother that it was a year before Rafael was released from the forced labor camp. Hannah’s mother experienced deep guilt over not helping Rafael in any way. Gustavo and Viera appeared at the house one day to announce that they were going to a distant country as ambassadors. Alma’s only response was to her turn her face away from her son; “the gesture wounded Gustavo to the depths of his soul” (306). Louis, Gustavo’s son, remained with his Aunt Hannah after Gustavo left Cuba. Gustavo and Viera died in a plane crash. Catalina remarked, “However much you hate your son, death is always a blow” (306). Hannah’s mother died in bed sometime after.
Chapter 39 Summary: “Hannah, 1985-2014”
After completing his studies, “Louis started work at the Center for Physics Education Research” (310). Louis likes to shut himself in his room and read after coming home from work. He is quiet and enjoys the cinema. He eventually leaves for New York. It is only long after September 11 that Hannah learns that her nephew is dead. Catalina encourages her not to “cry twice over the same corpse” (310), that is, not to mourn his death again after he already “died” once by leaving Cuba. Hannah learns of Anna’s existence when a lawyer in New York reaches out to her about an account. She is about to turn 87. She wants to reach out to Anna, “the only trace our family would leave in this world” (312).
Chapter 40 Summary: “Anna, 2014”
Anna learns that when Louis, her father, reached New York, he took over what is now the family’s apartment and reactivated trust accounts his grandfather had set up.
Anna goes out and meets with Diego. They go to the Malecón, where Diego jumps in. Anna takes pictures. Diego comes back to the wall with an injured foot: the sole of his right foot is covered in urchin spikes. Anna takes out the spikes, and Diego continues swimming.
Anna and her mother stop by the cemetery. At the family plot, they find a new inscription—Hannah Rosenthal, 1927-2014. “Aunt Hannah must have decided this will be her last year,” Anna says (316). Back at home, Catalina and Anna make a cake for Hannah’s birthday celebration. Hannah watches on as they mix the batter and the icing. They celebrate at dusk, lighting a candle and singing first in English, for Anna, and then in Spanish, for Hannah. Hannah tries to blow out the candle and fails, then snuffs it out with her fingers.
Chapters 37-40 Analysis
Alma experiences her final tragedies before finally passing away in these chapters. After fleeing persecution in Germany so many years before, and losing her husband and untold others to concentration camps, learning that her own son is now involved in a military regime that perpetrates atrocities as enforced labor is too much for her to bear. When Hortensia and Esperanza show up on her doorstep and ask for her help in saving Rafael, who has been placed in such a labor camp, Alma is placed in an impossible situation: she must either admit to herself that her own son is a “monster” and help Hortensia and Esperanza in their struggle to free Rafael, or else she must willingly ignore the fact her son is a monster and choose not to help Hortensia at all. In the end, she chooses neither to help Hortensia nor to defend her son’s actions, literally turning her face away from the problem. “That was her only response” (306).
Then she learns that her son has died in a plane crash. Although Alma was not on good terms with him, and in many ways he was no longer part of her family, Catalina suggests that the death was still “a blow” to her. Just as Hannah’s father “let himself go,” so too does Hannah’s mother let herself go. This prompts Anna to reflect, “I understand now why my aunt says that nobody in our family dies: it’s more that we let ourselves go; we decide when it’s time to leave” (307). However, just as earlier in the novel when tragedy and happy events were often intertwined, the deaths of Alma and Gustavo give rise to a happy occurrence: Hannah goes on to raise Louis, Anna’s father, the man who binds Hannah and Anna’s stories together.
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