A Review: “Children and Fire”

Children and Fire

By Ursula Hegi

Scribner, 2011

Released May 24

Those who enjoyed Ursula Hegi’s 1994 bestseller Stones from the River will look forward to her latest offering, Children and Fire. Both novels are set in Nazi Germany, and while the plots are unrelated, some fictional elements recur. Drawing upon her childhood experience in West Germany, Hegi writes with an authority that heightens the tension in her fiction.

Thekla Jansen is a 34-year-old Catholic elementary school teacher in 1934 as Hitler’s regime expands its power in Germany. She has recently replaced her former teacher and mentor whose philosophy of education she had adopted.

Because Jansen has waited for years to be offered this position, she is willing to make moral compromises to maintain it, looking the other way when Hitler’s newly instituted policies affect the lives of her young students, telling herself as many of her neighbors do, that the regime will pass and soon all will return to normal.

Hegi has chosen to tell her story with a narration that alternates between the novel’s present (Tuesday, February 27, 1934) and the past (beginning in 1899 and continuing until 1933). While the focus is on one critical day in the life of her central character, the past chapters serve as dramatic irony, revealing to the reader information that the young teacher sometimes does not know.

As we begin her day, Tuesday, February 27, 1934, we admire the energy, the determination, the idealism, and the charisma of a gifted teacher; as the day progresses and we become aware of the forces in her life that have shaped her, our feelings toward her become more ambivalent, but our empathy remains constant.

For some readers yet another fictional treatment of the Nazi holocaust seems an intellectual overkill. But Hegi’s work does not dredge up familiar horrors. While she abhors the brutal legacy of Adolph Hitler, she at the same time finds ways to criticize the very human failings of the man.

But most important, she avoids a panoramic approach to her subject, instead holding one specific piece of social fabric beneath her writer’s microscope to show the effect of a historic sweep on one person: a teacher who prides herself on shaping the lives for the better of the young boys who are her charges.

The supporting characters in the novel are depicted as richly as is the protagonist. For example, Lotte Jansen, who is a midwife at the St. Margaret Home for unwed pregnant girls, commissions toy makers to carve wooden blocks ostensibly for the illegitimate children to play with; in reality, Lotte Jansen instructs her young charges in the use of them as primitive diaphragms for birth control once their babies have been offered for adoption and the girls return to their former lives.

Ironically, Lotte Jansen’s work provides her with redemption for her own past sin, one that seems to have irrevocably damaged the psyche of her son, a gifted carver of wooden toys. A poignant character, he is selfless in his dealings with others while at the same time struggling with his despair.

The wealthy Herr and Frau Abramowitz are equally complex, dealing with the darkness of their own past through pathetic attempts to find ways to heal and make amends.

As these lives come together, Hitler’s policies multiply like a virus. The major tragedy of the story comes not from the off-stage cruel actions of his soldiers, but rather from something far more insidious and contagious. Subsequently, the plot has metaphorical overtones.

Those in Door County who participated this past winter in the Fahrenheit 451 project will recall that Bradbury was influenced by Hitler’s book-burning policies, a theme that occurs in Hegi’s novel:

“Some books were still smoldering at dawn, but most had disintegrated to ashes when the cleaning crews shoveled them into wheelbarrows, swept the market square, and hauled away the debris.

Yet, the charred remains got tracked throughout the village, got inside your houses, and soiled your floors even if you hadn’t been near the pyre. As the smell of wet ashes seeped through your closed windows and doors, it settled in your bedding, your clothing, your wardrobes. The affront of that smell – flat and nasty – made you want to spit. You believed you’d never get used to it. But despite your ceaseless scrubbing and airing, it would become part of your own smell, in your breath, on your skin, increasingly familiar.” (May, 1933)

Ursula Hegi continues to be a master storyteller, and in this, her 12th book, she again dazzles readers with her craftsmanship.