Lines 1-2

Assuming that the speaker of this poem is to be identified with Mueller, the child that is described here would be about twelve. It is not always the case that a poem's main character is based on the author, even when the poem speaks as "I," but in this case there is enough in common between the two (such as similar age and German background) to assume that Mueller is actually speaking about herself. These opening lines present an unsettling dramatic contrast in their use of the phrase "a child in Hitler's Germany." Childhood is often thought of as a time of innocence, and yet the world has come to see Adolph Hitler as the embodiment of evil due to the widespread slaughter of innocents that went on during the years that he ruled Germany, 1933-1945. The two phrases contained in these first two lines, separated...