As a novel that deals with the period from 1933-1945 in Germany, the Nazi persecution and destruction of Jewish culture are at the heart of its themes. The novel attempts to show through its chapter sequences how general, everyday antisemitism (and one can insert the term racism here, as well), can steadily escalate and result in mass deportation and even genocide.

The very first example of antisemitism in the novel occurs in Chapter 3, when Herr Resch calls Friedrich by an antisemitic epithet after Friedrich mistakenly tramples his rose bushes. While such language is never justified, its everyday nature grants it a certain innocuousness. The narrator’s mother, when pulling her son away from the window, does not do so out of shock at hearing a racial slur, rather she does not want to incur the landlord’s wrath.

However, Herr Resch’s seemingly harmless racial slur quickly becomes much more serious after he joins the Nazi party. In Chapter 10, Herr Resch’s racism, supported and fueled by Nazi racial ideology, pushes him to evict the Schneiders from their apartment. He is unable to do so because the Nazis have not yet been able to change all the laws that make antisemitism legal.