Neudorf, a Swabian settlement near Stanislaviv, is the childhood home of the Anger family and the starting point of the family history that helps explain Doctor Anger’s later life. Founded by his grandfather and father, it embodies an ordered vision of rural improvement, yet the family’s departure for town and eventual return complicate the village’s image as a stable refuge.

Foundation and Setting

The grandfather and father of Doctor Anger were among Neudorf’s founders. They had come from southern Germany and settled there in 1783, during the Josephine Colonization Period. The village in question is distinguished from other places named Neudorf: it lies near the Swabian colony of Bredtheim, halfway between Kolomyia and Stanislaviv, with Nadvirna completing an equilateral triangle around the landscape of Doctor Anger’s childhood.

The settlement is described as a long, paved street bordered by sturdy stone houses under thatched roofs. Rounded brick chimneys, edged with cornices and marked by a black band, rise through the thatch. The description makes the houses seem watchful, like snails cautiously extending their antennae. Carefully tended rosebushes run along the street, encircling gardens and wells and leading toward the church at the colony’s entrance, whose towers reach upward. Neudorf’s layout and cultivated appearance project care, discipline, and permanence.

A Model of Rural Improvement

Doctor Anger’s young father took pride in what his fellow German settlers were doing for the surrounding poor population. In his view, the locals needed to be taught basic ways to care for livestock, forests, land, homes, and themselves. He pointed to crops such as rapeseed, hops, rhubarb, and clover as evidence of what the settlers’ agricultural knowledge could contribute.

The account also qualifies this self-congratulatory vision. Local people had little reason to welcome instruction when they possessed so little control over their own futures: tiny plots were divided among children into still smaller pieces. Familiar habits and restricted possibilities made the organized Swabian colonies seem like mirages, visible but beyond reach. Neudorf thus stands not simply for successful settlement, but for an uneven social landscape in which one group’s apparent order becomes another group’s inaccessible ideal.

Departure, Experiment, and Return

Despite his attachment to the village’s agricultural routine, Doctor Anger’s father wanted to escape what the narrative calls the mirage of Neudorf. He continued to plough and sow, tend rose cuttings and train vines and hops, care for animals, and smoke sausages. Then, while his wife was putting twenty loaves into the oven, he asked her to pack their belongings. Their departure astonished the village pastor, who watched them leave the empty street in the strong sun amid the scent of roses beginning to fade.

In Stanislaviv, Anger tried making soap. The work’s attraction lay in transformation: ingredients combined in a large pot and changed from a grey, unpleasant mixture into bars. But the practical market was less receptive than the maker’s fascination. Buyers cared little for its smell, the softness of its lather, or the love put into it; cheaper pig-fat soap served the laundry well enough. Eventually Anger announced to his wife, now nursing their newborn, that they were returning to Neudorf. Their small apartment had become crowded with soap stacked in pyramids almost to the ceiling, leaving only a narrow route between the kitchen and the bed.

The family was accepted back into the village. The soaps were sold among their fellow believers as the price of the couple’s impulsive venture, and Anger resumed farming, relieved to leave the experiment behind. The return does not erase the departure: Neudorf is both the place the family leaves in search of another life and the community that receives them when that attempt fails.

Family Legacy and Narrative Significance

The village’s influence continues through Doctor Anger, whose childhood in the region draws him back toward the triangular landscape. At sixteen, he was sent by the community to the nearest railway station; he later studied medicine in Graz and Krakow, but settled in Stanislaviv, where his medical practice quickly succeeded. His trajectory links Neudorf’s local community to the wider world of education, mobility, and urban professional life without severing the pull of his origins.

Neudorf’s history also gives the novel a concrete setting for its tension between the promise of a prosperous, orderly imperial world and the inequalities concealed within that promise. The village’s stone houses, roses, crops, and church make improvement tangible, while the small divided plots reveal who cannot share equally in it. Later imperial language celebrates loyalty and protection, but Neudorf’s account has already shown that material opportunity is unevenly distributed and that apparent stability can be left behind. Its role is therefore more than biographical: it establishes the rural past against which the family’s urban experiments and the broader fragility of the imperial order can be understood.