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Top of the pile
78
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
59/100Critics
96/100Scholars
Author:
Burkhard Bilger
Publisher:
Random House
Date:
May 2, 2023
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.
What The Reviewers Say
...an elegant and ambivalent book animated by an insoluble mystery.
Resolutely unflinching and ultimately illuminating.
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.
[Bilger] builds a narrative that admits to its holes, that doesn’t shy away from its incompleteness while it still makes an effort, with the materials at hand, to understand life in wartime and the kind of people whose actions occupy that gray zone of morality.
