Chap­ter 20 begins with the narrator’s unset­tling dis­cov­ery regard­ing the cir­cum­stances sur­round­ing his father-in-law, Wern­er Noth’s death. The year is either 1958 or 1959, and the scene unfolds in a Green­wich Vil­lage bar­ber shop, where the nar­ra­tor finds him­self flip­ping through a girly mag­a­zine. The magazine’s cov­er boasts an arti­cle titled “Hang-women for the Hang­man of Berlin,” which imme­di­ate­ly cap­tures his atten­tion due to its sen­sa­tion­al­ism. Expect­ing lit­tle more than the usu­al trashy con­tent, the nar­ra­tor is tak­en aback when he real­izes the arti­cle con­nects direct­ly to his father-in-law. At first, he doesn’t make the con­nec­tion between Noth and the arti­cle, but curios­i­ty com­pels him to read on, and he soon finds him­self drawn into the dark and trag­ic truth that has remained hid­den for so long.

The pho­to­graph accom­pa­ny­ing the arti­cle is a strik­ing and dis­turb­ing one, show­ing Noth hanged from an apple tree. Despite the grue­some nature of the image, the narrator’s mind focus­es not only on the dis­turb­ing con­tent but on the dis­crep­an­cies between what is por­trayed in the arti­cle and the magazine’s ini­tial sen­sa­tion­al­ized promise. He notes that the women promised to be glam­orous, as adver­tised on the cov­er, are nowhere to be found in the actu­al pho­to­graph. Instead, the women shown are replaced by scrawny men, mak­ing the cover’s promise seem com­plete­ly out of place. As he con­tin­ues to exam­ine the pho­to­graph, he sud­den­ly rec­og­nizes the decay­ing build­ing in the back­ground as Noth’s for­mer home. This real­iza­tion hits him hard, bring­ing forth a wave of mem­o­ries of his wife, Hel­ga, and her child­hood, con­nect­ing him deeply to a painful past that he has spent years try­ing to for­get.

The arti­cle itself is writ­ten by Ian West­lake, a for­mer pris­on­er of war who offers an in-depth and sober­ing account of Noth’s exe­cu­tion at the hands of for­mer slave labor­ers after the war’s end. Unlike the mon­strous por­tray­al one might expect, West­lake frames Noth as a man caught in the tur­moil of his role as a city police chief dur­ing a time of chaos, strug­gling to main­tain order amidst the ruins of a war-torn soci­ety. West­lake high­lights Noth’s pri­ma­ry flaw—his involve­ment in a cor­rupt judi­cial sys­tem that sub­ject­ed pris­on­ers to inhu­mane con­di­tions. This rev­e­la­tion is key to under­stand­ing Noth’s fate, as it sheds light on the real­i­ty that his exe­cu­tion was not only a ret­ri­bu­tion for his role in that sys­tem but also a way for the exe­cu­tion­ers to reclaim a sense of pow­er. The irony is that these indi­vid­u­als, respon­si­ble for car­ry­ing out the exe­cu­tion, had lit­tle under­stand­ing of Noth’s true role and the extent to which he was also a vic­tim of the sys­tem he was part of. Westlake’s depic­tion invites the read­er to rethink con­cepts of guilt, com­plic­i­ty, and jus­tice in the after­math of a war that turned the world upside down.

The nar­ra­tion con­tin­ues with a vivid descrip­tion of the bru­tal­i­ty that defined Noth’s death, empha­siz­ing the repeat­ed hang­ings that stripped him of any remain­ing dig­ni­ty. These acts are por­trayed not just as pun­ish­ment, but as pub­lic state­ments made by those in pow­er, show­ing that Noth’s exe­cu­tion was meant to serve as a reminder of author­i­ty in a world where chaos reigned. This loss of dig­ni­ty is not just phys­i­cal but sym­bol­ic, mark­ing the total dis­in­te­gra­tion of the man Noth once was. The exe­cu­tion, thus, is pre­sent­ed as an asser­tion of pow­er, not just over Noth but over the idea of jus­tice itself in a post-war world where pow­er dynam­ics were rapid­ly shift­ing. As the chap­ter draws to a close, the nar­ra­tor reflects on the dis­com­fort that aris­es from the stark con­trast between the seri­ous, painful account of Noth’s death and the super­fi­cial por­tray­al of it in the mag­a­zine. This jux­ta­po­si­tion of the grue­some real­i­ties of human suf­fer­ing and the triv­ial, often sen­sa­tion­al­ized way in which such events are pre­sent­ed in the media serves as a cri­tique of the com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion of his­to­ry and pain. It forces the read­er to con­front how his­to­ry, par­tic­u­lar­ly human suf­fer­ing, can be turned into a com­mod­i­ty for enter­tain­ment or shock val­ue, there­by strip­ping it of its true emo­tion­al weight and sig­nif­i­cance.

In this reflec­tion, the chap­ter also high­lights the broad­er impli­ca­tions of how such sig­nif­i­cant events are remem­bered or for­got­ten in pub­lic dis­course. The narrator’s dis­com­fort with the magazine’s super­fi­cial por­tray­al of Noth’s death under­scores a larg­er soci­etal issue, one in which the tragedies of the past are often reduced to mere spec­ta­cle. By pre­sent­ing such a per­son­al and trag­ic moment in this way, the mag­a­zine com­mod­i­fies human suf­fer­ing, dis­tort­ing it into some­thing far less mean­ing­ful than it should be. The narrator’s per­son­al con­nec­tion to Noth’s death, cou­pled with the real­iza­tion that this trag­ic event is being exploit­ed for cheap enter­tain­ment, deep­ens his sense of dis­il­lu­sion­ment and prompts a crit­i­cal exam­i­na­tion of how the media shapes our per­cep­tions of his­to­ry. This explo­ration of the ten­sion between his­tor­i­cal truth and media rep­re­sen­ta­tion serves as a poignant reminder of the impor­tance of remem­ber­ing the true weight of his­to­ry, not as a spec­ta­cle, but as a series of real, lived expe­ri­ences that deserve respect and under­stand­ing.