The German Girl

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.

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).