German homeland and family belonging

German homeland and family belonging is not a settled inheritance for the Waldvogels but a contested choice: Ludwigsruhe holds their relatives, language, and family history, while North Dakota is where Fidelis has made a home and where his sons have grown up. The question of returning the boys to Germany turns nostalgia into a decision with immediate consequences, testing how much belonging rests on ancestry and how much on daily care, shared language, and safety.

Ludwigsruhe as Family Memory

After Christmas, Fidelis and Tante sit together recalling the family’s old town. Their memory centers on a substantial, three-story brick shop built by their grandfather, its stone rosettes still vivid in their minds. The recollection gives Germany a concrete shape: not merely a distant country, but a place marked by family labor, property, and generations of continuity. Their shared silence and half-smiles make the remembered building feel like a common possession even though they are now living in North Dakota.

The German newspapers they receive offer another kind of connection. The Deutsche Freie Presse and Die Rundschau cautiously report general news, but the local births, deaths, and weddings matter especially because they name people Fidelis and Tante know. Reading these notices aloud lets them participate in the old town’s life from afar. Fidelis, drawing on his pipe, wonders whether they might save enough money to visit. Tante presents a visit as a way for the boys to see their grandparents and learn how Germans live, and suggests that they might remain for a few months. Her proposal joins cultural transmission to family reunion: the boys would acquire language and customs by living among relatives, not only by hearing about Germany at home.

The Case for Sending the Boys Back

Tante’s wish to return with the boys gains force after Markus is nearly buried when the hill collapses. She argues that the boys are adventurous, hard to supervise, and at risk of getting into further trouble. Their worn boots, with newspaper lining visible inside, and Fidelis’s difficulty paying the shop’s expenses make her case material as well as emotional. The danger on the hill gives her a vivid example to press on Fidelis: the boys’ freedom in North Dakota has nearly become a catastrophe, and she presents a more disciplined upbringing among family in Germany as a safer alternative.

Fidelis becomes more receptive, but the choice is not shown as the result of a single cause. The cost of raising the boys, the money he owes Delphine for her work, their need for clothes, the injuries and accidents they have suffered, and the strain of managing the shop all weigh on him. Tante’s proposal offers relief from immediate pressures as well as the promise of returning the boys to relatives. She is to take them, while Franz, nearly finished with school, remains behind. She expects the arrangement to last no more than a year or two, after which Fidelis would come for them. The projected separation is thus presented as temporary, even though its outcome depends on a future journey and an unsettled political situation.

The planned route makes the family’s intention precise. They will drive from North Dakota to Chicago in the DeSoto, complete passport procedures at the consulate over two days, and then Tante and the boys will take a train to New York City. Their ship is due to leave the following day. A single cabin, with an additional floor pallet and a small window, has been reserved as an affordable passage. These arrangements turn an idea of return into an imminent departure, and make Delphine’s distress sharper: the journey is not an abstract discussion of heritage but a family separation about to begin.

Delphine’s Objection: Care, Language, and Risk

Delphine opposes sending the boys to Germany because she believes Tante is not equipped to care for them and because the boys’ ties to their father and their North Dakota home matter. She tells Fidelis that his sister does not know how to look after boys, and challenges his assumption that life in Germany will automatically prepare them to return and help in the shop. She also warns that Tante might not let them come back. Fidelis replies that he could go and retrieve them himself, but Delphine counters with a newspaper rumor that the German government is keeping visitors who travel there. The warning is uncertain at the time, but it expresses the danger that a border or government policy could turn a temporary family visit into a lasting separation.

Their disagreement is also shaped by language and cultural change. Fidelis believes that in Germany the boys will learn the proper way to do things. Yet he recognizes that they are not being raised as he was: they have little discipline or formal learning, and their freedom seems to him excessive. At the same time, he cannot always understand their English, while they do not always understand him when he speaks at length in German. The homeland he imagines as a place of restoration is also a place where the boys might become more fluent in a culture and language that increasingly separates them from him.

Delphine invokes Eva and the morphine Tante stole, making the proposed move a question of trust and care as well as national belonging. She asks how Fidelis can send his sons with the woman who contributed to Eva’s suffering, and urges him at least to leave Markus with her. Fidelis knows that Delphine has cared for his sons beyond the limits of her paid work since Eva died. Her offer is therefore grounded in an established caregiving relationship, not simply a wish to keep the family together. He admits that he cannot watch the boys closely enough and that he can no longer afford to pay Delphine. His hesitation holds two truths at once: Tante’s plan has a practical appeal, and Delphine has become essential to the boys’ daily care.

Homeland under Political Pressure

Delphine’s fear of the journey is intensified by what she has read about Germany. Since the purge of 1934, she has followed reports of political violence and kept details in mind even as Fidelis and Tante emphasize their family’s prosperity and growing holdings. Their attention to Germany’s strength, and to the leader they describe as exceptionally capable, contrasts with the information Delphine collects about terror. When a brief newspaper report describes hatred directed at Jews and shattered glass, Fidelis dismisses the hostility as an old and recurring poison. He mentions Johannes as Jewish but does not explain further. The family’s attachment to German relatives and material success thus exists alongside a political reality that they do not interpret in the same way.

Fidelis insists that another war is impossible and believes Hitler is strengthening Germany for peace. His confidence rests partly on the prosperity he sees in his family’s circumstances and on the gifts they send the boys. Delphine, by contrast, treats the possibility of closed borders and renewed war as reasons not to entrust the boys to a journey whose return cannot be guaranteed. The argument does not make German belonging simply good or bad. It reveals a conflict between the pull of relatives and heritage, the boys’ established life with their father, and the danger of mistaking national prosperity for personal security.

The Unresolved Meaning of Belonging

For Fidelis and Tante, Germany promises family continuity: grandparents, familiar customs, a known language, and the old town represented by the family’s three-story shop. For Delphine, belonging is measured more immediately through who protects the boys, attends to their needs, and remains present in their lives. The contrast is not between family and its absence. It is between competing forms of family responsibility: inherited kinship and cultural formation on one side, and accumulated care and lived attachment on the other.

The planned departure makes that conflict especially poignant because the boys are not simply being sent toward a homeland; they are being carried away from the person who has helped raise them and from a father who admits he struggles to communicate with them. Delphine’s appeal to leave Markus with her proposes a smaller, alternative future for belonging, but the conversation establishes no settled resolution. The episode leaves the return plan poised between promise and danger, showing that a homeland can call a family back while the act of answering that call threatens to divide the family it is meant to restore.