“A World Where Butchers Sing Like Angels”: German Poetry, Music, and (Counter)History in Louise Erdrich’s The Master Butchers Singing Club

Mit Gesetzen ist es wie mit Würsten. Man sollte nicht zusehen, wie sie gemacht werden.

(Laws are like sausages. It is better not to watch them being made.)

— Otto von Bismarck

In his famous “law and sausage quote,” Germany’s Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck (1815–98), commented on the parallels between politics and the sausage-making process. Whereas a number of different versions of this quote are in circulation, they all share the idea that, for one’s own comfort, one should not inquire too deeply into the secrets of either butchery or politics.¹ In her 2003 novel The Master Butchers Singing Club, which revolves around the German American immigrant, ex-soldier, master butcher, and talented singer Fidelis Waldvogel, Louise Erdrich clearly disregards this advice and invites her readers to do the same. One could certainly classify this novel, to which Silvia Martínez Falquina attests “a notably solid historical texture” (13), as “counterhistory” or “a tale of silenced history,” because in its telling of alternative or, to use Jean-François Lyotard’s term, “little narratives” (60) and in its depiction of multiple wars and their aftermaths through personalized, fictional accounts and songs, The Master Butchers Singing Club manages to narrate excruciatingly painful, unofficial versions of history that challenge cultural “grand narratives” and that one would not find easily in history books.² With this work, Erdrich tackles the “double burden— to write both literature and history” (Peterson 3) and grants deep insights (literally and metaphorically) into both the bloody butchering and meat-processing business per se and the likewise dirty and bloody details of politics and genocide on both the European and the American continents of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In The Master Butchers Singing Club, much of this history is transmitted (both among characters and to readers) through songs that are sung, heard, or remembered by the multiethnic and multinational assemblage of characters. These songs include “foolish ballads, strict anthems, German sailor’s songs and the paddling songs of voyageurs, patriotic American songs, . . . Cree lullabies, sweat lodge summons, lost ghost dance songs, counting rhymes, and hymns in the snow” (388). This rather unconventional, multilingual, and multicultural list of songs generates the image of the world as an interconnected, transcultural chorus of voices devoid of national and geographical borders in which “not a single note is ever lost” (388). In fact, singing constitutes an important leitmotif in this novel. Singing can both unite and divide people, and songs often function as (emotionally laden) carriers of cultural heritage and collective memory. Music is also characterized by its intrinsically paradoxical nature, which is aptly expressed in the image evoked in the last sentence of the novel, which describes “a world in which butchers sing like angels” (388).³

The lyrical writings of the expatriate Heinrich Heine as well as those of World War I veterans Georg Trakl and Rainer Maria Rilke play a similarly important role in The Master Butchers Singing Club. The works of these authors not only function as decoration on the young Fidelis Waldvogel’s bookshelves but also have a deeper, underlying meaning for the story and for the characterization of the novel’s protagonist. Moreover, their integration into the novel attests to Erdrich’s extensive knowledge of German literary traditions. Scholars like Thomas Austenfeld, Peter Beidler, and Ute Lischke have already written about Erdrich’s German background and her profound interest in the German side of her ancestry. Specific influences of the German literary tradition on this author’s work remain to be explored, though.

Today, Erdrich is widely known as an author “who has written about the American experience in all its diversity” (Blades), and considerable scholarship exists— for example, by Maria Cornelia, Claudia Egerer, Silvia Martínez Falquina, Bärbel Höttges, and Susan Perez Castillo— on Erdrich’s multiethnic background, the construction of American ethnicity in her work, and the author’s view on ethnic labeling. Rather than repeating what has already been explored by these and numerous other [End Page...