United States

The United States is a destination, a place of settlement, and a landscape marked by sharply unequal forms of movement. Fidelis Waldvogel crosses the ocean by choice and builds a life in North Dakota, while the country’s history and institutions also shape the lives of Indigenous survivors and German prisoners of war. These distinct journeys make the United States more than a setting: it is a place where hopes of safety and belonging coexist with conquest, confinement, and the burdens of memory.

A destination imagined and reached

Fidelis’s decision to emigrate begins with a slice of bread in the public square of Ludwigsruhe. Its fine texture, clean cut, and evenly browned crust seem to him evidence of a distant place governed by a new kind of order. He learns that the bread came from America, writes down the place name, and carries it for months as the possible destination gradually becomes an actual one.

In 1922, Fidelis steps from the RMS Mauretania into the arrival crowds of New York City. His suitcase holds smoked sausage made from a wild boar he had poached, along with the knives and sharpening tools that represent his trade. His family has spent its remaining valuables and best clothing on his passage; he has only a small store of English, learned aboard ship, and a plan to find work, money, and land. He relies on stillness and close observation as he tries to turn the family’s precarious investment into a future.

Rather than wait until he has enough money to travel farther, Fidelis buys a ticket into the beginning of the Midwest and sells sausages to passengers on the train. The route carries him through Minneapolis and prairie country to North Dakota. He arrives in Argus with thirty-five cents, an empty sausage case, and his tools. The broad, exposed landscape initially seems vulnerable and temporary, but it is where he settles and begins making a life.

Settling and building a family life

Fidelis’s migration is bound to family survival and work. The sausages finance part of his journey, and his knives and whetstones travel with him as the means to earn a living. The move is thus not an abstract pursuit of a new world: it takes the resources his family can spare and places their prospects in his ability to find work in an unfamiliar country.

Later, the family’s plans expose the continuing cost and uncertainty of migration. Fidelis agrees that Tante will take the boys, except Franz, back to Germany, where their grandmother is lonely. The proposed journey is carefully staged: the family will drive to Chicago, complete passport formalities at the consulate, travel by train to New York City, and board a ship. Their cabin is cramped, with an added floor pallet and a tiny window, despite being presented as a bargain. The sequence shows that movement across borders depends not only on desire but on money, documents, transport, and family decisions.

At the Chicago office, the family waits in a long corridor for passport photographs and processing. The boys look up at the building’s central shaft and skylight while Delphine holds their hands; Tante, tired but upright, insists that the boys need food and then refuses Delphine’s offer to get sandwiches. The administrative setting turns a family departure into a public, procedural undertaking, with relatives’ competing wishes and practical needs carried into the same line.

Indigenous identity and remembered violence

The United States is also the setting for histories of Indigenous identity and military violence. When Delphine asks Cyprian about his background, he identifies himself as Chippewa and Ojibwe, and gives the name Anishinaabeg, meaning the humans, used by his grandfather. He acknowledges this identity in a town where he and Delphine live openly together as though married. His account makes clear that a person’s belonging cannot be reduced to the categories other people impose.

Roy later tells Delphine the story of Minnie’s childhood and the Wounded Knee massacre. He recounts how a group of Minneconjou Lakotas, fleeing hardship and seeking shelter, were directed under a white flag of surrender toward a military camp near Wounded Knee. Among them are Minnie and her father, a Cree sent to learn about the Ghost Dance movement. Roy’s telling places the family’s movement through the Badlands against the army’s control over where they may go and under what conditions.

In Roy’s account, the massacre leaves Minnie without her father and forces her to flee. She escapes the camp, follows the tracks of other people through the snow, and eventually reaches a mission run by a priest named Jutz. The story is not presented as a detached historical episode: Roy connects it to the person Minnie becomes and to the persistence of a violence that shapes later lives. The United States as a place of refuge for migrants is therefore also a place where Indigenous people experience military force, displacement, and the lasting consequences of massacre.

Prisoners, belonging, and the end of the war

Erich’s arrival in the United States is involuntary and follows a different route from his father’s immigration. Captured as a German soldier, he is transported north in a train with two hundred other prisoners. He hides his ability to understand English because Nazi prisoners in his group have threatened those who cooperate with Americans. As the train crosses the country, the prisoners find not the destruction they were promised but a landscape they struggle to reconcile with their expectations.

The train proceeds into northern pine forests. At a small station, the prisoners are linked together and walk for miles along a muddy road before reaching a camp enclosed by logs and wire. The guards and camp rules mark them as prisoners, yet the surrounding forest and the practical routines of the place complicate the image of confinement. Erich is issued clothing and basic supplies and finds himself unexpectedly satisfied by the prospect of forestry work. The food, including baked beans and soft white bread, recalls his childhood; he eats slowly, with reverence and shame, and thinks of Delphine.

The camp’s daily life also changes through shared activity. Erich’s voice, which developed during adolescence, becomes part of the prisoners’ evenings when he begins singing to pass the time and others join him. Music creates a temporary common practice among men held far from home, even as their status and memories remain different. The camp is both a site of state control and a place where routines, food, work, and song complicate the distance between captors and captives.

Years later, Fidelis and Markus drive through the forest to visit Erich. They locate the camp by following a former guard’s map and the logging road. At the entrance, the guard on duty is surprised to learn that one prisoner may have been born in the United States. While they wait for the prisoners to return from burning slash, Fidelis and Markus sit in the car, share chocolate, and struggle to sustain a conversation without Delphine to help them find their meaning. Their visit brings the family’s migration story into contact with the country’s wartime system of captivity: the place that became Fidelis’s home is also where his son has been held as an enemy prisoner.