FATHERLAND

Discovering that his grandfather was a Nazi imprisoned for war crimes, the author explores his life.

Bilger, a veteran staff writer at the New Yorker, knew that both of his parents lived in World War II–era Germany, moving to the U.S. in 1962. Grandfather Karl, released after the war, resumed life as a schoolmaster until his death in 1979. Despite family visits, the war was rarely discussed. “Like most Germans her age,” writes the author in this powerful investigation of morality, his mother “talked about [the war] as she might tell a sinister fairy tale: in rough, woodcut images, black and white gouged with red.” Matters changed in 2005 when she received a package of letters from the village where Karl was stationed. The author traveled to Europe repeatedly, researching archives and interviewing villagers, and the result is a vivid portrait of his grandfather and his times. Karl lived in the Black Forest in the southwest, a region that was overwhelmingly Catholic and rural. It had no industry and few Jews, and it remained mostly impoverished until well after 1945. Born in 1899, Karl was drafted in 1917. A year later, he “lost his eye in the Ardennes,” and he spent the interwar years as a village schoolteacher. After Germany’s conquest of France, he was sent to a town in neighboring Alsace to teach French children to be loyal Germans. In 1942, he was promoted to local Nazi Party chief. In four years of German occupation, no one from his town was sent to concentration camps, and “no families were deported, no political prisoners executed.” This did not prevent him from suffering when the French returned with vengeance in mind. Kurt was imprisoned off and on for over two years and only released after a trial in which a crowd of townspeople testified in his defense. A fluid writer, Bilger crafts a fascinating, deeply researched work of Holocaust-era history.

A moving, humane biography of a minor Nazi official who did his job without the usual horrors.