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Chapter 4
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in A Night Divided, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Freedom
Family
Secrets, Surveillance, and Suspicion
Individuality vs. Conformity
Hope and Risk
Summary
Analysis
Gerta often does the family’s shopping at the market while Mama and Fritz are at work. There’s never much selection on the shelves, but Gerta manages to scrounge together some potatoes and chicken. In line for the register, Gerta watches the people ahead of her who “watch nothing at all because it [is] safer that way,” and she resolves never to be like them. Still, she also feels herself losing the freer person she once was. Gerta’s schoolteacher always tells her class that it’s only “greed and selfishness” in West Berlin, and anyone who wants to go there is greedy and selfish, too. Gerta supposes she must be greedy and selfish herself, then.
Gerta’s vow never to become like the people in line at the market who “watch nothing at all because it [is] safer that way” reinforces her independent spirit. She is willing to maintain some semblance of freedom and curiosity about the world around her, even if doing so puts her personal safety at risk, and even if people like her teachers, who claim that anyone who embraces western values is greedy and selfish, might judge her for her nonconformist thoughts.
Themes
At dinner that evening, Mama asks Fritz, who appears dismal and deflated, if anything is wrong. Fritz insists he’s just had a long day, but Gerta senses he’s lying. Hesitatingly, she tells her family about seeing Dominic earlier that day. Mama is upset to hear that Gerta has been looking over the wall. This angers Gerta, who retorts that none of this would be an issue if Mama had only let them leave with Dominic and Papa that day—it’s an argument they have had before, though Gerta knows it won’t change anything. Gerta wonders if Mama is becoming just like everyone else here, blind to the whole wide world that exists beyond the fence.
Themes
