Chapter 14 Cont.

Things seem to be going good for awhile: Markus fails his eye test and takes a desk job, Franz and Mazarine reunite and consummate their love, resulting in a future addition to the family, and Markus discovers that there is a man in an American prison camp named Waldvogel who can sing like an angel; everyone is shocked and excited. In perhaps the saddest twist of events that I could have imagined, the family soon realizes that "Erich's fanaticism was that of the culturally insecure...Erich's new father was a boundary on a map, a feeling for a certain song, a scrap of forest, a street" (Erdrich 364). They go to see him at the prison camp, but he walks right past them as if they were ghosts. He thinks that he has no family, and indeed perhaps he doesn't anymore. His twin brother was killed right at the start of the war, and he has nothing left to identify himself with; being German is no longer a good thing where he is, but he has worked so hard to become so that he runs the risk of losing himself entirely if he cannot let it go. What so many failed to realize, including Fidelis, was that although Erich was German by blood when he was born, he was culturally American, and thus had no idea what was accepted or cool in Germany. He was singled out and people were confused by him. He was German, spoke German with an American accent, was raised in Germany, but unable to forget his American childhood as well. It does not help with the pain of the loss of Erich that soon after Franz is gravely injured in a freak collision with a heavy steel cable.