"A Nazi, but a reasonable one." That’s how villagers in occupied France described their man in Alsace, Karl Gönner: a Nazi schoolteacher who’d been recruited to convert French children into good little ideologues. He eventually became the village’s Nazi party chief. For all his moral failings and blindness, he also doled out mercies— protecting draft-dodgers, giving top grades to a developmentally delayed child who’d be a candidate for euthanasia under the Nazis' eugenics program. After the war, he was charged with ordering the murder of a French dissident, but exonerated in part because of the testimony of villagers he saved. Decades later, his grandson, New Yorker journalist Burkhard Bilger, began an eight-year quest to try to make sense of Karl Gönner. Who was he? What do we do with ambiguous figures from our past— and from our own families? Bilger's new book is the lyrical and challenging Fatherland: A Memoir of War, Conscience and Family Secrets. Here's our conversation about what he uncovered—and what role, if any, war’s living descendants should play.
Jessica Nordell: Do you remember the moment you understood your grandfather was a member of the Nazi party?
Burkhard Bilger: Early high school. I'd met him when I was five and six, and again when I was 14 and 15. In my mom's stories, he was a somewhat stern figure. There were stories my mother told, like him buying her beautiful doll furniture, or playing violin. Stories were few and far between.
How did knowing about his past affect your sense of self as a young person?
I've had a lot of people tell me, "You're so brave to write this book." A lot of people feel personally shamed by ancestry. I never did, honestly. Part of it was because I knew my mother so well, and she was a child during the war, and I did not in any way want to put blame on her. Whenever the idea of Nazism came up, my friends would ask me, "Well, when were your parents born?"
There was this definitive thing on my part, which said, well, my mom is totally innocent and my father's totally innocent. So by extension I'm innocent. I don't buy into the idea of ancestral guilt in the blood. We need to take responsibility for our country's politics, and I do feel responsible in my own moral makeup. But I did not feel like suddenly he tainted my blood.
That's interesting. I'm thinking about this a lot because over the course of writing my book, I discovered that my ancestors were enslavers. I had always identified with my dad's Jewish side and didn't know much about my mom's Christian side that went back to the 1600s in this country. No family history was passed down.
It was extremely painful to learn about this ancestry, and I wrote about that. I did feel a sense of shame. I wonder why we had such different reactions. Perhaps because the consequences of slavery are so much part of daily life in segregated America.
Some of it is maybe how we're built emotionally. Also, my parents had emigrated. We lived in Oklahoma, which was so not Germany, so there was a kind of a buffer there, that remove.
What would I have done? I don't think I would've joined the Nazi party, but there are lots of other ways in which I'm blinkered now.
Your grandfather is this confounding figure who doesn't fit into any neat category of purely demonic evil Nazi or courageous resister. What was it was like for you emotionally over these years of research?
It was emotional in two different ways. One was personally, becoming aware of my own weaknesses and thinking about myself in this situation. What would I have done? And constantly thinking, "Oh shit, I'm not sure I would've done the right thing, or would've had the courage." I don't think I would've joined the Nazi party, but there are lots of other ways in which I'm blinkered now. I'm not out protesting people in cages on the border, or any number of outrages happening all around us. Going back to this history and seeing people being the same way I often am-- that was hard emotionally.
The other thing, honestly, was professionally it was emotionally difficult because I didn't know the story I was going to find. I had a lot of reason to believe that my grandfather wasn't just a flat out, awful Nazi— that he was an ambivalent character. But I didn't know. If I had dug up some awful things, I would've written that book, but I didn't want to write that book.
I wanted to absolutely do justice to what I found. If I found anything negative, I made sure to put it in the book. I did not want, in any way, to cover up anything. But also, it's my grandfather and part of me hoped he wasn't a bad guy.
Milton Meyer, the Jewish and American journalist, interviewed Germans in the early '50s about what it was like living under Nazi rule. As you explain, he found that by the early 1940s, most Germans knew crimes were being committed, but didn't have "binding knowledge," knowledge so irrefutable they'd have to act.
I went to a Catholic high school in Green Bay, Wisconsin. At the time there were rumors about priests molesting boys. As unbelievable as it seems, we joked about it. Now it's come out that, in fact, priests I studied with did assault my classmates, and this was happening in the 1990s when I went to high school.
So was it this lack of "binding knowledge" that prevented us from doing anything other than snicker? Or was it a gradual habituation-- we slowly became so used to these ideas that they didn't seem shocking? I don't know.
I think it's a little bit of both. If there's a rationalization we can live with, we'll grab it. Also, Milton Mayer talks about, how do you know it's not foreign propaganda? How do you know? The stuff you know irrefutably generally is small bore stuff. Small bore terrible stuff. And those things you are habituated to, you feel at some level, this is the way it is. You passively accept it.
Perhaps sometimes when we're in a new context-- whether it's temporal or spatial or cultural-- we have enough distance to recognize how truly wrong it was.
With my grandfather, what I really want to ask is, how do you reconcile-- he went to those two Nuremberg rallies, and heard Hitler making those statements, then to see the anti-Jewish laws, to see people deported-- how do you go on saying, "He won't go as far as he says he will"? That's a level of self-blinding I find hard to accept or explain away.
What do you think made him susceptible to this ideology?
To look at him— he's coming from a semi-feudal childhood, his father committing suicide because he gambled away the farm, WWI destroying any faith he had left, coming into deep depression, so much deeper than the one in the United States. Even before all this happened, Germany was a terribly unequal place— the poor were crushingly poor and seemed to have no way out of it. Then you have Nazism coming in and promising social and economic uplift.
And saying "No more hunger!" "No more poverty!"
Absolutely. "Middle class people or lower class people can get a car, buy a house!" And seeing the concrete results— I think that overrode his other misgivings. That's the best I can say.
Mayer said, "Nazism overtook Germany not by attack but with a whoop and a holler." What does that mean to you?
If you're on the right side of that equation— which was the majority of the population-- boy, it sounded great. The laws were all there to uplift you. You're being told your people are great people, your ancestors were great people. The economic turnaround bolsters that. To force yourself into that other perspective, especially after this long period of terrible economic depression, I think takes an act of will. Or real decency.
I should say even in a village like Aulfingen [where Gönner joined the Nazi party], a good healthy chunk did not buy into it. There was a lot of skepticism— a lot of people who thought, "Why would we want this big blowhard in charge of our government?"
A passage that really spoke to me as a Jew was Mayer’s comment about the people he interviewed, the Germans who became his friends. "What I really want... is for each of them to have cared enough at the time to have thrown himself under the iron chariot of the State. This none of my friends did, and this I cannot forgive them. They did not care enough."
This reminded me of a terrible thought experiment that I've done since I was a kid: in a social situation, looking around and wondering who would have hidden me. Who would have risked their life? It's a terrible thought experiment because most people probably wouldn’t risk their life.
I think about it all the time. And what will the next generation look back on us and be appalled that we went along with? I'm a meat eater. It's such an obvious evil the way these pigs are raised. And yet I have not broken myself of that habit, I think because most of the people around me make the same moral choice. Peter Singer, the philosopher, would say we're the same way with income inequality. He's given away most of his income. He says this is a clear moral choice we're all making and we are failing.
It's built into us as humans. History that comes after emphasizes this. You have Chinese mass murder, Cambodian mass murder, Bosnian, Rwandan. You have the Armenian genocide. We all have this capacity in us.
And right now, it appears that many American goods are being produced by Uyghur people forced into labor in Xinjiang. But we're not giving up our cars or Nikes or fast fashion.
Yes, right.
A villager in occupied France described your grandfather as "a reasonable Nazi." How do you make sense of that phrase?
That phrase depends on the context in which it was said, which is those villagers saying, you know, as a Nazi administrator in our village during the war, he acted humanely. He did not imprison people or punish people for no reason. Did not enforce rules blindly.
I think of him as two-sided. Here's a man who became a Nazi because of his failings, his weaknesses, you know, his ideology and his tendency toward a certain kind of blind principled behavior. It landed him in a situation where suddenly he realized to follow those principles, he was gonna have to kill people or hurt people. That's when he turned against it. He made this huge mistake and then he tried to rectify it and live a better life, and tried to atone for it as best he could.
We want a story that explains us. This idea that our blood defines us—we've accepted it because so often it flatters us.
And at some point accepted the role of the Nazi party chief in the French village where he taught.
Here's a guy who's got these visions of what Nazism can do. He has all these ideas about remaking the economy, all this grand phraseology. Then he arrives in France and he's confronted with two things. One is the concrete manifestation of all that, which is grim. He's getting war reports. He knows people are dying by the millions. Two, he's in charge of teaching all these French villagers about the superiority of German culture. And the truth is, they're a half-hour bike ride from his own village. They are in no way some kind of subculture that needs to be rectified. Part of him realizes these rules make no sense and are just hurting people.
I think being the Nazi party chief probably wasn't that hard a choice for him. It was expected. He knew that there were awful Nazi party chiefs around, and that he can do more good than harm if he himself takes it. A book reviewer in the Washington Post said, "Yeah, but the only reason he could be in that position to help people was because he was a Nazi in the first place." I agree with that.
How did this project affect your own development as a person?
I'm not someone who necessarily examines my own morality that often. This forced me to think, "What would I have done in these situations? Who am I? What do I have to watch out for in terms of my own character weaknesses?"
Politically, it's changed the way I feel. Politics has never been a big thread in my life. I'm from Oklahoma, and we were at our 40th high school reunion in the fall. A lot of Oklahoma has gone from mildly conservative to radically right wing. So the way I talk to people when I'm there is more active.
Did your book change the way you behave?
Yes. It really did. It made me conscious of the ways that I self-segregate, how I gravitate toward people with shared identities. It made me try to work against that and seek out people who are different than I am, and take every opportunity to pursue those relationships. It also made me a lot less scared of talking about hard things.
Interesting.
Why do you think the past does have such a hold on us?
Part of it is we want a story that explains us. This idea that our blood defines us-- we've accepted it because so often it flatters us. "Oh, I come from good stock." Then it becomes fascinating when it suddenly might be the opposite. "Oh shit." I think both are fallacies. We all have these terrible things potentialities in us.
I wonder if it could also be that we feel the past living in the present. We sense it all around us. I'm thinking about this great study by Bergsieker, Shelton, and Richeson that looked at interracial encounters between Black and White Americans. They found that the groups had different goals for the interactions. For Black individuals, the goal was to be respected. For White individuals, the goal was to be liked.
I can't think of a better encapsulation of how the past is living in the present.
Yes, absolutely.
In political conversations, Germans are very different from Americans. There's this caution about self-righteousness.
I imagine you have Jewish friends. How did this story affect interactions with friends or colleagues?
It came up all the time. There was a certain caution, like, “Oh. Tell me about that.” What I loved about doing the book and interacting with my Jewish friends in New York is it rammed home that the main thing is trust. They trusted me as a person before they knew my history. Once they knew me as a person, they looked at that history differently.
What should we do with these toxic lineages, these troubled ancestors that we live with?
To me, there's a twofold response. The first is looking in yourself and trying to really come to terms with that history—not to forget, not "Never forget what the Germans did" but "Never forget what humans are capable of, what a society can turn into in a matter of years."
We are not personally responsible for our ancestors, but that doesn't mean we're not responsible for reparations, for fixing the outcomes of all that behavior. So much of what the Germans did after the war—saying we need to really instruct ourselves on who we were and take responsibility for it—transformed the German character, their behavior on the world stage.
Germans can be very abrupt and opinionated. They're not afraid to say blunt things to each other. But it's interesting, in political conversations, they're very different from Americans. There's this caution about self-righteousness, thinking you're too correct. I think we could use more of that. (Of course, there's the far right in Germany, too, so I'm not gonna speak to the whole population.)
Do you think this caution is a consequence of all of the work Germany did post World War II?
I think it got driven home in the seventies and eighties, where they said, wait a sec. We have actually have to emotionally deal with it. In Berlin, I'd go to shows about the Holocaust or about German history, and we'd have talk-backs afterwards. People could say very strongly worded emotional things, without getting into a shouting match. They could listen to each other in a way that I often haven't been able to do in this country, especially in the last 20 years.
I’d love to hear your reactions to our conversation. Are there moments with which you agree, disagree, or other? Please comment below.
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Fascinating. My Jewish mother hid the fact we were Jewish from we (her) children. Apparently, coming of age during WWII, and ending up in Minnesota by 1951, she was terrified we would somehow be targeted. How much that war, those atrocities, was underlying our baby boomer childhoods, we couldn’t see at the time, but they were the bedrock beneath our, relatively privileged (by historical standards) childhoods. At age 17, as I was about to turn 18 and run off to Alaska with my (then) boyfriend, my oldest brother decided it was something I should know.