Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime
and start saving today with fast, free delivery
Amazon Prime includes:
Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.
Amazon Prime members enjoy:- Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
- Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
- Streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows with limited ads on Prime Video.
- A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
- Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
- Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access
Important: Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.
-19% $23.57$23.57
Ships from: Amazon.com Sold by: Amazon.com
$9.99$9.99
Ships from: Amazon Sold by: Books with a Smile
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
OK
Audible sample Sample
Fatherland: A Memoir of War, Conscience, and Family Secrets Hardcover – May 2, 2023
Explore your book, then jump right back to where you left off with Page Flip.
View high quality images that let you zoom in to take a closer look.
Enjoy features only possible in digital – start reading right away, carry your library with you, adjust the font, create shareable notes and highlights, and more.
Discover additional details about the events, people, and places in your book, with Wikipedia integration.
Purchase options and add-ons
“Fatherland maintains the momentum of the best mysteries and a commendable balance.”—The New York Times
“Unflinching and 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
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Kirkus Reviews
One spring day in northeastern France, Burkhard Bilger’s mother went to the town of Bartenheim, where her father was posted during the Second World War. As a historian, she had spent years studying the German occupation of France, yet she had never dared to investigate her own family’s role in it. She knew only that her father was a schoolteacher who was sent to Bartenheim in 1940 and ordered to reeducate its children—to turn them into proper Germans, as Hitler demanded. Two years later, he became the town’s Nazi Party chief.
There was little left from her father’s era by the time she visited. But on her way back to her car, she noticed an old man walking nearby. He looked about the same age her father would have been if he was still alive. She hurried over to introduce herself and told him her father’s name, Karl Gönner. “Do you happen to remember him?” she said. The man stared at her, dumbstruck. “Well, of course!” he said. “I saved his life, didn’t I?”
Fatherland is the story behind that story—the riveting account of Bilger’s nearly ten-year quest to uncover the truth about his grandfather. Was he guilty or innocent, a war criminal or a man who risked his life to shield the villagers? Long admired for his profiles in The New Yorker, Bilger brings the same open-hearted curiosity to his family history and the questions it raises: What do we owe the past? How can we make peace with it without perpetuating its wrongs?
- Print length336 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRandom House
- Publication dateMay 2, 2023
- Dimensions6.43 x 1.07 x 9.54 inches
- ISBN-100385353987
- ISBN-13978-0385353984
Books with Buzz
Discover the latest buzz-worthy books, from mysteries and romance to humor and nonfiction. Explore more
Frequently bought together
Similar items that may deliver to you quickly
From the Publisher
|
|
|
---|---|---|
|
|
|
Editorial Reviews
Review
“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)
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Suspect
The man in the interrogation room had all the marks of a dangerous fanatic: stiff spine and bony shoulders, lips pinched into a pleat. He wore brass spectacles with round, tortoiseshell rims and his head was shaved along the back and sides, leaving a shock of brown hair to flop around on top, like a toupee. When he posed for his mug shot, his expression was strangely unbalanced. The left eye had a flat, unwavering focus, edged with fear or grief. The right eye was glazed and lifeless.
The French inspector, Otto Baumgartner, paced in front of him reading from a typewritten sheet. “In October of 1940, you moved to Alsace and set yourself the task of converting the inhabitants of Bartenheim to National Socialism,” he began. “You established yourself as Ortsgruppenleiter in order to become the town’s absolute master. . . . You brought to your duties a zeal and a tyrannical fervor without equal! In the entire district of Mulhouse, you were the most feared and infamous of leaders!”
Baumgartner paused after each charge to let the prisoner respond, while another inspector transcribed the exchange. It had been nearly a year since the German surrender, and these men had heard their share of pleas and denunciations. The countryside seethed with military courts and citizens’ militias, lynch mobs and makeshift tribunals. For four years, the Nazi occupation had divided France ever more bitterly against itself, turning neighbor against neighbor and Christian against Jew. Now the days of reckoning had come. More than nine thousand people would be executed as war criminals and collaborators over the next five years, in addition to those denounced and beaten; the women shorn and shaved and paraded through towns for sleeping with German soldiers. L’épuration sauvage, the French called it: the savage purification.
The facts in this case were not in question. They came from a seemingly unimpeachable source: Captain Louis Obrecht, an adjunct controller in the French military government and president of the local Purification Commission. Obrecht was a veteran of the French army and a former prisoner of war. When German forces invaded Alsace in 1940, Obrecht was the school principal in the village of Bartenheim, where the prisoner later became Ortsgruppenleiter, or the town’s Nazi Party chief. For four years, Obrecht insisted, the prisoner had been the terror of Bartenheim. “But it was above all in the last year of ‘his reign’ that he became menacing and dangerous.”
Obrecht went on to accuse the man of crimes ranging from sabotage to using French children as spies. But the investigators zeroed in on a single incident: the murder of a local farmer named Georges Baumann. On the morning of Wednesday, October 4, 1944, a German military police chief named Anton Acker ordered Baumann to report for a work detail, building wooden pallets for the German army. Baumann refused. The war had turned against Germany by then, and the Allies were on their way. He had no intention of working for “those German swine,” he said. When Acker tried to arrest him, a scuffle ensued, and Baumann and his family disarmed the officer.
Their victory was short-lived. Within the hour, Acker returned with five other policemen. Baumann was arrested, as were his wife and daughter later that day, while his son fled into the fields. The three prisoners were taken to a police station, where they were detained and beaten. By that evening, Baumann lay half dead. “I found him on the floor of the station, unconscious, his hair, cheeks, and forehead covered in blood,” a local doctor later told investigators. “His scalp was split open, without a doubt from blows of a rifle butt, and he also had a bullet wound in his pelvis, with tears in his intestines and probably an artery as well.” Baumann died in the hospital that night. By then, bruises from the bludgeoning had begun to appear all over his body.
The death of Georges Baumann could be traced back to one man, Obrecht believed. It was set in motion by a direct order from the prisoner in the interrogation room. “For four years, he made thousands of innocent people suffer,” Obrecht said, and the inspectors had no reason to doubt him. The war had been over for nearly a year and fresh horrors were still being unearthed in mass graves and killing fields and concentration camps across Europe. There was more than enough guilt to go around.
Yet the inspectors had also heard rumors of a different sort. There was talk that this gaunt, bespectacled bureaucrat—this “perfect Nazi,” as some people described him—was the opposite of what Obrecht claimed. That far from terrorizing two villages, he had shielded them from the worst Nazi excesses during the occupation. That without him many more might have died. It was an unlikely story. But in those days of furious judgment, justice could be hard to tell from self-justification, and purity was often code for revenge.
The inspectors would look into the matter. In the meantime, the case would be remanded to the military court in Mulhouse, and the prisoner—my grandfather, Karl Gönner, forty-seven years old and a father of four, one of them my mother—would be sent to solitary confinement in Strasbourg. To await judgment in the Citadel, the seventeenth-century fortress along the River Ill, where the worst German war criminals in Alsace were kept.
Product details
- Publisher : Random House (May 2, 2023)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 336 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0385353987
- ISBN-13 : 978-0385353984
- Item Weight : 1.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.43 x 1.07 x 9.54 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #81,607 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #102 in German History (Books)
- #156 in Jewish Holocaust History
- #3,010 in Memoirs (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
I've been a working journalist for nearly forty years and a Staff Writer at the New Yorker since 2001. I’m the author of two books: Noodling for Flatheads (Scribner, 2000), and Fatherland (Random House, 2023). Both are rooted in my family history. I was born and raised in Oklahoma but grew up speaking German at home—my parents had emigrated to the United States in 1962. I’ve always been fascinated by underground communities and people in hidden subcultures, whether they're moonshiners in South Carolina or Alsatians in Nazi-occupied France. In almost everything I write, I try to understand people with lives quite different from mine, and to see the world, for just a moment, through their eyes.
After graduating from high school, I came east to study English and French at Yale. I went on to work as a science and environmental editor and reporter for more than twenty years, covering stories on five continents. At the New Yorker, I've written about everything from gem dealers in Madagascar to ginseng poachers in the Appalachians, deep-cave divers in Mexico, and a cheese-making nun in Connecticut. My stories have also appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, and Harper’s, among other publications, and have been anthologized ten times in the Best American series. I’ve received fellowships from Yale, MacDowell, and the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, and my work as an editor has helped earn two National Magazine Awards and six nominations.
My first book, Noodling for Flatheads, was a collection of stories about my adventures in the Deep South. It looked at old rural traditions like coonhunting and cockfighting and tried to see what they could tell us about our changing American values. How is it that Abraham Lincoln was once a cockfighting referee and Andrew Jackson hosted cockfights in the White House, yet the sport is now illegal in every state? The book was a finalist for the Pen/Martha Albrand Award.
Fatherland is about the other half of my heritage. It’s the story of my mother's father, Karl Gönner, a small-town schoolteacher in the Black Forest who joined the Nazi Party and then gradually turned against it. I began work on the book in 2014, when I moved to Berlin with my family for a year to do research. I’ve since made numerous trips to my grandfather's village in the Black Forest, to the battlefields of the Western Front where he lost an eye in WWI, and to Alsace, where he was stationed during the German occupation of France in WWII. Fatherland is part memoir and part detective story. It's a book about how good people can be seduced by bad ideas and how their descendants can come to terms with that guilt. It’s a work of history that speaks directly to the present, as people everywhere wrestle with their own fraught family histories.
When I'm not reporting books and stories, I live in Brooklyn with my wife, Jennifer Nelson. I sing and play guitar and have made music my whole life. When our three children were young, my wife and I led a family band that played a quirky blend of bluegrass, folk, and rock and roll. The band performed every other week at a café in Brooklyn for four years and once opened for Bon Jovi on Broadway. For the past six years, my wife and I have been in a trio called Nine Pound Hammer. My wife plays violin and accordion, our friend Mike Shapiro plays banjo and harmonica, and I play resonator guitar. We like to sing in tight, three-part harmony on country and French cabaret tunes, as well as originals (www.hammercounty.com).
Photo: © Beowulf Sheehan
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonReviews with images
-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
It revolves around one man primarily, the authors grandfather Karl Gonner. He stands alongside Germans, like those found in the mentioned 1950’s book by Milton Meyers “They Thought They Were Free”, but Karl also seemed to have common ground with Martin Heidegger, being educated and having aspired to the clergy. As a teacher, it’s hard to know how much he embraced the party chief assignment in the French town, despite being a devoted Nazi Party member. There’s some betrayal of the Nazi protocols as he takes the risk of saving people in the town, acts that may have saved his own life after the war. Would Karl have offered the same assistance to Jews in the town (they had fled or were taken away prior to his arrival)? It seems hard to say.
Burkhard Bilger stories in The New Yorker have been a real pleasure over the years, with this more personal one also reading as much like fiction. The final paragraphs felt the most thought provoking, with the unlikely use of Karl’s own words in the form of an encouraging letter to his son from a prison cell after the war. It seems an unlikely ending, following the authors long and ‘intense stare; of his grandfather life, but thought provoking and feeling appropriate, though it’s hard for me to know exactly why. Part of that may be that its set against Bilgers own words, asserting that we’re not gonners (no pun intended) to our past, despite some of our deepest fears. This facing of history and ourselves is a lesson that I got from Fatherland, and what makes it such a relevant story in our time.
Bilger's quest to learn more about his grandfather focused on his Nazi past and the extent to which, if at all, he bore blame for German criminal acts against the people of Alsace. His quest lasted for years and involved many trips to Germany and France, long searches through dusty archives, interviews with elderly witnesses whose accounts were often contradictory, and letters and other documents produced by Gonner himself. In the end Bilger found answers to many of his questions and began to gain a fuller picture of his grandfather's life.
Fatherland is an extremely interesting read that captures not only the moral quandaries faced by Gonner and many others, but also those dealt with by the entire region of Alsace. I found Bilger's researches especially resonant because they echo some of the quandaries I've found myself in as I study my own family tree filled with fallible human beings who made questionable moral decisions. Fatherland thus holds up a mirror that often shows us images that, while uncomfortable, are important in helping us understand our heritage.
The tales of his documentary discoveries amaze, when you consider how much detailed history is retained, stuffed in corners, never looked at. I have pursued nearly identical, pathways, and am stunned at how thoroughly Bilger has uncovered his family history.
Less a memoir of the author, and more a biography of the subject, Karl Gönner, Bilger unearths and weaves together a gripping story, shared by millions of “Kriegskinder” — children of World War II, born to German parents, who discuss nothing of their experience, and repress all memory, or erase all family history at great cost to following generations. That he remains journalistically aloof may be this book‘s only minor flaw in my eyes.