Great Reads for Great Readers

 

Fatherland, by Burkhard Bilger.                       Non-fiction.  Memoir.

 

 
           Burkhard Bilger is a respected writer for The New Yorker, and has contributed many times to other publications – The Atlantic, Harper’s and the New York Times among them.  Born in Oklahoma, he is also of German ancestry;  his parents emigrated to the USA after the Second World War.  Bilger Senior was a Physicist and his mother was a schoolteacher who eventually returned to university to qualify as a historian:  life was full of promise – the American Dream was possible for all in the sixties in Oklahoma (provided your skin was white.)

            But Burkhard wasn’t so much concerned with skin colour eventually, as much as the gaps in his parents’ reminiscences of their early lives in the Germany of the War years spent in the Schwarzwald, the Black Forest near the southern border of France and the Swiss border:  there was, among the fairy-tale sounding stories of Wurst und Speck and snow up to the eaves in winter, absolutely no mention of the War, or the fact that Burkhard’s mother’s father, his grandfather, was a longtime member of the Nazi party, and Nazi Chief representative in Bartenheim, a small southern village on the Rhine.   Originally a school teacher, Grandfather Karl Gönner embraced as did so many others, the new prosperity promised by Hitler.  After so many years of poverty and inflation when Germany and its remaining wealth was parcelled out to others in the infamous Treaty of Versailles, it was now time to take back what had been stolen.  It was time for the ascension of The Third Reich:  Sieg Heil!

            Bartenheim during the war years was, as always, an uncomfortable mixture of die-hard French inhabitants, and equally intransigent Deutsche counterparts – which was nothing new, for every time the two countries went to war, the victor always determined which language took precedence all along the French/German border, only this time the Nazi troops were much more trigger-happy, more ruthless in fact, than in previous times. Which meant that there were a lot more informers and turncoats all ready to turn someone in for money – or spite.  Grandfather Karl, in his capacity of local headmaster but ultimately Chief Nazi Officer of the area, turned out to be fair game for those local politicos with a grudge once the tide of victory had turned – and there were many.  He was sent to prison at the end of the war.

            His grandson Burkhard’s sterling efforts on several trips to Germany to peel back the layers of history to get at the plain, unvarnished truth;  his hours, weeks and months of research, delving through archives miraculously still available, and all the heart-rending  personal interviews have produced a beautifully written family history, a deeply affecting account of a nation’s guilt, shame and redemption – and the posing of the worrisome question in the wake of today’s world situation:  have we learnt anything at all?  FIVE STARS.