Postwar deprivation in Germany

Postwar deprivation in Germany is the material pressure behind Fidelis Waldvogel’s departure and the family’s efforts to secure a future. The novel makes scarcity concrete: food is uncertain, belongings become the price of passage, and a simple loaf of sliced bread points toward a country imagined to offer abundance. Hardship is not confined to the years immediately after the war; later economic crises and wartime shortages renew its effects, reshaping work, household responsibilities, and the movement of family members.

Hunger and the Return Home

Fidelis walks home from the First World War in twelve days and then sleeps for thirty-eight hours in his childhood bed. When he wakes in Germany in late November 1918, the revised borders have placed him only a few centimeters from becoming French, but that political change matters less to him than the question of what might be available to eat. The meal he smells prompts cautious hope: perhaps potatoes, soft cheese, or an egg. His return is measured first through bodily rest and the prospect of food, not through triumph or political belonging.

The remembered bed adds a domestic measure of continuity to this deprivation. His mother has aired and restuffed its white eiderdown every spring since he was six, and a faint stain from a childhood nosebleed remains despite repeated washing. The familiar bed has survived years of absence, yet it offers no assurance that the household can provide a substantial meal. In this contrast, home remains emotionally recognizable while its material security is in doubt.

The Bread That Points West

Shortly after marrying Eva, Fidelis encounters a machine-sliced loaf in the public square of Ludwigsruhe. At first he mistakes the white, precisely cut slices for a picture; learning that they are bread, sent from distant relatives in a coastal American city, he joins the onlookers to examine them. The loaf turns an abstract idea of America into a tangible contrast with scarcity at home. Its mechanical regularity suggests a world where ordinary food can be made plentiful and standardized, and Fidelis becomes convinced that he, too, should travel there.

The bread’s significance is not simply that it promises a better meal. It offers a visible sign of productive capacity and a possible route out of postwar want. For Fidelis, the image converts hardship into a decision: emigration becomes a practical response to an environment in which even staple food carries the force of hope.

The Cost and Method of Emigration

In 1922, Fidelis steps from the RMS Mauretania into the crowded arrival scene at New York City. Eva’s baby is three years old, and the family’s remaining wealth has been concentrated in the journey: trinkets, cuff links, and their best woolens paid for his passage and helped him avoid selling his knives. His suitcase carries his father’s smoked sausage, made from wild boar obtained with carefully kept ammunition and a hidden rifle. The food is both cargo and livelihood, the product he can sell while seeking work as a butcher.

Fidelis has learned only a few English words aboard ship, selected for what he needs to do: find a train and station, travel west, sell the best sausage, obtain work as a master butcher, and eventually secure money and land. In the harbor’s confusion, he relies on quiet and watchfulness. He begins selling sausages, earns more than half the money he needs by dusk, and then buys a ticket into the beginning of the Middle West. Before boarding, he sells one more sausage and puts the ticket inside his breast pocket. The journey is a calculated use of scarce resources: rather than wait until he has raised the full sum, he carries his goods onto the train and plans to continue earning along the way.

The contrast he draws between Germany and America is economic as well as social. People in the new country astonish him because they are not generally starving and have not recently been defeated and detested beyond diminished borders. He interprets their ordinary gift of bread as something made possible by comparative security. The kindness matters, but its material precondition matters too: in his view, abundance can make everyday generosity affordable.

Work, Family, and Renewed Scarcity

Fidelis finds work at once with Pete Kozka and takes jobs in surrounding small towns, including custom butchery on farms when people fetch him. He initially has no car, but his trade expands enough that he later owns a succession of delivery trucks. When he joins the Kozka business, its trade increases because he brings his father’s skill and sausage-making knowledge. The instruction inherited on the eve of his departure is exacting: no ingredient is too humble, and even salt, fresh garlic, meat, and sheep casings must be the finest available. The family craft thus becomes a means of making a living abroad, carrying knowledge across the same migration that scarcity made necessary.

Economic pressure also informs decisions within the family. Fidelis eventually agrees that Tante may take the boys, except Franz, back to Germany, where their grandmother is lonely and Tante expects to raise them with her help. Tante believes the children will be more responsible in a year or two and says Fidelis can later bring them back. Their departure is planned through Chicago, passport proceedings, a train to New York City, and a ship, with one cabin and an added floor pallet reserved. The plan is not only a family reunion with the old country; it is also an attempt to ease the demands of caring for the boys so the store can flourish. The paperwork, travel costs, and separation show how household survival depends on managing both labor and mobility.

The novel later places these postwar choices beside new shortages during the Second World War. Business at Waldvogel’s Meats surges as customers arrive and Jewish synagogues from Minneapolis seek Fidelis for custom kosher work, but supplies grow scarce. Although Fidelis has a coveted C sticker for the delivery truck, gasoline remains limited; coffee disappears, butter is requisitioned, and Delphine sells oleomargarine with small pats of yellow dye. Canned goods fall to the lowest grade and then vanish, while eggs are powdered for soldiers. Markus writes that powdered eggs are a staple of his breakfasts, and that Clark candy bars and fresh fruit are among the few things he looks forward to. The return of scarcity across a later generation makes deprivation a recurring historical condition rather than a hardship neatly left behind in Germany.