Testing the Conscience of a Village Under the Nazis
NYT Sunday Book Review
All novelists are godlike. Sovereign creators of worlds they populate with beings wrought from something less than dust and rib, they set events in motion and determine their consequences. The situation is less ideal than it sounds: omnipotence can be a dreary limitation. That’s why the best novelists are also childlike. Bent over impalpable dollhouses, moving their lips while they rearrange the furniture and figures, they give themselves over to such deep play that their stories read less like a premeditated imposition than obedience to the whispered suggestions of the universe.
Ursula Hegi belongs to this second category, and she attends not to a single dollhouse but to an entire imagined village. Again and again, she has returned to this setting, investing it with renewed curiosity and a desire to feel her way down new paths, coming at many of the same rooms and characters, even the same story lines, from different angles. One senses in Hegi a willingness to lose herself in play, in the service of play. So it’s fitting that her latest work is concerned in part with the awful, awe-full seriousness of children’s play.
“Children and Fire,” is the fourth novel Hegi has set in Burgdorf, a German village “hundreds of kilometers” from Berlin where everyone seems to know everyone else — and where that knowing entails a multigenerational grasp of the history, secrets and myths that make up each person’s lineage. This is a village with a chorus of old women who say things like “During those times when there was an abundance of dying, there was also an abundance of poetry.” It’s a village in which “the taxidermist gave glass eyes to the children . . . on St. Martin’s Day, not sweets or apples like other merchants.” It’s a village with a chess club and a pigeon club, a “midwife to the dying” who reads verses at the bedsides of those drawing their final breaths, a village with an “unknown benefactor” who slips inside people’s houses to deposit, uncannily, the very items they’ve been pining for: roller skates, a phonograph, a block of cheese. But lest Burgdorf sound a little too picturesque and gemütlich, the village is also — like any place, like every place — home to cruelty and cowardice and harm, qualities Hegi makes all the more disturbing by locating them in both large-scale events and in the vicissitudes of daily life, in the personages of the well-meaning, the hard-working, the innocent.
Much of the narrative unfolds over a single day: Feb. 27, 1934, the first anniversary of the burning of the Reichstag. This fire, which destroyed the Parliament building in Berlin and for which a Communist was accused of arson, has allowed the Nazis to consolidate their power. By the time the novel begins, many Burgdorf boys have joined the Hitler-Jugend. Books have been burned in the town square. Jewish families are leaving. The remaining Jewish children must now attend a segregated school in the synagogue, and a beloved Jewish teacher has lost her job. This firing proves pivotal, setting the story in motion — although we will have to wait almost until the novel’s end to learn exactly what happened, to see how deeply it continues to affect the protagonist, Thekla Jansen.
A former student of the dismissed teacher, Thekla has agreed to take over her mentor’s class of fourth-grade boys, “knowing she was doing something wrong” but rationalizing the decision as a way to “save the position” until the older teacher can “come back.” Thekla’s guilt and subsequent efforts to make amends for her betrayal (while simultaneously denying it to herself) shape everything that ensues, from how she relates to the day’s events to her pressing need to understand her own past. Alternating sections of the book exhume that past, tracing the story of her birth and parentage, her parents’ beginnings and those of the townspeople whose lives intersect with hers in true Burgdorfian fashion.
Hegi follows Thekla as she struggles to divert her thoughts from acknowledging the great ugliness looming over Germany, repeatedly redirecting her attention to more immediate exigencies: her class of 9- and 10-year-olds. “She loves them all: the boys with crossed eyes and the boys with crooked teeth; the brainy boys and the beautiful boys; the boys from good families and the boys with Rotznasen — runny noses,” and even the bullies, in whom she seeks out what there is to praise, to nurture. She recites poems to them and takes them on walks. She wants to teach them courage, tries to impress on them her former teacher’s lesson that “we can alter fate,” that “for us, as humans, there is choice.” Yet Hegi reveals, with fine, damning precision, that choosing the right course is anything but easy. Writ large or small, the same complicated human impulses distort the picture. On the playground as in Parliament, fear thrives alongside love, the giddy thrill of power alongside the burn of shame.
In this novel as in others (particularly “Stones From the River,” many of whose characters show up here; also, notably, in “Tearing the Silence,” her nonfiction exploration of German identity after the Holocaust), Hegi makes a considerable effort to engage our moral imagination. Her aim is signaled in the opening lines: “A winter morning in 1934. Imagine frost on the windowpanes of the schoolhouse in this village by the Rhein, milk blossoms of frost.”
By addressing the reader directly, Hegi implicitly conveys an intention to reach beyond the bounds of fiction. At best, this is like inviting us to kneel beside the toy village along with her, involving us more deeply in the fluid flow of her story. At other times, though, the urge leads us astray. Occasionally, Hegi can’t resist pointing out the parallels between events in little Burgdorf and those on a grand scale. When the children gang up on a weaker classmate, Thekla intervenes, only to realize that “any moment now, they may turn on her, no longer individual boys she can guide but a pack. . . . It comes to her how, with the government, too, she believed she could manage it, yet once unleashed, it was overtaking her, all of them.” The novel falters under the pedantry of such moments, but thankfully they are rare.
And what is it Hegi means us to apprehend? Not simply that each of us harbors the capacity for wrongdoing or that insisting on a divide between good and bad people is itself harmful. We are, she shows us — sadly, tenderly — incapable of not doing wrong. Yet she also hints at the many forms our redemption can take: imagining, doubting, telling our truths, gathering together to listen to one another’s “tales around the flames.”
Leah Hager Cohen’s latest novel, “The Grief of Others,” will be published in September.
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