Summary
A thunderous fresco that hurtles from Genesis to the Western Front, The Birth of a Race splices scripture with steel-mill smoke: Adam’s rib dissolves into Columbus’s sailcloth, Calvary’s timbers echo in the tramping boots of 1917. Inside this cosmic montage, the Schmidt clan—Teutonic titans of industry—fracture like shrapnel: paterfamilias Fritz clings to the Kaiser’s shadow while George, the prodigal, enlists under Stars-and-Stripes; Louisa, the daughter, tends wounds that will soon be inflicted by her own kin. In a moon-drenched field hospital Oscar, the black-sheep brother, bayonets the dark and spears his sister’s innocence, only to be felled by George’s trembling rifle—fratricide as baptism into American allegiance. The surviving kin drag their guilt home, where espionage, secret dossiers, and a final act of cleansing violence re-knit the family under a flag whose colors have been rewashed in blood.
Synopsis
After a biblical and historical prologue detailing the evolution of the idea of democracy through the creation of the world, the flood, the crucifixion of Christ, the discovery of America, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and the Civil War, the present-day threat to this idea by autocratic powers is dramatized. Fritz Schmidt, a German-American steel plant owner, and his son Oscar remain loyal to the Kaiser, while son George fights for the Allies. When the American army hospital where Louisa Schmidt works as a nurse is attacked by the Germans, Oscar, now a German soldier, assaults her, not recognizing his sister in the confusion. George, recovering in the hospital, kills his brother and then returns home to find his mother and a German spy struggling for some secret papers. George kills the spy, Fritz realigns his loyalty to the American cause, and the family is reunited.
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