Part Eleven: 1945

Berlin, Paris

In concluding the novel, Doerr uses the last three parts to chart the lives of those remaining, skipping 30 and 40 years at a time. In part eleven, Jutta and Frau Elena are working in a factory with other girls from the children’s home. Russians come through the town and the girls try to make themselves undesirable as they have heard the Russians are ‘pigs’. It does not protect them and they are raped by a small group. It highlights that although for most of the text the reader may have denoted the Germans as ‘bad’ and Russians as ‘good’, the truth is mankind is not so easily divided.

Marie-Laure and Etienne move to Paris and back to the original apartment. They hope to find Daniel but he does not return when other prisoners are released. Marie-Laure decides she would like to go to school.

Part Eleven Quotes

In the fall, at Zollverein, she received two letters announcing his death. Each mentioned a different place of burial. Part 11, Berlin

Jutta allows herself to believe that they won’t come up the staircase. For several minutes they don’t. Until they do, and their boots thump all the way up. Part 11, Berlin

‘And close your eyes,’ says Frau Elena. Hannah sobs.
Jutta says, ‘I want to see them.’ Part 11, Berlin

‘There is a chance,’ Etienne says, ‘that we will never find out what happened. We have to be prepared for that.’ Marie-Laure hears Madame Manec: You must never stop believing. Part 11, Paris

Somewhere, someone is figuring out how to push back the hood of grief, but Marie-Laure cannot. Not yet. The truth is that she is a disabled girl with no home and no parents. Part 11, Paris

Part Twelve: 1974

Volkheimer, Jutta, Duffel, Saint-Malo, Laboratory, Visitor, Paper Airplane, The Key, Sea of Flames, Frederick

In a comment on post-war living, the giant killing machine now repairs television antennas. He receives a package from a veterans association that contains Werner’s possessions. He is himself a victim, haunted by ‘the eyes of men who are about to die’. Memories of Werner and considerations of his unlived life fill Frank’s mind. He takes Werner’s duffel bag to Jutta who is married with a child, Max, and living in Essen. They discuss Werner but Jutta does not want to hear. She hopes to move on however memories cannot be stopped.

Jutta and her child head to Saint-Malo. The city has been restored. There is little physical evidence of the siege, like the survivors who seem unscathed but have internal scars, Frank, Jutta and Marie-Laure. From here she is given the address of Marie-Laure.

Now a respected scientist and expert on shells, Marie-Laure lives in Paris and works at the museum, and has a 19 year old daughter, Helene. Jutta visits her at the museum taking with her the model house. They talk briefly. Marie-Laure is not surprised when Jutta tells her Werner did not survive, he seemed too kind. 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.

Frederick and his mother live together in West Berlin where they are when a small letter comes from Jutta. It contains the bird page Werner tore from the book in Etienne’s house. Frederick seems to very briefly flicker in remembrance but then is unable to focus. Like Werner, he too was too sensitive to survive.

Symbolically, the mythological forces that the Sea of Flames represents seem to be dormant as the stone rests somewhere in the sea. Perhaps the Earth Goddess is now pleased that the Sea God has received his gift at last.

Part Twelve Quotes

The universe is full of fuel. Part 12, Fort National

Other times the eyes of men who are about to die haunt him, and he kills them all over again. Dead man in Lodz. Dead man in Lublin. Dead man in Radom. Dead man in Cracow. (Volkheimer) Part 12, Volkheimer

A part of Jutta does not want to take the letter. Does not want to hear what this huge man has travelled a long way to say. Weeks go by when Jutta does not allow herself to think of the war, of Frau Elena, of the awful last months in Berlin. Now she can buy pork seven days a week. Part 12, Jutta

It is cut, polished; for a breath, it passes between the hands of men. Another hour, another day, another year. Lump of carbon no larger than a chestnut. Mantled with algae, bedecked with barnacles. Crawled over by snails. It stirs among the pebbles. Part 12, Sea of Flames

What the war did to dreamers. Part 12, Duffel

Before dark, a well-dressed man with a prosthetic leg boards the train. ….. that the man can already tell. Maybe she smells German. He’ll say, You did this to me. Part 12, Saint-Malo

… she waded onto reefs in a sun hat with a collecting bucket and harvested snails on three continents. (Marie-Laure) Part 12, Laboratory

Over time, thinks Marie-Laure, events that seem jumbled either become more confusing or gradually settle into place. The boy saved her life three times over. Once by not exposing Etienne when he should have. Twice by taking that sergeant major out of the way. Three times by helping her out of the city. Part 12, Visitor

She sees him solve the puzzle of the little house. Maybe he drops the diamond into the pool among the thousands of snails. Then he closes the puzzle box and locks the gate and trots away. (Marie-laure thinking about Werner) Part 13, The Key

Part Thirteen: 2014

A parting scene. Marie-Laure is in the park with her grandson. He plays a video game in which he dies but reassures Marie-Laure that he can restart. She thinks of all the radio waves surrounding them and wonders if she can hear the dead if she listens close enough. Her grandson walks her home. His footsteps fade away.

Part Thirteen Quotes

Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world. We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs. (Marie-Laure) Part 13

That her father and Etienne and Madame Manec and the German boy named Werner Pfennig might harry the sky in flocks, like egrets, like terns, like starlings? That great shuttles of souls might fly about, faded but audible if you listen closely enough? (Marie-Laure) Part 13