Emil and Erich

Emil and Erich are the twin sons of Eva Waldvogel and Fidelis Waldvogel, growing up in a household where work, play, and family life are repeatedly interrupted by illness, loss, and war. Their childhood is rendered not as a separate world protected from adult crisis but as life continuing beside it: the boys play outside while their mother is dying, then return at night to kiss her good-night. Through their small routines, their toy armies, and their involvement with the family’s chinchillas, the novel shows how children register upheaval in concrete, partial ways, while adults and other caregivers try to make a livable order around them.

Identity and Childhood

Emil and Erich are presented as a pair, but not as interchangeable children. Their attention and temperaments differ even in a brief scene: when Markus Waldvogel finds a tiny scallop shell in a field and says the land used to be an ocean bottom, Erich looks at the shell without much interest. A moment later, however, he asks the question the adults have not answered directly: whether Eva is dying now. Markus says that he thinks she is. Erich’s plain question brings the family’s crisis into the boys’ ordinary conversation, without ceremony or euphemism.

The shell is a small object with a history far longer than the boys’ own lives, and it offers a quiet counterpoint to their immediate uncertainty. Markus reads a vanished ocean into it; Erich turns back to the present and asks about their mother. The scene gives the brothers different orientations toward the same world without assigning either child an elaborate explanation or a fixed symbolic role.

Living Beside Eva’s Death

During Eva’s last days, the boys spend most of their time outdoors. Delphine Watzka feeds them old bread or stiff oatmeal, sometimes without checking whether their chores are finished, because her attention has shifted toward the person who is dying. The household has become two worlds side by side: one for those who will go on living, and one centered on Eva’s approaching death. The boys are not kept away from their mother. After dinner they go in to see her and kiss her good-night.

They become used to the visible changes in Eva’s body. Her face is gray and sunken, with new folds around her mouth; her breathing grows so slow that the pauses seem to stretch on. The boys are not afraid of her, but familiarity does not make the experience emotionally simple. When Markus kisses her, he feels numb and notices an earthen, moldy taste that seems no longer human. He goes to bed, hears a buzzing in his ears, and falls asleep at once. Sometimes Emil climbs into bed beside him without waking him. The children’s response is conveyed through physical perception, exhaustion, and sleep rather than through a mature account of bereavement.

Eva’s chinchillas give the boys something practical to do and something to watch. She had wanted her bed in a small room off the kitchen, among the canning jars, because its window looked onto the backyard. From there she could see the boys carrying out her chinchilla-raising plan. They had made cages from wire netting salvaged from failed coops and built nesting boxes from scrap lumber. Delphine realizes that the scheme is also a diversion: the animals draw the boys’ attention away from their dying mother, giving them an activity within the same space where the family is confronting her death.

Work, Play, and the Chinchillas

After Eva’s death, Delphine tries to turn the chinchillas into a source of income and a shared responsibility for the boys. She tells Emil and Erich that the animals could make money, but at first the idea leaves them bored. Their attention is already trained on the prices of their toy soldiers and battlefield equipment: they know the cost of each piece to the penny, including the ranks of officers, horses, and cannons.

Delphine makes the connection in terms that can reach them. If the chinchillas produce money, the boys could buy more soldiers, as well as lemon drops, licorice whips, or ice cream at Birdy’s Drugstore. She offers them equal shares of the profits with Markus, provided they do not let Tante Maria Theresa take over cleaning and feeding the animals. The calculation changes their attitude. Once the animals are linked to purchases they already understand and desire, the boys become serious and determined. Their toy armies belong to wars of the previous century: officers still ride heroically on caparisoned horses rather than crawling through mud. The contrast joins childhood collecting to the larger history of violence without making the boys’ play identical to adult war.

Delphine also shows Tante how the little boys should mix the animals’ food, then sends Emil and Erich out to learn the routine. They appear barefoot in short pants and torn shirts, their hair smoothed into wings by Delphine as she crouches to speak at their level. The scene makes care concrete: the boys are not merely recipients of protection but are taught a task, and Delphine seeks to secure their participation in the work that sustains the animals and may earn them money.

Delphine’s Care and the Family’s Future

The boys’ dependence on Delphine becomes particularly visible when Markus needs help preparing to return to Tante. Delphine notices that he has trouble staying dry through the night and understands that the problem has to be addressed before he can go back. Cyprian Lazarre recognizes her intention and agrees to help. Delphine makes two pitchers of lemonade, one for each of them, and sends them behind the henhouse to practice every morning. By the end of the week Markus is dry in the morning. Delphine regards this not as an isolated fix but as the first part of what she thinks he needs to learn to survive.

Her plan extends beyond the immediate problem: she considers teaching Markus to imitate an epileptic fit to protect himself from Tante’s anger, but Fidelis arrives before she can begin. Even that unrealized plan clarifies the circumstances in which Delphine’s care operates. She is trying to equip a child for the difficulties of a family arrangement she cannot fully control, using the practical ingenuity available to her rather than formal authority.

Years later, the brothers’ place in the family is marked by different futures. Markus writes to Delphine that he has failed the vision test and will probably be assigned desk work at the OCS for the duration of the war. She feels relief that he will not be sent into combat. He writes far more often than Franz Waldvogel and describes a job composing letters for others, which Delphine struggles to understand until he comes home. His return shows him changed into a neat, thoughtful young man with a quick laugh and a talent for mimicry, but he remains awkward with Fidelis; the two sit together over beer and exchange short, nearly meaningless remarks until Delphine joins them and asks about his work. The surviving scenes distinguish the twins’ childhood from Markus’s later trajectory, while keeping family connection visible in habits of care, shared rooms, and the difficulty of speaking after separation.

Narrative Significance

Emil and Erich’s story is defined less by a sequence of independent exploits than by their presence within a changing household. They encounter Eva’s decline through nightly visits and the altered texture of her body; they inhabit the neglected routines of children while Delphine’s attention is fixed on death; and they acquire work and purpose through the chinchilla scheme. The novel does not suggest that a child’s understanding of loss is complete simply because the child asks whether a parent is dying. Instead, it lets direct questions coexist with boredom, play, numbness, and sleep.

Their scenes also reveal how family care exceeds the biological bond. Eva’s animals become a project for the boys, while Delphine feeds them, teaches them, and devises ways to prepare Markus for life with Tante. Practical tasks—mixing feed, learning a morning routine, dividing potential profits—do not erase grief or insecurity. They give the children a way to remain within the family’s daily life as that life is reorganized around loss.