Fidelis Waldvogel travels with small luggage. He has his father’s knives with him and the homemade sausages. He has the recipe in his head. He sells the sausage out of his suitcase. With the money he pays for his trip, from the Swabian to New York and finally – as far as the dollars go – to Argus, North Dakota. There, in a prairie dump in the middle of nowhere, he wants to make his fortune, which he believed lost at home. When he returned from the First World War, mentally wounded, nothing can keep him at home. “I’m a butcher”, he introduces himself to strangers on his journey, “German Master Butcher”. It turns out that America has actually been waiting for one. Because no other one tastes as good as his sausage.
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Michael Hanfeld
responsible editor for features online and “media”.
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The circus artist Delphine is also on the go. Together with her father Robert, she goes into the ring, if his condition allows it. Most of the time, however, the old man is in the cloakroom in an alcohol coma. His daughter shipped him and himself overseas without further ado. The year is 1919, and economic hardship and political conditions mean that many Germans have run away. “Those over there eat meat every day,” says a barker who praises the passage to New York. Butchers are needed, that much seems certain, but also artists? If they have the right abdominal muscles, yes, Delphine notes. At least this is what the artist Cyprian is after. She goes on tour with him, but her stopping point is also Argus, North Dakota.
There are a few more emigrants from Germany and Europe who find a new home there. Fidelis catches up with his wife Eva and son Johannes, but unfortunately the cold-hearted Aunt Lore is also part of the party. Clarisse, a native of Hungary, runs the funeral home in the town and has to fight off the sheriff’s increasingly brutal advances. On Independence Day, however, everyone comes to the “German Master Butcher” shop and celebrates. The background music is provided by a male choir founded by Fidelis, the “Club of the Singing Butchers” – “The Master Butchers Singing Club” .
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Delphine (Aylin Tezel) and Eva (Leonie Benesch, right). :
Image: ARD Degeto / SWR / Moovie // Constanti
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Under this title, the novel by Louise Erdrich was published in 2003, which forms the template for the three-hour emigrant epic, which the ARD expands opulently this evening. The author, who was born in 1954 to an Ojibwe and a German-American, has long made a name for herself in the United States. She received the National Book Award, the Pen / Saul Bellow Award, and the Library of Congress Prize. A whole series of her novels is now available in German (“Der Gott am Ende der Strasse”, “Liebeszauber”, “Die Rübenkönigin”, “Das Haus des Windes”), and the story of the singing butcher was published in 2004 under the title “Der Gesang des Fidelis Waldvogel ”at Eichborn, the novel is currently available under the title“ The Club of Singing Butchers ”from Aufbau Verlag.
