Fatherland

The photograph of the Weiss family that March finds in his apartment symbolizes the importance of remembering while developing the theme of The Dissolution of Objective Truth. March discovers the photo before the start of the novel, and it exacerbates his disenchantment with the SS. He finds the photo hidden behind the wallpaper in his apartment. It’s dated 1929 and shows a woman, her husband, and their child, who is Pili’s age. He notes how “for years he had wondered, but hesitated” to discover who they were until “no reason he could properly define—vague and growing uneasiness”—led him to seek the truth (33). March finds their name in the landlord’s records, but no one will speak about them until an old woman living in the attic tells him that they’re Jewish. In hindsight, he marks this as a point “when his relationship with Pili had started to go bad; the time when he had started to wake up before it was light and to volunteer for every case that came along” (34).

Through the actions of the SS, the people in the apartment complex become afraid to speak about the events of World War II with relation to the Holocaust.