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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 meatprocessing 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...