“Das Lila Lied” is a motif through which the novel traces queer community, cultural memory, and the changing possibilities for expressing identity. First introduced during the vivid Silvester fest at the Eldorado in pre-Nazi Berlin, its performance is communal, joyful, and public. Sofie recalls how they “sang it at every party, every burlesque, wherever [they] could get away with it” (132), establishing the song as part of a shared culture. Its repeated performance binds people together through an experience of difference that can be openly celebrated.

The motif changes after that community has been driven underground, its emotional force coming from the juxtaposition of the crowded, public performance of the past with the characters who must now hide themselves and their culture. When Sofie teaches Karl “Das Lila Lied,” there is no nightclub, crowd, or even functioning piano; she is forced to draw piano keys on the floorboards and teach him there. The contrast between the Eldorado performance and this private lesson emphasizes how radically the circumstances of queer life have changed. At the same time, however, its repetition also allows something to survive that persecution has attempted to destroy. Karl was imprisoned at 16 and denied the opportunity to experience the Berlin community that Bertie and Sofie remember, so learning the song gives him access to a cultural history from which he was forcibly excluded. The music also provides him with an outlet for emotions that ordinary conversation cannot, intertwining cultural transmission with his gradual willingness to reconnect with other people.

The final performance of the song brings the motif full circle. At immigration, Bertie, Sofie, and Karl perform “Das Lila Lied” as part of their effort to convince an official of their shared history. A song once performed openly in queer gathering places and later preserved privately in hiding becomes public again. Even though its meaning is coded, as the official can hear the performance without fully understanding what it means, the three are still allowed to carry their history into their new lives while still protecting themselves from those who might judge or endanger them. Its recurrence demonstrates how culture can persist even when the spaces and communities that once sustained it have been destroyed.

Gert’s flat-cap is a symbol of Bertie’s unresolved grief, survivor’s guilt, and the uncertainty surrounding the fates of those who disappeared during the Holocaust. When Bertie discovers the cap among the victims’ belongings at the Oberer Kuhberg camp, the abstract horror of mass murder becomes a devastatingly personal tragedy. He believes the cap belonged to Gert and treats it as evidence that his friend died there, but Sofie reminds him, “[t]he Nazis must’ve collected thousands of hats. […] The odds of that one being Gert’s…” (119). Because the cap cannot therefore provide the certainty Bertie needs, its ownership instead symbolizes the absence of closure itself: Bertie has an object onto which he can attach his grief even with no definitive account of what happened to the person he mourns.

In this way, the cap is also linked to the theme of The Arbitrary Nature of Survival, intensifying Bertie’s guilt over living relatively safely on the Baumanns’ farm while Gert remains missing or dead. While the novel focuses on the grief of a few, Bertie’s obsession with the flat-cap reflects the uncertainty that millions faced during the Holocaust, struggling with questions over why and how so many died, as well as why they were the ones to survive. Ultimately, Bertie chooses to burn the cap and add it to the urn as a form of remembrance. He receives partial closure by Roy’s confirmation that Gert never reached America, but more importantly, he chooses to move forward with his own life as best he can.