Daniel Kehlmann rightly says in the afterword to the new translation of Cordelia Edvardson’s biography “Burned Child Looking for the Fire”, which was first published in 1984, that it is terrible reading. The hint that is often given too easily trigger warning is actually appropriate here: “You have to warn people at risk about this text.” He shows a mother-daughter relationship taken to an unbearable extreme and details from the reality of the extermination camps “that we would rather not know – but that we have to know; because since it happened, we have no right to ignorance.” .
It was a good decision to include this short, horrified afterword in the audio book, spoken specifically by Ulrich Noethen. What Kehlmann says is true: even or especially in Nina Kunzendorf’s reserved, almost quiet interpretation, the text develops a force, a maelstrom-like attraction that you first have to cope with. As short as “Burned Child is Looking for the Fire” is, the book, which is described as a novel, is cleverly structured. The report of the deportation of the young, adolescent girl (Cordelia is only fourteen years old) in 1943, first to Theresienstadt, then to Auschwitz, is contrasted with the family history, which is the premise of the tragedy.
Only step by step does the child understand his deadly situation
It is an almost ancient curse, because Edvardson’s mother was the writer Elisabeth Langgässer, the product of an extramarital affair, whose biological father was Jewish. Langgässer also had an illegitimate child with a Jew, Cordelia’s father Hermann Heller (whose famous name does not appear in the book). In addition to the double civil stigma, there has been racial persecution since 1933: Langgässer is considered a “half-Jewish,” Cordelia is a “full-Jewish.”
The cursed nature of the constellation becomes all the more gruesome when it is kept quiet about the child. Only step by step does it understand its deadly situation, while in the foreground a façade of cultivated bourgeoisie is still maintained. The tension between foreground and background – much more than a plot tension – is wrenching. It culminates in the terrible moment in which the child has to turn down a possible rescue – the mother has arranged an adoption that would give Cordelia Spanish citizenship – so that the mother is not transported away in her place. There is hardly another scene in all of world literature that is so terrible and yet so laconic. One thinks of Euripides’ Alcestis, who goes to the underworld for her husband. The fact that the highly Catholic author Elisabeth Langgässer used her daughter’s experiences in the camps as the subject of a novel after the war borders on the unfathomable.
Nina Kunzendorf foregoes any acting in her lecture
The depiction of the camp world is framed by a private calamity that would be horrific even without racial persecution. But the fact that this is inextricably linked to the collective fate of the Jews makes the world of the book hellish. Edvardson’s strength is also shown in his complete ruthlessness towards himself. A second, actually unbearable scene shows the girl, dressed for the first time in a beautiful ball gown, whose family background is still a secret, being attacked at a wedding under swastika flags by, of all people, a pretty SS man. An officer is whirled through the air in a dance and loses control of his bodily functions out of fear.
One understands that only tonelessness is appropriate when faced with such shaming. Nina Kunzendorf foregoes any acting in her lecture. Edvardson’s book is cold, proud and bitter. A look at the reality of the camps shows, in contrast to the cliché of a clinically clean extermination machine, a world of licentiousness, of neglect, in which everything is allowed in each case, for those who have power, even in the prisoner society. There is mercy, to be sure, but it is so scattered and lost that there is hardly any warmth radiating from it.
Cordelia Edvardson: Burnt child seeks fire. Unabridged reading with Nina Kunzendorf and an afterword by Daniel Kehlmann, read by Ulrich Noethen. 3 hours 52 minutes. Argon audio book, Berlin 2023, 22 euros.
(Photo: Argon)
Like other survivors, Primo Levi for example, Edvardson also focuses on continuing to live. And here the book takes on an unexpected relevance and urgency. Edvardson, who emigrated to Sweden after the war, became a correspondent in Israel and an Israeli citizen. There she sees Jewish soldiers fighting in 1973, and the very fact that there is such a thing: a state for the Jews that has soldiers, conveys a feeling of relief much more than the rescue from the extermination camp. How desperately necessary the existence of the State of Israel became for those who had escaped annihilation, not only for reasons of protection, but in the deeper sense of self-rescue from powerlessness, can be understood here once and for all. If you have gone through the hell of the previous report.
The last page of the book is a response to the most famous book by Cordelia Edvardson’s mother, Elisabeth Langgässer’s novel “The Indelible Seal”. There the redemption of the Jews through Christianization is imagined. But the daughter writes: “She” (the narrator, who speaks of herself in the third person) “was a part of her people, a member of the bond of the indelible seal.”