Fatherland: A Memoir of War, Conscience and Family Secrets

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)