Nazi-era Germany

Nazi-era Germany shapes the Waldvogel family’s choices across the Atlantic: economic hopes make a return to Germany seem possible, while Delphine’s attention to persecution and political violence makes that plan feel perilous. The conflict is not simply between two readings of the news. It exposes the different memories, loyalties, and responsibilities through which Fidelis and Delphine imagine the boys’ future.

Political Warning Signs

Delphine follows reports of the 1934 purge and keeps the details in mind as further information emerges. She sees Fidelis and Tante focusing instead on Germany’s apparent strength and prosperity, their family’s increased holdings, and the leader’s perceived genius. The contrast is sharpened by a small item in a Minneapolis newspaper about a rampage of hatred against Jews and the breaking of glass. Fidelis dismisses it as an expression of an old, recurring poison; he acknowledges that Johannes was Jewish but does not explain the remark to Delphine.

For Delphine, the danger is not confined to a single report. She remembers the slaughter and views the return of the Saarland and the remilitarization of the Rhineland as developments that Fidelis and Tante have allowed to eclipse it. Her vigilance is grounded in the practical stakes of the family’s plan: the boys may be sent away from America to live in Germany, and Delphine fears what the political situation could mean for them.

Family Plans and Political Disagreement

The immediate dispute arises when Tante persuades Fidelis to let her take the boys, except Franz, back to Germany. She proposes that they stay with her and their grandmother for a year, perhaps two, while Fidelis remains in America and later brings them back. The plan is presented as temporary and as a way to ease the strain on the household and help the business flourish. Its material context includes the family’s bills, the cost of clothing for growing boys, and Fidelis’s inability to pay Delphine for all her work.

In Minneapolis, as the family prepares for the journey, Delphine resolves to speak privately with Fidelis before the boys leave. She fears the separation could become permanent, and she knows that political disagreement is only part of what makes the conversation difficult. When Fidelis insists that he could go to Germany and retrieve the boys himself, Delphine warns that a new government may keep visiting Germans from leaving. She invokes the possibility of closed borders and reminds him that he knows what war was like. At the time, her report about the government’s restrictions is a rumor, though it later proves true.

Fidelis answers from the authority of his own experience: having seen war, he believes another war impossible. He interprets Hitler’s strengthening of Germany as preparation for peace and points to the family’s prosperity and ability to buy things for the boys. Delphine rejects money as an answer, reminding him that these are the sons he had with Eva. Her appeal makes the argument personal: the boys are not merely part of a family arrangement or a measure of Germany’s recovery, but children whose safety and future depend on decisions made by the adults around them.

Memory, Belonging, and Consequence

Fidelis’s confidence is bound up with his wartime past and his attachment to Germany. Later, when he recognizes a painful repetition in the present—Delphine might rescue him and the boys just as he once rescued Eva and Franz—he begins telling her what happened to Johannes. In his account, Johannes saved his life twice and died during the war’s final days. The story gives Fidelis a way to speak about the dead friend whose name had surfaced during the earlier argument, and it connects his present decisions to a history of loyalty, loss, and survival.

The novel places these family memories beside other accounts of political violence and its aftermath. Roy tells Delphine about Minnie’s childhood during the Wounded Knee Massacre, while Erich, a German prisoner of war, has become deeply committed to an ideologically purified idea of being German and avoids revealing his American upbringing. These histories do not make the situations identical; they show how violence, national belonging, and selective memory shape what characters can recognize or say. At a later gathering in Germany, Delphine sees the master butchers sing beneath a memorial, and the performance evokes for her the violence and burning associated with the country’s history. The ordinary beauty of the singing and the remembered horror coexist, refusing an easy separation between cultural fellowship and political reckoning.

Nazi-era Germany therefore enters the story through concrete family decisions—whether children should cross an ocean, who can retrieve them, and what borders may allow—as well as through the memories that make those decisions emotionally charged. Delphine’s warning is not only an argument about government; it is a demand that Fidelis look beyond prosperity and family property to the danger his sons may face. His faith in peace, formed by war and attachment, leaves him slow to accept what she sees. The conflict gives the family’s contemplated return a lasting uncertainty: belonging to Germany may promise reunion and continuity, yet it cannot guarantee safety.