Every Book Is a Danger

Catharina Irma Dessaur, Ronnie van Rijk, Atara, Reinier or Andreas Burnier (1931-2002) had as many names as she led lives. Alongside her work as a professor of criminology, she published as a novelist, essayist and poet. She wrote about being lost in a woman’s body and in doing so was one of the pioneers of homosexual and transgender emancipation, much in the same way that Susan Sontag was in the United States. She spoke out on feminism, discrimination, genetic manip- ulation and the relationship between spirituality and science. At the same time Burnier was tormented by fears originating in the war years, when she went into hiding from the Nazis at no less than sixteen different addresses.