David Baerwald holds up his most precious possession so that it’s visible on our video conference: a very old violin in a very old, battered case.
Baerwald, an award-winning musician, film composer and songwriter who called Los Angeles home for nearly four decades, doesn’t play the violin. During his years with the Tuesday Music Club (immortalized in the Sheryl Crow album “Tuesday Night Music Club”), he played guitar. But the violin belonged to his grandfather Ernst Baerwald — and it plays an important role in his recently published debut novel, “The Fire Agent.”
Not every successful artist turns to a new medium at age 65 or moves to the opposite coast (Baerwald now lives in Kingston, N.Y.). Then again, not every artist has a family history quite like Baerwald’s, one that includes Germany and Japan, two world wars, a 1920s throuple and Beethoven’s Ninth.
On the Shelf
The Fire Agent
By David Baerwald
Spiegel & Grau: 624 pages, $32
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The violin in Baerwald’s hands was the one his German-Jewish grandfather played as a Japanese prisoner of war in the Bandō camp at Tokushima during World War I. “It’s a very serviceable violin,” Baerwald notes. “A friend of mine played it for some years in the Long Beach Symphony. When my grandfather was older and wealthy, he bought a better violin, which was lost in a fire. But this is the one that matters.”
It matters because Ernst Baerwald was a founding member of a German POW orchestra that chose Beethoven’s great symphony as their premiere work — a performance so moving that it began a Japanese tradition marking the December holidays that persist to this day. Baerwald’s grandfather not only kept his violin throughout the war in which he fought; when he defected from the Third Reich in 1941, he placed it in an oiled bag and brought it with him via an oceanic escape.
Ernst Baerwald’s odyssey from a cushy childhood in Frankfurt to his final days in a beautiful Berkeley mansion, with a long sojourn in Tokyo along the way, reads like, well, a novel. Sent to an elite boys’ prep school in Germany, then on to a seriously disciplined Milanese dojo where he was trained by a Japanese sensei, Ernst was a prisoner in Japan for four years during World War I.
Those details might have been easy to find, but it wasn’t until David Baerwald went to clear out his parents’ house in Brentwood that he discovered papers showing that his grandfather had not only been the head of the Tokyo office of I.G. Farben, but that he had given a major speech to the nascent Office of Strategic Services (precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency) in 1943 that laid out the plan for the firebombing of Japan.
For the record:
10:56 a.m. June 8, 2026An earlier version of this story said Ernst Baerwald’s 1943 speech to the OSS urged use of the atomic bomb on Japan. It laid out the plan for the firebombing of Japan. It also said Kurt Baerwald joined the CIA. He joined the U.S. Army.
He also urged them not to allow partnerships between large corporations and the military, the way the German scientific community and government did with I.G. Farben and Krupp Armaments and Steel. “Any business that makes peace with Fascism will become Fascist,” he said. “And once Fascism captures economic control, then a Fascist coup will inevitably follow to seize political power. Germany, Italy, Rumania, Japan, Spain the story is the same. We cannot allow it to become the story of America.”
When Baerwald read that, “I was really alarmed, in the moment,” he says, realizing how closely tied his grandfather had been to the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “But it gave me a plan.” He wanted to show how deeply his grandfather had become integrated into Japanese culture.
“One of my characters tells Ernst that he has ‘yuyo,’ which might best be described as grace,” says Baerwald. “Its Japanese meaning is closer to the state of a river rock that has been washed over and tumbled thousands of times, so that it’s both distinct, and a meaningful part of its environment.” To some extent, the author understands “yuyo” personally, having lived in Japan and been educated at its International School until age 12, when his family moved back to California, “although I wouldn’t claim it for myself,” he says.
That move, in the early 1970s, may have led to his career in music. “When we got back to the States, I was extremely troubled. Call me a fish out of water, I guess. I went through a period of voluntary mutism — I think they call it selective communication. I didn’t talk to anyone, especially not to my family. My hearing would sort of come and go at will, too.” His mother understood he seemed to like his sister’s acoustic guitar, so she suggested he take some lessons. “At the time, it wasn’t at all a career path, it was a way of reassembling my brain so that I could cope with the reality I was experiencing, finding a way to communicate again.”
Part of what he was experiencing, which he knows a great deal more about now, was feeling “the secrets that were the engine propelling my family.” After Ernst’s long career of service and deception, David Baerwald’s father, Kurt, entered the U.S. Army during WWII and later became a professor of Japanese studies at both in Japan and at UCLA. The effects on their family of five still reverberate. Baerwald’s mother eventually became a clinical psychologist who specializes in trauma. “I had to separate myself completely from my family in order to survive,” he says.
However, what stalled the writing of this first novel were the two decades he initially left out, which included Ernst, Lina and their lover Chizuko being a ménage à trois in a 1923 Tokyo dealing with the aftermath of an earthquake and wildfires.
Although “The Fire Agent” is based on Ernst’s history, not all of the facts are congruent. The wrestling coach at the American school in Tokyo, Ernst’s glamorous courtesan Chizuko, and many of the characters are composites. Speaking of that courtesan, Baerwald says it’s true that his grandfather and grandmother cohabited with a Japanese woman for many years, even after Lina and Ernst had a child together. “I found so many letters between my grandfather and my grandmother and I think they truly loved each other, and I think they truly loved that woman, too.”
That didn’t make it easy for Baerwald to write about that love. “My German grandmother, on whom Lina is partly based, was terrifying,” he says. “It was easier to write about her sex life with my grandfather and their Japanese lover by creating composite characters.”
He didn’t want to leave out their sex life, though, or that of others.
“Every generation of young people thinks they invented sex, right? But nothing is new — and it never gets old. Here’s an example. One of my godfathers, Sam Jameson, was the L.A. Times bureau chief in Tokyo for decades. He was also the doyenne, if you will, of the cross-dressing community in that city. It was this rich world he was a part of that nobody knew anything about. I based the character I call Bünheimer on him.”
Some of the worlds Baerwald has uncovered through his family’s papers are rich and sensual; others, like the POW camp where Ernst was held and the speech he gave to the OSS analysts at the Presidio in the 1940s, are stark and terrible. While he renders all appropriately, he’s aware that his perspective remains that of a white Western man. How did he gain the courage to write about people of other races, cultures and genders? He says it comes from something he did when he was on a swim team in high school. “The psychological trick I would play on myself at each meet was to imagine the water I’d dive into was freezing cold,” he says. “And of course it wasn’t. Which was such a relief and kept me going.”
Like his grandfather’s beloved violin, Baerwald has taken a deep dive into previously unknown waters — and survived. As he works on his second novel, he’s better prepared for airing family secrets and the publishing world. Ever the musician, he likens his first round with it to a Shepard tone, the auditory illusion that can make listeners feel like two notes one octave apart are constantly ascending or descending in pitch (Baerwald has worked with famed composer Hans Zimmer, who used the tone in, for example, “The Dark Knight”).
“A Shepard tone can make you feel like you’re flying. Or sinking,” he says. “At this point in my life and art, I prefer to have my feet firmly on the ground.”
