Bilger burkhard biography sampler

  • Burkhard Bilger is an American of German descent.
  • A New Yorker staff writer investigates his grandfather, a Nazi Party Chief, in a finely etched memoir with the powerful sweep of history.
  • Summary/Review: "What do we owe the past?

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    Fatherland: A Memoir of War, Conscience and Family Secrets

    A New Yorker staff writer, investigates his grandfather, a Nazi Party Chief, in this "unflinching, gorgeously written, and deeply moving exploration of morality, family, and war” (Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Empire of Pain)

    ‘The book we need right now’ Atul Gawande, author of Being Mortal

    What do we owe the past? How to make peace with a dark family history? Burkhard Bilger hardly knew his grandfather growing up. His parents immigrated to Oklahoma from Germany after World War II, and though his mother was an historian, she rarely talked about her father or what he did during the war. Then one day a packet of letters arrived from Germany, yellowing with age, 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 be

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    Fatherland : a memoir of war, conscience, and family secrets

    Summary/Review: "What do we owe the past? How to man peace with a dark family history? Burkhard Bilger hardly knew his grandfather growing up. His parents immigrated to Oklahoma from Germany after World War II, and though his mother was an historian, she rarely talked about her father or what he did during the war. Then one day a packet of letters arrived from Germany, yellowing with age, and a secret history began to unfold. Karl Gönner was a lärare 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 over the next kvartet years, till he came to think of himself as their protector, shielding them from his own party's brutality. Yet he was arrested in 1946 and accused of war crimes. Was he guilty or innocent? A vicious collaborator or just

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    In a small white house on a quiet country road in the foothills of northeastern Georgia—the end of Appalachia or the beginning, depending on your point of view—there lived an old blues singer named Cora Mae (Sweet Petunia) Bryant. Rumor had it that she could be difficult. Bryant had been known to slam her door on uninvited visitors, to demand a few “dead Presidents” for an interview, and to beat her manager with a purse for getting her onstage too late. Her nickname was borrowed rather than earned. It came from a song that her father, the blues guitarist Curley Weaver, wrote in 1928. Cora Mae was born two years earlier, but the lyrics were clearly about someone else: “I’ve got a gal, she’s long and tall, every time she do the shimmie I holler, Hot Dog!”

    When Lance Ledbetter and Art Rosenbaum arrived at Bryant’s house one morning in December, the place looked welcoming enough. There were electric candles on the windowsills and candy canes on the lawn. The porch was hung with pots of

  • bilger burkhard biography sampler