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

Abstract

In his famous “law and sausage quote,” Germany’s Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck (1815– 98), commented on the parallels between politics and the sausagemaking process. Whereas a number of diff erent 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 Th e Master Butchers Singing Club, which revolves around the German American immigrant, exsoldier, 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 Martinez 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 JeanFrancois Lyotard’s term, “little narratives” (60) and in its depiction of multiple wars and their aft ermaths through personalized, fi ctional accounts and songs, Th e Master Butchers Singing Club manages to narrate excruciatingly painful, unoffi cial versions of history that challenge cultural “grand narratives” and that one would not fi nd 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 meatprocessing business per se and the likewise dirty and bloody details of