Fatherland

November 1, 2022

After World War II, Bilger's family moved from Germany to Oklahoma, and his mother never spoke of her father. Finally, Bilger, a New Yorker staff writer, learned that his grandfather had been a Nazi Party member, sent to occupied France to turn one village's children into "proper Germans," though eventually he sought to protect them. In 1946, he was accused of war crimes. Through research, interviews, and travel, Bilger reconstructs his grandfather's war activities while asking key questions about truth and responsibility. Big buzz.

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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.

May 15, 2023
A package of old letters sends New Yorker staff writer Bilger (Noodling for Flatheads, 2000) hunting for the truth about his maternal grandfather's enigmatic wartime record in Nazi Germany. In this gripping, beautifully written memoir, Bilger recounts his decade-long search through memories and paper trails. A story slowly emerges: Karl G�nner returned from WWI disillusioned, convinced the world needed "radical repair." Incensed by conditions in his native Black Forest, he embraced National Socialism. Sent to teach in a village in occupied France, leaving his family behind, he was later appointed local party chief. After liberation, he was detained and accused of war crimes. How to square Karl's loyalty to the Reich with testimony that he was a "reasonable Nazi" who took risks to protect those in his charge? Fatherland is "part history and part storytelling." The history is frank and insightful about Karl's contradictions, the storytelling evocative and richly detailed. This is one man's history and one family's story that begs the universal question of how we, as individuals, are accountable to the judgment of history.

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Starred review from February 1, 2023
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.

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