A New Yorker staff writer, investigates his grandfather, a Nazi
Party Chief, in this "unflinching, gorgeously written, and deeply
moving exploration of morality, family, and war” (Patrick Radden
Keefe, author of Empire of Pain) ‘The book we need right now’
Atul Gawande, author of Being Mortal What do we owe the past? How
to make peace with a dark family history? Burkhard Bilger hardly
knew his grandfather growing up. His parents immigrated to Oklahoma
from Germany after World War II, and though his mother was an
historian, she rarely talked about her father or what he did during
the war. Then one day a packet of letters arrived from Germany,
yellowing with age, and a secret history began to unfold. Karl
Gönner was a schoolteacher and Nazi party member from the Black
Forest. In 1940, he was sent to a village in occupied France and
tasked with turning its children into proper Germans. A fervent
Nazi when the war began, he grew close to the villagers over the
next four years, till he came to think of himself as their
protector, shielding them from his own party’s brutality. Yet he
was arrested in 1946 and accused of war crimes. Was he guilty or
innocent? A vicious collaborator or just an ordinary man,
struggling to atone for his country’s crimes? Bilger goes to
Germany to find out. What follows is a literary suspense story: a
tale of chance encounters and serendipitous discoveries in villages
and dusty archives across Germany and France. Intimate and
far-reaching, Fatherland is an extraordinary odyssey through the
great upheavals of the past century, tracing one family’s path
through history’s wreckage. For readers of Bart van Es’s The
Cut Out Girl or Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with the Amber Eyes,
this is a story of middle lands, torn allegiances and loaded family
inheritance.
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