German identity

German identity in the novel is both a home carried across borders and an allegiance that can be remade into a barrier. Fidelis Waldvogel leaves Germany to build a life for his family in North Dakota, but his son Erich later embraces a severe, politically cultivated version of Germanness that makes him refuse his father. Their encounter at a prisoner-of-war camp brings the story’s two forms of belonging into sharp conflict: one rooted in family, place, and remembered life, the other in an ideal of national purity that survives even defeat.

Migration and the carried homeland

Fidelis’s decision to leave begins with an object that makes America seem almost unreal: a mechanically sliced loaf of bread. In the public square of Ludwigsruhe, he examines its fine texture, sharp cut, and even crust, then learns that it came from a distant American city. What first appears to him as a marvel of precise production gradually becomes a destination. His migration begins not as an abstract rejection of Germany but as a practical attraction to what another country might make possible.

In 1922, Fidelis steps off the RMS Mauretania in New York carrying smoked sausage made from a wild boar he had poached in Germany. His family has sold trinkets and their best woolens to pay for the passage, while Fidelis has kept his knives and the tools of his trade. His English consists of words directed toward work and settlement—train, west, sausage, butcher, money, land. The journey makes national belonging material: it travels in food, clothing, tools, and the obligation to support those who have remained behind.

Fidelis turns the sausages into the means of moving west. After selling enough in New York to buy a ticket, he boards a train into the Middle West and continues selling through Minneapolis and the plains. When the last link is gone, he steps onto the platform at Argus with thirty-five cents and a suitcase holding six knives, a sharpening steel, and whetstones. The wind and open horizon make the town seem exposed and temporary, yet it is here that he begins a new life. German identity persists not as a refusal of America, but as skill, family responsibility, and the work through which he establishes himself.

War, silence, and inherited memory

The migration story does not erase the war that preceded it. Fidelis and Cyprian Lazarre never openly discuss their shared experience, but the war remains present in their daily lives. A remembered image, sound, or word can halt either man in an inward struggle; the other registers the pause and lets the conversation move on, sometimes through a joke or a long drink. Their silence is not forgetfulness. It is a tacit recognition of memories neither can easily make public.

That unspoken history gives national identity a cost. The men share the aftermath of a war that has become part of their private lives, but the novel does not treat their common service as a simple bond that cancels difference. Their memories surface in fragments, while the landscape seems to cover the trenches and tunnels without undoing what happened there. German identity, in this account, is entangled with violence and displacement, yet it cannot be reduced to either: the living carry the past in habits of silence as well as in national labels.

Erich’s wartime formation

Erich’s captivity reveals how radically belonging can change. Transported north with other German prisoners, he hides that he understands English. Some prisoners have vowed to punish anyone who collaborates, so he maintains a guarded silence. The group expects to see a country devastated by war, as German radio reports had promised, but instead travels through an apparently prosperous and untouched America. The sight unsettles the prisoners; Erich, however, is consumed by memories and despair rather than arriving at an easy conclusion about defeat.

At the remote camp, the prisoners work among pine forests, and Erich begins singing. His voice, unexpectedly strong after adolescence, helps turn singing into a nightly activity that eases the tedium for the men. Yet music does not loosen his attachment to Germany. Awake in the bunkhouse, he listens to the woods and longs for Ludwigsruhe, his grandfather, and the sausages he once stole to share with Emil. He also tries to shut out thoughts of his family. To reveal his American upbringing or make use of his identity could put him at risk among prisoners who distrust collaboration.

His political formation has replaced much of childhood with an uncompromising creed: purity, loyalty unto death, and hatred of weakness. Erich has become, in his own understanding, thoroughly German. That identity is not simply the continuation of his family’s culture; it is a forceful reconstruction of the self under Nazi indoctrination. The novel places ordinary homesickness beside this hardened allegiance, showing that both may invoke the same homeland while producing profoundly different loyalties.

The failed reunion

Fidelis and Markus travel to the camp to find Erich. They follow a former guard’s directions through the northern woods and wait at a barbed-wire-and-log entrance while the prisoners are away burning slash. When the men return, Fidelis recognizes his son and calls after him, even using an old threat from Erich’s childhood. Erich does not turn around. The family’s appeal reaches him as a danger to the identity he has made, not as an invitation to resume the life he left.

From Erich’s point of view, his father appears old and diminished, not the commanding figure he remembers. Childhood objects and gestures have lost their authority: what once frightened him now seems almost harmless. He refuses to expose his reaction, thinking of himself as a trained soldier and of the encounter as still part of a war. He also knows that Fidelis and Markus do not yet know that Emil has died, killed by one of their own land mines. Grief and anger therefore sharpen his refusal, but do not overcome it.

Erich interprets his father’s presence as a threat to the national self he has struggled to become. His new father, as he conceives it, is not a person but a boundary on a map, a song, a piece of forest, and a street. This imagined homeland joins his brother’s death and the suffering of war to a lasting political romance. He walks through the prison gates rather than return to the family waiting outside. Fidelis and Markus leave without him; their drive away is marked by silence and sadness, and they do not find the words that might have bridged the distance.

Belonging after defeat

The novel contrasts Erich’s refusal with the ordinary life of German-American family ties. Fidelis has built a business and household in Argus, yet the family still considers a journey to Germany: Tante plans to take the boys there to be raised with their grandmother, and the family prepares passports and passage through Chicago and New York. The plan makes belonging a matter of practical routes, documents, schooling, and care, rather than a single unchanging allegiance. Delphine, by contrast, fears what the boys may encounter as political terror becomes more visible in Germany. Her concern is sharpened by news of the purge of 1934 and the increasingly hateful public climate, while Fidelis and Tante focus on signs of national recovery and the family’s improved prospects.

When Fidelis eventually returns to Ludwigsruhe with Delphine, homecoming is neither uncomplicated restoration nor a return to a world untouched by history. In 1954, master butchers gather to sing at the unveiling of a monument to those killed in the bombing. Fidelis practices with the few surviving men; Delphine, unable to follow the rapid German around her, experiences the ceremony as an outsider even among her husband’s relatives. The songs sound beautiful, but the memorial and the gathering hold the past in view. German identity here is communal and embodied in language, kinship, craft, and song, yet its public rituals stand beside the memory of destruction.

The novel’s account of national belonging therefore refuses a neat opposition between German and American life. Fidelis carries his German craft and family obligations into America; Erich turns Germanness into an absolutist creed that rejects those same family ties. The distance between father and son is not merely geographical or generational. It shows how a homeland can remain a source of memory and relationship, or be remade into an ideology powerful enough to make return impossible.