Cherrypicker | Literature  Against Forgetting

In “Von Norden rollt ein Donner”, Markus Thielemann explores family conflict, rural idyll, and a repressed Nazi past—set in motion by the return of the wolf to the Lüneburg Heath, which throws the life of a shepherd’s family off balance.

In 2014, the wolf returns to the Lüneburg Heath. Whether that’s good or bad news depends on who you ask. For nineteen-year-old Jannes, a third-generation shepherd, and his family, the predator’s return brings more than a few problems—problems for which each family member has their own solution.

Dementia in the Wolf’s Shadow

Father Friedrich installs a fence to protect the sheep. Grandfather Wilhelm thinks the only good wolf is a dead one. And mother Sybille and son Jannes are somewhere in between—more frightened by Friedrich’s growing forgetfulness than by any wolf. But unlike the wolf, his declining health is never openly discussed. So Jannes is left to carry the weight of worry about his father and the future of the farm on his own.

That’s the starting point Markus Thielemann gives us in Von Norden rollt ein Donner(Thunder Rolls from the North). A novel about the daily life of a shepherding family in rural northern Germany in 2014? Not quite. Alongside the generational tensions and the threat of the wolf, the novel explores the darker history of the region, which begins to entwine with Jannes’s own family story. Right-wing extremism in rural villages and the struggles of coming-of-age are also woven in. As Jannes grows distant from his school friends, he begins to realize with a kind of quiet dismay that his parents are aging, and that long-held roles within the family are shifting—and must shift.

Thielemann weaves this multitude of themes seamlessly into the narrative, using a timeless, almost epic tone that still feels fully grounded in the present. So it feels perfectly natural when WhatsApp messages appear alongside poetic landscapes and Jannes’s quiet inner thoughts about sheep, wolves, and the farm’s uncertain future. Even as Jannes begins to hallucinate—visions that ultimately lead him to uncover a dark family secret—this surreal layer is so well integrated that it doesn’t feel jarring. I usually skim past long nature passages, but the chapters where we follow Jannes and his flock through the heath were among my favorites: strikingly vivid and stunningly precise in their poetry:

Glorification, Suppression, and Silence

What impressed me most—beyond the language—was how the wolf becomes a metaphor over the course of the novel: a symbol for the “foreign” and “dangerous” that is said to threaten the “German nature.”

It’s surely no coincidence that the novel is set in 2014, just one year before Germany saw its peak in asylum applications. In the book, not a single sheep is killed by a wolf. And yet there’s constant talk of that possibility. On one side, we have the enemy image: the “wolf.” On the other, the German landscape—the protected area of the heath—allegedly under threat. And as the wolf becomes more and more of a phantom, a shadow at the forest’s edge, the author demystifies the landscape itself. It’s no wonder that the public-broadcasting institution WDR calls the novel an “anti-Heimatroman” on its back cover. While traditional Heimatromane idealize rural life through cliché and nostalgia, Thunder Rolls from the North does the opposite: Thielemann disrupts the supposed idyll of the heath.

The Other Side of the Heath

He does so first through his characters, who challenge the ongoing glorification of the 19th-century heath poet Hermann Löns. Between the lines of Löns’s nature poems lie deeply exclusionary ideas of “nature” and “naturalness,” which later earned him a posthumous honorary burial under the Nazis. Then there’s Jannes’s own research into the nearby village of Unterlüß: just a few kilometers from his family farm once stood the Tannenberg subcamp of a concentration camp, where 400 to 800 Jewish women were imprisoned under inhumane conditions. Today, the site remains unmarked. Only a few trenches and crumbling foundations hint at the horror that once occurred there.

In the end, it’s the motif of forgetting that ties everything together: Friedrich’s dementia, and the collective amnesia surrounding the region’s violent history. And in the middle of it all stands the quiet, thoughtful Jannes and his flock—far from a conventional hero, and yet heroic in his resolve to read the signs his landscape offers, to face what others ignore. Even when the past, in all its ugliness, stands right before him.

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May 2025