Places: Watch on the Rhine

Farrelly Watch on the Rhinecountry house. Suburban home of the distinguished Farrelly family, located outside Washington, D.C. The house’s living room is the setting for most of the action in the play, literally and figuratively. The play’s stage directions reveal that the room holds furniture from several different generations, “all people of taste.” It is a busy room, with “too many things in it.” Here people gather, argue, and get on with the business of life. The room represents prosperity and political connectedness, as well as Fanny’s well-decorated life, including her concern with appearances. It offers a closed view of the world she once shared with her late husband. For Sara it represents her former life, a life she sought to escape but now returns to as a kind of safety net with her family. The terrace off the living room is a place the family members and their guests go to breathe freely in the open air; it represents the winds of change that are to come.

*Rhine River. European river that flows north, from Switzerland, through Germany and the Netherlands, to the North Sea. The play’s title is symbolic of the river’s course, as it passes through countries that were “on watch” as fascism was spreading across Europe in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s. The Rhine stands as a tangible symbol of the danger facing Europe. Kurt Muller returns to Germany, continuing his own “watch on the Rhine,” as his American relatives rest in their naïveté in the Farrelly home.

*Germany. Kurt Muller’s homeland, which he hopes to defend against the spread of fascism, and the place to which he returns for refuge in the end.