In ‘Fatherland,’ Burkhard Bilger writes of his grandfather in the Nazi party

Gönner is the grandfather of New Yorker staff writer Burkhard Bilger, and the enigma at the heart of “Fatherland: A Memoir of War, Conscience, and Family Secrets,” an elegant and ambivalent book animated by an insoluble mystery. Gönner’s murder charges are easily defused, but the question of his general complicity continues to gnaw, and Bilger finds himself entangled in a skein of uncertainties. Complex questions of culpability aside, it is difficult enough to establish the basic facts of the case. Gönner is an ordinary person, not a major historical figure, and much of his life went undocumented. Still, Bilger manages to piece together an outline, albeit one riddled with gaps and doubts.

The Nazis knew the Alsatians had divided loyalties, and in 1940, when the region was incorporated into the Reich, Germanization proceeded apace. Bilger writes that “gravestones were tossed out or recarved in German, berets declared illegal. The Nazis called the latter Gehirnverdunkelungskappe, brain-darkening caps, and gave out fines and jail time to those who wore them.” Soon after the occupation began, “children were given wagons with which to gather French books door-to-door” so that the offending texts could be burned. Schoolteachers played a seminal role in indoctrinating the youth, and Gönner, who was working as a teacher on the German side of the Rhine, was sent across the river to transform the children of Bartenheim “into good little Germans.”

His pupils agree that he was a skillful instructor, strict but never cruel. He performed the obligatory Nazi rituals — he made his students shout “Heil Hitler” when they greeted him — but spent less of the school day propagandizing than many of his peers. He even let his students get away with pro-French pranks. One of them, now a wizened old man, tells Bilger: “He was a Nazi, but a reasonable one.” Is there such a thing?

By all accounts, Gönner became more reasonable still when he was appointed party chief of Bartenheim in 1942. It was a role that a more passionate disciplinarian might have abused, but Gönner turned a blind eye to the minor infractions that the Nazis loved to punish so disproportionately — and eventually went so far as to cover for draft dodgers. “Most of what Karl could offer were small mercies,” Bilger writes, “yet lives were at stake,” even in a remote town.

In the end, Gönner was exonerated, if not entirely absolved, by the testimony of the many villagers he saved. “Husband, wife, daughter, and niece all freed from prison by his requests,” one villager wrote. “Of the eighteen hundred souls in our town, not one was deported,” another added, “although he knew that several young men had hidden themselves.” Still, in one letter written before the war, Gönner announced his “open commitment to National Socialism.”

“Fatherland” is billed as a memoir, but it contains little in the way of self-indulgent soul-searching. Instead of brooding on memory and morality, Bilger reports on Gönner’s contradictions as impassively, methodically and evocatively as he does on high-altitude skydivers and mushroom hunters in the New Yorker. The results are reconstructions of scenes from Gönner’s life that read as fluidly as passages in a novel.

Writers of popular history are apt to fidget over minutiae like enthusiasts fussing over model trains, but “Fatherland” wears its meticulous research lightly. Its prose is not academic but brimming with vivid images. In Bartenheim, the houses blend “German propriety and French deshabille, their walls newly plastered here and crumbling picturesquely there.” In his prison photographs, Gönner’s lips are “pinched into a pleat.” Even minor characters are painted in bright hues. One interviewee tells stories in a “faint, papery voice, like a breeze through dry leaves,” and a man at a local festival has features “as flushed and bulbous as a handful of radishes.” Anecdotes abound as Bilger travels through Germany and France to meet with local historians, interview aging Alsatians and, on one occasion, enlist a group of elderly German women to help him decipher a letter in archaic script.

Yet “Fatherland” is indeed a personal document, not because it often lapses into reminiscence, but because it doubles as a commentary on its own composition. Alongside Gönner’s narrative runs a second thread, this one about the limitations of the journalistic endeavor. “I had grown used to a certain kind of omniscience as a journalist,” Bilger confesses.

If an online search or database couldn’t answer a question, an expert source was moments away by phone or email. It didn’t matter if I was writing about bull breeders in Texas or sapphire miners in Madagascar. And now here was my grandfather, a man closer to me than anyone I had ever written about. … Yet he was impossible to reach.

— Burkhard Bilger, “Fatherland: A Memoir of War, Conscience, and Family Secrets”

There are many reasons for Gönner’s inaccessibility. First is deliberate obfuscation: The archives in his native village “were burned by locals desperate to erase their Nazi past.” The second is his anonymity. The battles that he fought during World War I “were cataclysmic events shared by tens of thousands of others,” but there are few records revealing the texture of his daily life as a small-town schoolteacher. Third and most intractable is the difficult truth that the question of Gönner’s conscience is impossible to answer, probably even for the man himself.

“Fatherland” contains no decisive revelations and delivers no ultimate verdicts. The most Bilger can conclude is that, during World War II, almost no one remained untainted. If Gönner was able to do good deeds, it was because he was a dutiful enough Nazi to ascend the ranks of the party. As a sign that Bilger passes on a walk through idyllic modern-day Germany reminds him: “WER SCHWANNEN FÜETTERT, FÜETTERT AUCH RATTEN” — those who feed swans also feed rats.

Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post.

A Memoir of War, Conscience, and Family Secrets

Random House. 314 pp. $28.99