49 pages • 1 hour read
The German Girl
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Symbols & Motifs
Cleanliness
In Chapter 1, one of Hannah’s neighbors calls her “dirty people” (9). Afterward she takes a shower and attempts to clean herself of her dirtiness, rubbing her herself “with a white towel to get rid of every last trace of impurity” (10). She pushes this to uncomfortable lengths, turning the water as hot as it will go, until she “couldn’t take it anymore” (10). Hannah’s dirtiness is of course symbolic: Her Aryan neighbor has deemed her Jewishness “impure,” and by scrubbing herself clean, Hannah is attempting to prove her neighbor wrong. If she is literally clean and pure, it will be impossible for her neighbor to judge her impure. Later on, in Chapter 5, Hannah’s mother tells her, “You’re dirty, Hannah,” but this time Hannah reflects that “to hear myself called dirty was like a caress” (45). Just as Hannah’s mother wants to reclaim the word “German,” she also wants to turn being “dirty” from a point of shame into a point of pride, and here uses the word in this way.
Broken Glass
The image of broken glass recurs throughout the novel. Many of the photos Hannah sends Anna contain images of “smashed shop windows, the Star of David, glass shards everywhere” (52). Anna’s mother says of November 9, 1938, that “they smashed the windows of all the shops […] On Kristallnacht, the night of the broken windows, they burned down all the synagogues” (53). In Chapter 11, Hannah visits Leo’s apartment building and finds “broken glass on the pavement,” although “nobody seemed to care” (99). All of this broken glass could represent the broken dreams, lives, and hopes of the Jews persecuted throughout Europe before and during World War II. Just as the shop windows of Jewish businesses lay shattered on the streets, where “nobody seemed to care,” so too were the lives of those businessowners shattered without anyone around who could seemingly help.
Islands
The symbol of the island figures prominently in several ways. First, it is significant that both Manhattan, where Anna lives, and Cuba, were Hannah lives, are islands. This is one more tie that bonds these two characters together. Second, Robinson Crusoe is said to be Anna’s father’s favorite novel. Anna soon discovers that the book is a “story of a man shipwrecked on an island where there were only two seasons, rain and dry, stuck in the middle of nowhere” (34). This description might also describe Anna’s father’s life in Cuba, which is said to only have two seasons, rainy and dry. Third, Hannah and Anna’s mothers are isolated in their own “islands” of depression. Hannah calls her home in Havana “another island within this island” (280). In this sense, being on an island is constrictive and claustrophobic, which might be why Anna’s father said that “you have to leave islands” (66). It is suggested that escaping one’s own past requires leaving the island of the self for new lands and frontiers. This is what Anna’s father does when he leaves Cuba, and this is what Hannah and her mother fail to do.
Music
When she arrives in Cuba, Hannah’s mother attempts to shelter herself “from an orchestra that, in her opinion, knew how to play only those fast-paced Cuban guarachas” (214). Alma disdains the guarachas. Of course, the Cuban-style music symbolizes Cuban culture itself. Hannah’s mother never adjusts to life in Cuba, and her dislike of its music signals her inability to adjust. Later, when Gustavo begins listening to guarachas in the home, the music retains its symbolic status. Just as Hannah’s mother used her dislike of the music to express her denial of Cuban culture, Gustavo embraces guarachas to declare his acceptance of Cuban culture.
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