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The fourth book in the Burgdorf Pattern. Though more than 15 years have exceeded since Ursula Hegi's Rocks from the River captivated critics and viewers alike, it keeps its recognition, is on academics reading lists, and is still adopted by reserve groups. Also set in Burgdorf, Germany, Hegi's Children and Flame tells the story of a single day that will forever enhance the lives of the townspeople. At the primary of this amazing book is the question of how one educator - gifted and joyful, keen and inventive - can become seduced by propaganda through the early weeks of Hitler's routine and encourage her 10-year-old students to become listed on the Hitler-Jugend using its hikes and songs and bonfires. Membership, she believes, will be a step toward better schools, better apprenticeships. How can a female we admire choose a course we don't admire? A lot has improved for the educator, Thekla Jansen, and the people of Burgdorf in the entire year since the parliament building burnt. Thekla's lover, Emil Hesping, is sure the Nazis did it to style the communists. But Thekla is convinced what she hears on the radio, that the communists established the flame, and she's happy to relinquish a few of her freedoms to keep her instructing position. She's always taken her moral courage for awarded, but when each silent contract chips away at that courage, she recognizes she must reclaim it. Hegi funnels pivotal moments in history through the experience of individual characters: Thekla's mother, who works as a housekeeper for a Jewish family; her employers, Michel and Ilse Abramowitz; Thekla's mentally ill father; Trudi Montag and her father, Leo Montag; Frulein Siderova, midwife to the dying; and the students who adore their young educator. As Ursula Hegi creates along that edge where sorrow and bliss meet, she shows us how one culture - educated, ethnic, compassionate - can slip into possible thats fabricated by propaganda and handled by fear, what sort of surge of national unity can be manipulated into the dehumanization of the perceived enemy and the justification of torture and murder. Gorgeously rendered and emotionally taut, Children and Flame confirms Ursula Hegi's position as one of the most distinguished writers of her era.
