Publishers Weekly
★ 02/13/2023
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. (May)
From the Publisher
Bilger sifts through his German grandfather’s confounding identities—teacher, soldier, party chief, traitor . . . Fatherland maintains the momentum of the best mysteries and a commendable balance, considering all the forms of intergenerational trauma present here . . . His subject matter is sensitive, but his sensuality remains intact; you can almost taste the schnitzel.”—The New York Times
“Unflinching. 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
“An elegant and ambivalent book animated by an insoluble mystery.”—The Washington Post
“A profoundly haunting work of historical investigation, a reporter’s dogged inquiry into the tangled history of his Nazi grandfather . . . Fatherland is an unflinching, gorgeously written, and deeply moving exploration of morality, family, and war.”—Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Empire of Pain
“Burkhard Bilger has long been one of our great storytellers: an acute observer, an intrepid reporter, and a writer of unmatched grace. Fatherland is that rare book—a finely etched memoir with the powerful sweep of history.”—David Grann, author of Killers of the Flower Moon
“Fatherland is the book we need right now. Gripping, gorgeously written, and deeply humane, it’s both a moving personal history and a formidable piece of detective work. Bilger wrestles with one of the essential questions of our time: How can we make peace with our ancestors’ past?”—Atul Gawande, author of Being Mortal
“Fatherland is an unforgettable book: a family saga set on a global stage. I could not put it down.”—Reza Aslan, author of Zealot and An American Martyr in Persia
“Fatherland is a masterful and riveting weave of the personal and the monumental, of ordinary Germans’ struggles with questions of identity, responsibility, and sheer survival in a world gone mad.”—Joel F. Harrington, Centennial Professor of History at Vanderbilt University and author of The Faithful Executioner
“Fatherland reads like a novel even as it provides important contributions to the history of the Second World War. His book is both a plausible and well-supported argument about the guilt and innocence of his grandfather, and a model for others trying to resolve their own painful family histories.”—Eric A. Johnson, Professor of History at Central Michigan University and author of Nazi Terror
“[A] powerful investigation of morality . . . a vivid portrait of [Bilger’s] grandfather and his times [and] a fascinating, deeply researched work of Holocaust-era history . . . a moving, humane biography.”—Kirkus Review (starred review)
“Bilger shares his long journey of historical investigation in his exceptionally well-written and compulsively readable Fatherland.”—BookPage, (starred review)
“A fascinating excavation of the twisted veins of good and evil in one man’s soul . . .”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
June 2023 - AudioFile
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
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2023-01-12
Discovering that his grandfather was a Nazi imprisoned for war crimes, the author explores his life.
Bilger, a veteran staff writer at the New Yorker, knew that both of his parents lived in World War II–era Germany, moving to the U.S. in 1962. Grandfather Karl, released after the war, resumed life as a schoolmaster until his death in 1979. Despite family visits, the war was rarely discussed. “Like most Germans her age,” writes the author in this powerful investigation of morality, his mother “talked about [the war] as she might tell a sinister fairy tale: in rough, woodcut images, black and white gouged with red.” Matters changed in 2005 when she received a package of letters from the village where Karl was stationed. The author traveled to Europe repeatedly, researching archives and interviewing villagers, and the result is a vivid portrait of his grandfather and his times. Karl lived in the Black Forest in the southwest, a region that was overwhelmingly Catholic and rural. It had no industry and few Jews, and it remained mostly impoverished until well after 1945. Born in 1899, Karl was drafted in 1917. A year later, he “lost his eye in the Ardennes,” and he spent the interwar years as a village schoolteacher. After Germany’s conquest of France, he was sent to a town in neighboring Alsace to teach French children to be loyal Germans. In 1942, he was promoted to local Nazi Party chief. In four years of German occupation, no one from his town was sent to concentration camps, and “no families were deported, no political prisoners executed.” This did not prevent him from suffering when the French returned with vengeance in mind. Kurt was imprisoned off and on for over two years and only released after a trial in which a crowd of townspeople testified in his defense. A fluid writer, Bilger crafts a fascinating, deeply researched work of Holocaust-era history.
A moving, humane biography of a minor Nazi official who did his job without the usual horrors.