Children and Fire / Ursula Hegi

Most people were introduced to the fictional Rhine River village of Burgdorf with Ursula Hegi’s critically acclaimed 1994 novel Stones from the River. The author’s latest visit to pre-World War II Burgdorf is her most recent novel Children and Fire.

Thekla is offered a job teaching an all-boy class when the Jewish teacher is asked to step down. The awkwardness of the situation is compounded by the fact the Thekla was a favorite student of Fräulein Siderova.

Throughout the novel the story of Thekla’s birth and upbringing is revealed in flashbacks, while the events of 1934 happen over a single day, a day that marks the one year anniversary of the burning of the Reichstag. A family secret is fully revealed by the end of the novel, a secret that puts Thekla’s future in Nazi-controlled Germany in question.

The novel deftly handles issues of complicity in the Nazi regime, mutual responsibility, and human compassion. I thought the flashbacks were more compelling and were more completely developed than the scenes from 1934, which seemed more stream of consciousness and a bit disjointed. There is a lot of German language in the novel and while most of it is glossed immediately in English (which gives the impression of repetition for those who understand deutsch) there are some passages which remain untranslated and apparently prove difficult to those who are unfamiliar with German (but I remember suffering the same fate when reading an Hercule Poirot novel in my pre-francophone days). While all of her Burgdorf novels stand alone, there are characters who recurr peripherally, so for the reader it’s a little bit like going home. It's not a perfect book, but it's enjoyable nonetheless, all the more so for Burgdorf aficionados and those who want to understand what life might have been like in small-town Germany in the years leading up to World War II.