Munich, Germany (Location Key)

Early in Chapter 9 of The Mansion, Charles Mallison mentions "Munich," though his equivocation about whether "Munich" should be "observed or celebrated or consecrated" - and his uncle Gavin's subsequent comment, "It wont be long now" - probably won't explain themselves to most 21st-century readers (229). In 1938 Munich, Germany, was the site where leaders from England, France and Italy met with Adolph Hitler, the leader of Nazi Germany, to sanction his annexation of Czechoslovakia; this act of appeasement was supposedly meant, as the British Prime Minister who signed it famously said, "peace for our time." Gavin's "it," on the other hand, refers to the inevitability of a major war. Like the novel's deployments of "Spain" and "Ethiopia," "Munich" connects Faulkner's north Mississippi county to the larger history of the modern world.