views. For her, the cruise ship Wilhelm Gustloff, built in 1937 to put the Volksgemeinschaft (people's community) into practice by allowing ordinary Germans to take free vacations abroad, was a floating utopia where for a brief moment a "classless" society existed where everyone was loved and cared for. Most Germans could not afford a vacation abroad in the interwar period owing to the undervalued Reichsmark, so a voyage aboard the ship was considered to be a great privilege. After the ship was launched, a number of German families who were considered Volksgenossen ("National Comrades"-i.e people who belonged to the Volksgemeinschaft) were allowed to take a free vacation aboard the Wilhelm Gustloff. The people selected for a voyage on the ship were never Gemeinschaftsfremde ("Community Aliens", i.e those who not belong to the Volksgemeinschaft). The Volksgenossen families selected were meant to provide a good cross-section of German society with families who were working class and middle class; Catholic and Protestant; and from northern and southern Germany all sailing together on the ship to provide proof that German society under the Nazi regime had indeed become one. For Tulla, the ideal of the Volksgemeinschaft with German society becoming a gigantic extended family of sorts where everyone was loved and happy is her ideal society, which for her was achieved with the Wilhelm Gustloff. The fact that people considered to be Gemeinschaftsfremde were excluded from the Volksgemeinschaft does not seem to be relevant to her way of thinking. Tulla's views are those of the "Hitler Youth generation" who came of age in the 1930s who remembered their youth as a blissful and happy time, and often seemed not to understand why others had more jaundiced and unhappy memories of the period. Thus, she moans not only the loss of life that resulted when the Wilhelm Gustloff went down on the night of 30 January 1945, but also what the ship represented. Somehow paradoxically, she also sees East Germany as another model of her favorite utopian society where everyone was alleged to be loved and cared for, albeit not as strongly as her feelings for what the Wilhelm Gustloff was said to represent. She seeks at every opportunity to put the story of the ship into the public domain, because it was the subject of silence for so long. When her attempts to persuade her son to write about the disaster fail, she turns