Fatherland: A Memoir of War, Conscience and Family Secrets (Hardback) - Burkhard Bilger

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 Goenner 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.

About the Author

Burkhard Bilger has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2001 His work has been anthologized ten times in the Best American series. Bilger was a senior editor at Discover from 1999 to 2005. Before that, he worked as a writer and a deputy editor for The Sciences, where his work helped earn two National Magazine Awards and six nominations.

He is the recipient of fellowships at the MacDowell Colony, Yale University, and the New York Public Library's Cullman Center. His first book, Noodling for Flatheads, was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, the singer Jennifer Nelson.