Inheritance, Espionage, History

Join musician, songwriter, and novelist David Baerwald in conversation with anthropologist Cari Borja on Baerwald's debut novel, The Fire Agent.

The novel begins with a real-life discovery. As wildfires threatened his family home in Los Angeles, David Baerwald salvaged a series of long-forgotten boxes belonging to his grandfather. Inside were a spy camera, a samurai sword, photographs, and diaries—fragments of a life that would take seven years to reconstruct and ultimately lead him to sell his music catalog to tell the story.

At the center is Ernst Baerwald: a German Jew born in 1900, educated in Frankfurt, and recruited into espionage under the cover of working for IG Farben. Sent to Tokyo, he trained with a samurai master, rose to lead the company’s Asia division, and moved between worlds as both cultural ambassador and covert operative. As fascism tightened its grip across Germany and Japan, Ernst faced a series of impossible choices—his life intersecting with some of the most defining events of the twentieth century, including the Rape of Nanking, the firebombing of Japan, the fate of Jewish refugees in Shanghai, and the early formations of modern intelligence networks.

Together, Baerwald and Borja will explore the terrain beneath the novel: the pull of buried lineage, the ethics of storytelling, and the strange, often disruptive force of uncovering a past that reshapes the present. What does it mean to carry a story you didn’t know was yours, and what are we called to do once we find it? This will be an evening about the stories we inherit and the ones that insist on being told.

David Baerwald is an award-winning singer-songwriter, composer, and recording artist, best known for the album on which he collaborated with David Ricketts, Boomtown. He has also collaborated with Joni Mitchell, Rickie Lee Jones, Sheryl Crow, Hans Zimmer, and Baz Luhrmann, among others. Baerwald spent a formative part of his childhood in Tokyo, grew up in Los Angeles, and currently lives in New York’s Hudson Valley. The Fire Agent is his first novel.

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