Burkhard Bilger didn’t know until his late 20s that his grandfather Karl Gönner had been a Nazi—a party chief, in fact, in a small village called Bartenheim in the Alsace region of France, “the great fault line of Europe,” which has at various moments in history been part of neighboring Germany. After the war, Gönner’s Nazism wasn’t discussed in the family: Bilger’s mother and her siblings were children of the war and their reticence was common for Germans at the time, who hoped to quietly bury their nation’s ugly past. For Bilger’s family in particular, with a former Nazi as their patriarch, the urge to stay mum may have been preservational. They’d been taught “never to ask questions,” he explains in his new family memoir, Fatherland. “The answers could only be dismal or self-incriminating—or worse, self-justifying.”
I was several paragraphs in on this review Monday when I saw the name above. I thought, “I know that name.” Suspicions confirmed, it was the same author as did the catfish book above. Steve included it as Chapter 4 in his book on books.
You can read the chapter here.
Another Review in the Atlantic
Burkhard Bilger has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2001. His pieces have included portraits of gem dealers in Madagascar, ginseng poachers in the Appalachians, deep-cave divers in Mexico, and a cheese-making nun in Connecticut. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, and Harper’s, among numerous other publications, and has been anthologized ten times in the “Best American” series.
My own paternal grandfather jumped with the 82nd into Holland, where he was hit with shrapnel in Arnhem, just by that bridge too far.
When the review author said the above it reminded me that dad fought the Nazis and used to call them Squareheads when he was bitter about the war. He lost friends in the war which he never talked about. He did say once that I owed my life to a dud German grenade. As Bilger wrote about his own history, snippets like that give you pause. I was born after the war and it was always an abstraction to me but I am connected to it in the biggest way possible.
Dad’s squarehead curse was a trivial bit of that abstraction. I always used to wonder why he used it because I didn’t hear it elsewhere. By miracle of the web, I looked Squareheads up and they gave a clear description. Sometimes it takes a long time to get closure.
Steve’s father flew B-17’s in the war. Tom Hanks is working on a Masters of the Air series. If it is as good as the Band of Brothers was it might be worth watching.