The dazzling, dangerous world of a 20th century spy

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Hey there, I'm Matea Roach. You're listening to Bookends. Usually the people I speak with on this program are best known for their literary work, but if you've ever heard the name David Berwald before, it was actually probably in relation to music. David spent almost 50 years as a singer, songwriter, and film music composer.

His hit songs range from the 1986 chart-topping Welcome to the Boomtown to the Golden Globe-nominated Come What May for Moulin Rouge. So if you watched Tessa N. Scott's long program in Pyeongchang, you actually have David Bearwald to thank for that in a way.

Through the decades, he's also collaborated with some major musical names like Joni Mitchell, Sheryl Crow, and Ricky Lee Jones. But now David Bearwald has written a novel, and that's what brings him to this program. That novel is called The Fire Agent, and it's based on the life of his grandfather, Ernst

Berwald. In the book, Ernst is German, Jewish, skilled at music and languages, and as it turns out, also skilled at spying. His work takes him across three continents, through two world wars, and into the Cold

War. There's been so much historical fiction written about these time periods, but David gives us genuinely a different perspective that I had not seen before on the first half of the 20th century, which made for a very exciting read. David Bearwald joins me today

for this conversation from the Hudson Valley in New York State. David, welcome to the program. Thanks so much for joining us. Well, thank you for having me. It's a delight. Well, congratulations on the novel. I want to start by talking about something you mentioned in the acknowledgements, where you say a speech that your grandfather gave to a spy school in

San Francisco in 1943 is what started you on the journey of writing this book. What was it about that moment in particular that inspired this novel? Well, it was a lot of things, you know. Largely among them was what I saw happening to the political system in the United States. That was quite a propulsive machine. But yeah, it was probably the most significant clue I discovered

when I discovered the artifacts that sort of led to me doing this. It was the speech he gave at that spy school or whatever you want to call it, that really showed to me that he actually was a trusted member of the planning of the firebombing of Tokyo, which meant that he was a highly placed American agent

for quite some time, because he was a dual enemy alien at the time. He had extremely detailed information on the firebombing of Tokyo,

which would not happen for another 18 months. Yeah, so he has all this detailed information about the firebombing of Tokyo, But he's a German Jew living in Japan and integrated into that society.

Yeah. According to U.S. intelligence, he was a dual enemy alien. You know, and it wasn't just him, my father, too. The FBI had both the German and the Japanese desks following the whole family around in San Francisco. I mean, it's so fascinating.

I want to ask, though, I guess, how did you know your grandfather? Because this is kind of like you have all this information that's about what his work was, his involvement in the war, his involvement in espionage. What was your understanding of him just as a guy, as a person? He died eight years before I was born, at least.

Yeah, I never met him. You know, and nobody ever really talked about him much. And, you know, and when they did, there was always a sort of asterisk next to his name, you know. He wasn't entirely respectable, I think.

That was the impression I had. And, you know, there were a lot of just lies being told as well, you know, not lies really, but lies of omission. It's certainly my father always said, oh, yeah, you know, your grandfather sold ink in Japan. You know, and I always thought of him as like some guy, you know, selling ink at a store or something.

Yeah, just like a sort of regular businessman, nothing much to see here. Right. And then I read another memoir of someone who was there. And that's where I learned that Ernst was actually the director of IG Farben in Asia.

He wasn't just some guy, you know. A regular salesman. No, he was running this incredibly complicated operation there. Yeah, IG Farben being like the major chemical company, right, based in Germany.

Yeah, IG Farben was, you know, it was basically the heart and muscle of the German economy, among other things. And they went very much into the Nazi camp. They built Auschwitz and they made the poison gas they used in the camps. And, you know, they were war criminals. And, you know, some of them were hanged at the end of the war, but not enough. David, I want to take us back to where we first meet Ernst in your novel, which is back in Germany. It's 1900. He's graduating from this high school in Frankfurt called the Philanthropen, which is a fascinating school, not your typical high school.

There's students graduating with jobs that have been sort of hand-selected for them. Can you tell me a bit more about that place and what made it so unique? Well, that was one of the clues, actually, that I found. You know, I'd heard about this school, the philanthropine. My great grandfather was the headmaster of the school. And it was a school that had been founded by the Rothschild banking family, the patriarch of the Rothschild banking family.