“Gebranntes Kind sucht das Feuer” by Cordelia Edvardson, 2023.
Übersetzt aus dem Schwedischen von Ursel Allenstein, Hanser Verlag.
In his afterword, Daniel Kehlmann, describes the sheer visceral horror of reading this slight memoir of fragments of a childhood culminating in an actual horror; of confusion, betrayal and a young girl’s fight for survival – from the creeping Nazi terror of Berlin, to Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. And having survived, reflections on the just that: the burden of being an Überlebende. It didn’t have to be, but Cordelia Edvardson had a life; a long, productive life – in Sweden, in Israel as the Jerusalem correspondent for Svenska Dagbladet, as a mother. I hope she also found some happiness and peace of mind.
I did not know Cordelia Edvardson (1929-2012), and her Wikipedia entry is brief and the accuracy of which I can not vouch for. (The German entry is longer but also confusing. At the Svenskt kvinnobiografiskt lexikon, a Swedish site, is a good biographical overview.) But her mother is Elisabeth Langgässer, a writer of some renown in the post-war years who has mostly disappeared from literary discourse in Germany – for good reason, Kehlmann says; has not dated well, he says; Catholic mystic, he says. Her name is only known to me through acquaintances that live in a street with her name in the Rhineland. I must say, after reading her daughter’s book and Kehlmann’s remarks I feel absolutely no inclination to pursue her any further. Only to wonder why there are streets, schools and literary awards in her honor.
Daniel Kehlmann makes the case for Edvardson’s book being one of the rare and most powerful first hand accounts of the industrial killing machine of the Holocaust, and one wonders why after its original publication in 1984 it did not find its place in the culture of remembrance. Or why it does not seem to have been translated into English (?). One wonders whether her familial situation, as a precursor to the events she describes or in the aftermath, was not just a little too complicated; whether she was just not Jewish enough; or was it that a mother’s betrayal, or at least her egocentricity, was not just too contrary to the maternal norms?
Above I referred to this book as a memoir, the publisher’s call it a Roman, that is, a literary novel; this something Kehlmann also wonders at. Edvardson does write in the third person, a narrative device most associated with fiction, but one could imagine she did so to create some distance from people and events and the emotions they gave rise to and that she had learnt to live with, but which no doubt loomed large still in her inner consciousness, ever threatening to overwhelm. In other words, there is no reason to doubt that das Mädchen in the telling is Cordelia Edvardson.
“Once bitten … twice shy” so it is said in English ; in German the expression is: “Gebranntes Kind scheut das Feuer”- literally, a child once burnt will tend to shy away from fire. But this child, das Mädchen, seeks it out – Gebranntes Kind sucht das Feuer. The imagery is devastating. The flames may no longer burn but the damage caused is never extinguished, nor is the urge, the necessity, to return to the source of her suffering. As if willing the flames to consume her as they did so many others.
An extraordinary account that, however horrendous the content, deserves much wider recognition.