Fatherland
A Memoir of War, Conscience, and Family Secrets
1 of 1 copy available
“Fatherland maintains the momentum of the best mysteries and a commendable balance.”—The New York Times
“Unflinching and illuminating . . . Bilger’s haunting memoir reminds us, the past is prologue to who we are, as well as who we choose to be.”—The Wall Street Journal
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Kirkus Reviews
One spring day in northeastern France, Burkhard Bilger’s mother went to the town of Bartenheim, where her father was posted during the Second World War. As a historian, she had spent years studying the German occupation of France, yet she had never dared to investigate her own family’s role in it. She knew only that her father was a schoolteacher who was sent to Bartenheim in 1940 and ordered to reeducate its children—to turn them into proper Germans, as Hitler demanded. Two years later, he became the town’s Nazi Party chief.
There was little left from her father’s era by the time she visited. But on her way back to her car, she noticed an old man walking nearby. He looked about the same age her father would have been if he was still alive. She hurried over to introduce herself and told him her father’s name, Karl Gönner. “Do you happen to remember him?” she said. The man stared at her, dumbstruck. “Well, of course!” he said. “I saved his life, didn’t I?”
Fatherland is the story behind that story—the riveting account of Bilger’s nearly ten-year quest to uncover the truth about his grandfather. Was he guilty or innocent, a war criminal or a man who risked his life to shield the villagers? Long admired for his profiles in The New Yorker, Bilger brings the same open-hearted curiosity to his family history and the questions it raises: What do we owe the past? How can we make peace with it without perpetuating its wrongs?
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
May 2, 2023 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9781101888926
- File size: 259060 KB
- Duration: 08:59:42
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Starred review from February 13, 2023
A writer investigates his grandfather’s enigmatic wartime career as a Nazi Party official in this knotty family history. New Yorker writer Bilger (Noodling for Flatheads) explores the life of his grandfather Karl Gönner, who was posted as a school principal and Nazi Party chief to the village of Bartenheim in the occupied French province of Alsace, an ethnically German region the Nazis annexed during WWII. After the war, Gönner was imprisoned in France and charged with murdering an anti-German farmer who was beaten and shot by police. Bilger traces the contradictory strands in his grandfather’s character: while some Bartenheimers viewed him as the personification of Nazi villainy, others credited him with having shielded them from the abuses of the occupation regime. Bilger’s atmospheric account probes the complex ethical ambiguities of wartime Alsace and his mother’s harrowing childhood experience of the defeat and devastation of Germany, conveying both narrative strands with a fine moral irony couched in prose that’s both psychologically shrewd and matter-of-fact. (“A reasonable Nazi.... What seemed an oxymoron to me was self-evident to the villagers in Bartenheim.”) The result is a fascinating excavation of the twisted veins of good and evil in one man’s soul. Photos. Agent: Elyse Cheney, Cheney Literary. -
In his first audiobook, NEW YORKER writer Burkhard Bilger proves to be a highly effective narrator of this tangled family history--a story of tacit suppression and a reporter's personal quest. From defeat in one war, through the Depression, to Nazism and another war, Bilger's grandparents were typical Germans, rooted in the German borderlands with Alsatian France. Bilger's maternal grandfather's role in the war is the buried core of his narrative, but this is also a journey of recognition and acceptance, a paradigm for so many German families' struggles since the last war. Bilger's personal investment in that story and his own links to its protagonist provide the core for this vivid portrayal of everyday people caught between nations, and between duty and conscience. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
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