At first, what emerges is the portrait of an ordinary German family in Frankfurt in the 1990s: the father, the mother, the two sisters M. and S., and the eldest son, Nicolas.
But behind this presumed normality, violence proves to be everywhere: within the parental couple, bound together by control and humiliation, and toward the three children, who are manipulated and abused. This violence seems to extend into a German history whose weight is passed down without ever being spoken: a grandfather who was a Wehrmacht soldier and is admired, and a grandmother who lived through the violence of the Russian occupation.
La Brûlure (The Burn) is the story of a man who can no longer avoid the past. Nicolas relives it in his flesh and seeks to wash it away in the white, clean space of a hospital room. He writes it in French, a language unknown to his family, to express what German could neither say nor think, and to try to set something against the pain: a piece of literature.
