9781101888902
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Fatherland audiobook

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Fatherland Audiobook Summary

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).

As a boy growing up in Oklahoma, Burkhard Bilger often heard his parents tell stories about the Germany of their youth. Winters in the Black Forest, when the snow piled up to the eaves and haunches of smoked speck hung from the rafters. Springtime along the Rhine, when the storks came home to nest on rooftops. His parents were born in 1935 and had lived through the Second World War, but those stories, vivid as they were, had strange omissions. His mother was a historian, yet she rarely talked about her father’s relationship to the Nazis, or his role in the war. Then one day a packet of letters arrived from Germany, yellowed with age, and a secret history began to unfold.

Karl Gönner was an elementary school teacher and father of four when the war began. In 1940, he was posted to a village in Alsace, in occupied France, and ordered to reeducate its children—to turn them into proper Germans. He was a loyal Nazi when he arrived, but as the war went on his allegiance wavered. According to some villagers, he risked his life shielding them from his own party’s brutalities. According to others, he ruled the village with an iron fist. After the war, Gönner was charged with giving an order that led police to beat a local farmer to death. Was he guilty or innocent? A war criminal or just an ordinary man, struggling to do right from within a monstrous regime?

Fatherland is the story of Bilger’s nearly ten-year quest to uncover the truth. It is a book of gripping suspense and moral inquiry—a tale of chance encounters and serendipitous discoveries in archives and villages across Germany and France. Long admired for his profiles in The New Yorker, Bilger brings the same open-hearted curiosity to his grandfather’s story and the questions it raises. What do we owe the past? How can we make peace with it without perpetuating its wrongs? Intimate and far-reaching, Fatherland is an extraordinary odyssey through the great upheavals of the past century.

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Fatherland Audiobook Narrator

Burkhard Bilger is the narrator of Fatherland audiobook that was written by Burkhard Bilger

About the Author(s) of Fatherland

Burkhard Bilger is the author of Fatherland

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Fatherland Full Details

Narrator Burkhard Bilger
Length 8 hours 59 minutes
Author Burkhard Bilger
Category
Publisher Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
Release date April 30, 2024
ISBN 9781101888902

Subjects

The publisher of the Fatherland is Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group. includes the following subjects: biographies, historical, history lovers gifts, history teacher gifts, gifts for history buffs, war, world war 2 books, book club recommendations, responsibility, truth, memoir books, army, holocaust books, family secret, secrets, military, military history, historical books, gifts for dad, dad books, biographies and memoirs, memoirs, memoir, history buff gifts, wwii, ww2, holocaust, war crimes, world war ii, world war 2, world war two, immigration, Germany, family history, family, Nazi, history gifts, history books, history, Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, History, Holocaust, History, Europe, General The BISAC Subject Code is Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs

Additional info

The publisher of the Fatherland is Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group. The imprint is Random House Audio. It is supplied by Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group. The ISBN-13 is 9781101888902.

Global Availability

This book is only available in the United States.

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