Die andere Heimat - Chronik einer Sehnsucht (2013)

The story centers on Jacob, a young man and blacksmith’s son who, hoping to escape the poverty caused by successive poor harvests, escapes into books about the Indians of Brazil and seeks to immigrate there, like many of his fellow countrymen. Jacob Simon is a village teenager from Schabbach, in the Hunsrück region of the Rhineland, in what is now southwestern Germany—a region annexed by France in 1793 and made Prussian after the Congress of Vienna. Neither a farmer nor a craftsman, literate, probably gifted, certainly romantic, shy, sometimes excitable, and above all out of place, he is called a “good-for-nothing” by his father. He struggles with material hardship and the weight of social conventions, alongside his parents Johann and Margret, his brother and sister Lena and Gustav, and his friends Jettchen and Florinchen. Like many Europeans of the time, he wants to leave the Old World for the Americas. He dreams of a new life in the jungles of Brazil. From books, he learns about the lives of the Indians of South America. He even learns one of the languages of the Amazon. At his own urging, he shares his secret—the dream of a new life—with Jettchen. When his brother Gustav returns from Prussian military service, the love between Jacob and Jesse is shaken. Jacob’s life takes a different course from the one he had expected.