Traumfeuer

Traumfeuer is a homemade preserve of fruit, sugar, and brandy in the Waldvogel butcher shop’s kitchen. Usually eaten as a weekend treat, it gives the boys a sweet, slightly intoxicating pleasure; when Delphine eats a large bowl on the afternoon before the family plans to leave for Chicago, it becomes a way of dulling her awareness of the impending departure.

Ingredients and Use

A large crockery preserving jar holds the mixture. Delphine adds fruit as it comes into season—cherries, tough peaches, raspberries, raisins, bananas, apples, and grapes—covering each addition with sugar and a measure of brandy. The resulting preserve is spooned over pound cake or ice cream when those are available. Its ingredients accumulate across the seasons, making it less a single recipe than a continuing household store of fruit and sweetness.

The boys love to eat Traumfeuer just before going to sleep. Because of the brandy, they may go to bed slightly tipsy and wake late the next morning. Delphine does not stay in the kitchen late enough to know where the preserve goes, and she does not realize that Fidelis allows the boys to eat it. The treat therefore belongs partly to a private family routine conducted beyond her view.

The Name

The name means dreamfire, and the narrative suggests that it may have arisen from the boys’ habit of eating the preserve before sleep. The word joins the mixture’s sweetness and potency to the threshold between waking and dreaming: a domestic dessert acquires an almost fanciful charge without ceasing to be ordinary food made from what the household has on hand.

Delphine and the Planned Departure

On the day before the journey to Chicago, Delphine eats Traumfeuer in the middle of the afternoon. She pours it over a hard piece of sweet bread, adds cream, and takes another powerful helping. She has just packed the boys’ clothes into a suitcase to be tied onto the car, and recognizes that the indulgence is also an attempt to blot out the plan for the following day.

That plan is for Fidelis, Tante, and Delphine to ride in the front of the DeSoto while the boys sit in back. They will leave during the night, reach Chicago in the morning, and spend the first two days handling passports and consular paperwork. On the third day, Tante and the boys are to board a train to New York City; their ship is scheduled to embark the next day. The family has reserved one cabin, with an extra floor pallet and a small window. Against this carefully arranged itinerary, Delphine’s solitary afternoon bowl registers the emotional cost of the departure in a concrete act of eating.

Household Pleasure and Separation

Tante has persuaded Fidelis to let her take the boys, except Franz, who is nearly finished with school, back to Germany. She intends to raise them with the help of their lonely grandmother and expects the separation to last a year, or at most two, before Fidelis comes to bring them back. The move is presented as a practical response to the family’s strain: the shop might flourish without the labor of caring for the boys, while they would have clothing they had outgrown and, in time, be old enough to help.

Traumfeuer brings these household pressures into the same kitchen as an intimate pleasure. The boys’ secret late-night indulgence belongs to the life Delphine has helped sustain, while her own afternoon serving accompanies the packing that prepares them to leave. Its recurrence across the seasons contrasts with the abruptness of the journey: fruit is preserved by adding each new harvest to what is already in the jar, but the family’s shared domestic routine is about to be divided.