Burkhard Bilger hardly knew his grandfather growing up. His parents immigrated to Oklahoma from Germany after World War II, and his mother rarely talked about her father. Then one day a packet of old letters arrived from Germany and a secret history began to unfold. Karl Gönner 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 until he came to think of himself as their protector, shielding them from his own party's brutality. He was arrested in 1946 and accused of war crimes. Was he a vicious collaborator or just an ordinary man, struggling to atone for his country's crimes? Bilger goes to Germany to find out.
...an elegant and ambivalent book animated by an insoluble mystery ... Complex questions of culpability aside, it is difficult enough to establish the basic facts of the case. Gönner is an ordinary person, not a major historical figure, and much of his life went undocumented. Still, Bilger manages to piece together an outline, albeit one riddled with gaps and doubts ... Fatherland is billed as a memoir, but it contains little in the way of self-indulgent soul-searching. Instead of brooding on memory and morality, Bilger reports on Gönner’s contradictions as impassively, methodically and evocatively as he does on high-altitude skydivers and mushroom hunters in the New Yorker. The results are reconstructions of scenes from Gönner’s life that read as fluidly as passages in a novel ... wears its meticulous research lightly. Its prose is not academic but brimming with vivid images.
Resolutely unflinching and ultimately illuminating ... Mr. Bilger makes palpable the tension he feels between the wish to forget the past, in all its discomforting details, and the desire to understand behavior that might be easier to erase from memory than to confront and try to take in, much less forgive.
Its 18 chapters are organized well, into the different roles Gönner played throughout his life, a table of contents that reads like a John le Carré collage ... His subject matter is sensitive, but his sensuality remains intact ... The author conveys an Indiana Jones-ish thrill ... Bilger is understandably preoccupied with titrating Gönner’s cloudy complicity in a regime of pure evil, a task that — to someone outside the family circle — may not seem particularly urgent or even possible to finish. But with all its diligence, Fatherland maintains the momentum of the best mysteries and a commendable balance.
