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9. Discuss the significance of the title A Postcard from the Volcano.

The title comes, on the one hand, from Adam's letter to Max in the last chapter, where he says: I’m sometimes afraid, sometimes depressed by feeling so powerless, sometimes angry that all that education and effort and work should only have brought me—us—to this sense of precariousness, as if we were condemned by some malign destiny to live until we die on the edge of a volcano that is sure to erupt sooner rather than later and will kill us when it does.

On the other hand, it also comes from the postcard that Max gives his favorite student in the prologue so that she can investigate his life. In the postcard he has noted the names of his six friends, all of them killed by the volcano when it finally erupted.

The germany of this age was an authentic volcano :-).

I think the prologue was tacked on, possibly at an editors or publishers request. A postcard is a glimpse, a single picture that tries to convey some aspect of a larger realty. So if we visit Paris, we send our friends or family a postcard of the Eiffel Tower, from Switzerland, a postcard of the mountains. Leaving aside the prologue, the story is a postcard, a small picture of the circle of family and friends around a man that is intended to convey to us something of the reality of Weimar Germany and the transition to Nazi rule.

The prologue has no purpose but to explain the reference to "Postcard." Max asks his favorite student to learn his story and to tell it, but he doesn't tell her himself. And we aren't told how she could possibly learn the story. It really isn't integrated well into the story. I wish it had been left off. This would also have increased the drama about whether Max himself would survive. You just knew that everyone else was doomed.

John wrote: "I think the prologue was tacked on, possibly at an editors or publishers request. A postcard is a glimpse, a single picture that tries to convey some aspect of a larger realty. So if we visit Paris..."

In my opinion the volcano (i totally agree with John) is Germany, the calm is Weimar, and the eruption is Hitler. The postcard we can understand and the Max`s remembrance in the inferno. The postcard is something to give somebody to have a remind, or an impression of everywhere. The Max`s story would be a remind, his own postcard to the reader.