Friedrich

“By 1925 most Germans had run through their savings trying to survive the devaluation of the mark. There was very little prospect of finding work. Hardship and unemployment were on the rise throughout Germany.”

As a part of establishing the setting of the novel, the narrator includes this bit of German history to establish his family’s pecuniary position juxtaposed with the Schneiders’ more affluent one, which is a subtle theme that runs throughout. Neither family uses their situation to aggrandize themselves over the other family; yet it is important that the narrator’s family is poor at the beginning and the Schneiders are well-off, because it shows the rise in fortunes for not only the narrator and his family and the Schneiders but also, in effect, that of German families rising in station at the expense of Jewish degradation.

“Well, Fritzchen! You look like a little Jew!” 

In this Chapter, the narrator’s mother is bathing him and Friedrich (Fritzchen is a German diminutive of Friedrich) and happens upon a physical marker of Jewish males, namely circumcision. This instance marks the distinction, through culture and religion, between the Schneiders and the narrator’s family. Moreover, it is the first aspect of dramatic irony because the reader knows what being Jewish in Germany in the 1920s entails, whereas the characters have no idea that such an innocent discovery will carry so much weight.