“That’s how I would picture fascists: this never-satisfied, dissonant climb to nothing… to ruin.” — David Baerwald

Earlier this month, the historian James M. Scott came on the show to talk about those three deadly days in August 1945 when the Americans dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan. Today we return to that war in the skies above Japan. Only with a fictional twist.

Behind this fiction, however, is the kind of family saga that few novelists have either the nerve or imagination to invent. It concerns three generations of the Baerwalds. In the Thirties, a German Jewish organic chemist called Ernst Baerwald worked for (of all people) I.G. Farben, the company that manufactured the gas used at Auschwitz. A sophisticated Japanophile, Baerwald was Farben’s man in Tokyo, where he hobnobbed with a member of the royal family. American intelligence turned Ernst Baerwald into a spy, using his intimate knowledge of Japan in their firebombing of Tokyo. In exchange, Baerwald fled to the United States with his wife and son Hans, who became a leading authority on 20th century Japanese politics. Hans’ son, David Baerwald, meanwhile, became a platinum-selling musician who has worked with Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Rickie Lee Jones, Sheryl Crow, and Bruce Springsteen.

Growing up in California, David knew little about Ernst. But seven years ago, while clearing out the family home after the Los Angeles fires, he discovered his grandfather’s diaries, photographs, and letters. He found a 1943 speech to the American Intelligence School proving that Ernst, a German Jew who loved Japan, knew the details of the Tokyo firebombing in which 140,000 people died, two years before it happened.

“I have no qualifications as a historian,” David Baerwald confesses. So what followed was The Fire Agent, a 624-page novel loosely imagined around his grandfather’s enigmatic life. But what David brought to this epic was a lyricist’s skill in the kind of musical composition that enabled him to keep characters in play like sections of an orchestra. No wonder then that The Fire Agent is one of the most acclaimed literary debuts of the year. And no wonder that, in our age of looming fascism, The Fire Agent reads as more than just history.

Five Takeaways

• Papers Found in a Fire. During an LA fire, Baerwald found his grandfather’s 1943 intelligence-school speech — proof the man who loved Japan knew the firebombing was coming two years early. The obsession became a novel.

• The Man Who Knew Where the Gas Was. The family’s “dye seller” was Asia director of the cartel supplying IG Farben, mentor to Prince Takamatsu — and the builder of Tokyo’s gas system, who knew every depot in the city he loved.

• “So We Firebombed the Civilians.” 140,000 dead in Tokyo, 65 more cities — while the industrial strip was spared for the postwar economy. And a father and son reconciled only in fiction: “I’ve forgiven him a lot.”

• From Boomtown to The Fire Agent. A lyricist can “write a page on demand”; a composer tracks characters like an orchestra. And Brecht at the surf joint: the émigré LA that made him.

• The Music of Fascism. Limited vocabulary, identical echoes. The sound: Kundera’s kitsch — a music box tortured by Ligeti — resolving into the Shepard tone: “a never-satisfied, dissonant climb to nothing… to ruin.”

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen.

Website: https://keenon.tv/ Substack: https://keenon.substack.com/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@KeenOnShow

Buy The Fire Agent: mcnallyjackson.com

Chapters:

00:00:31 Introduction: from Empire of Ashes to The Fire Agent
00:02:00 Papers found in a fire: the 1943 speech
00:03:18 A grandfather nobody discussed
00:03:51 “Dyestuffs”: the cartel behind IG Farben
00:07:18 Why a novel and not a history?
00:08:47 A lyricist’s confidence: “a page on demand”
00:09:40 Writing a novel like scoring an orchestra
00:11:31 How did a Jewish German survive IG Farben’s Asia desk?
00:12:38 The Tokyo gas system: what Ernst knew
00:14:40 The nearly empty OSS box (“He was a commie”)
00:16:51 A father he never really knew
00:18:09 The invasion that never came: a father’s relief
00:20:48 “So we firebombed the civilians”: Alperovitz and the atrocity
00:22:43 The purge of Japanese leaders: the father’s book
00:26:21 Frankfurt patriots: the complexity of German Jewry
00:28:48 The Philanthropin: raised antifascist before fascism
00:32:04 Brecht on the beach: Santa Monica’s émigré surf joint
00:34:52 McCarthy’s casualty: how the father lost his clearance
00:36:53 Takaichi, Kishi, and the deniers of Nanking
00:38:33 Why the echoes are “impossible to avoid”
00:41:57 What does neo-fascism sound like? Kitsch
00:43:53 The Shepard tone: a dissonant climb to ruin