My Father's Country: The Story of a German Family

by Wibke Bruhns

Book Overview

In this gripping memoir, the daughter of a man who conspired to assassinate Hitler tells the story of three generations of her family and offers unparalleled insight into the German experience in the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0099478773
• ISBN13: 9780099478775
• Release Date: January 2009
• Publisher: Arrow Books
• Length: 334 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.1" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

One father out of many

This review is based on the German edition, "Meines Vaters Land". One must admire the author for her courage in not only retracing faithfully her family's history, but also in uncovering in the family papers the personality of a father (HG) quite unknown to her; in the process she discovered more than one skeleton in her parents' household. In a way, her work can be compared to Bernhard Schlink's search for fathers of all kinds which he describes in his recent book "Homecoming". Besides painting for us an uncompromising and not always positive portrait of her father, she places this painting next to her mother's, Else, the other protagonist in this German family saga set into the first half of the 20th century. Else was of Danish descent, thus, HG became very well acquainted with Denmark and was posted there at the end of the 1930s. Else is driven to the edge of a complete breakdown by the political circumstances, by the unfolding war and by the personal difficulties reflecting within the family what is going on outside. She stays on course by the sheer will of protecting her flock and by the general inertia that somehow keeps us all moving; in this way, she reaches a safe haven once the war has come to an end, much in the spirit of Rudyard Kipling who urges us to "hold on when there is nothing in you except the will". Once her task had been accomplished, she could only go on living as the petrified image of her former self, in a way similar to the fate of the German people as a whole who needed the remainder of the 20th century to come to grips with the events of the first half. Wibke Bruhns belongs to a generation that did not consciously experience the end of the period she describes; in doing so she has provided her readers with a far-reaching and never boring account of those tumultuous years. She manages to convey to her generation and to those following an understanding of the problems encountered by their elders and thus enable them to confront in a more detached way the events of the present. These events are certainly in themselves different from those she describes, but are at least as complicated and far-reaching as what happened in the world half a century ago. From her post-war viewpoint, Wibke Bruhns rolls out before our eyes, with many details, the lives of her parents and grand-parents, starting with the First World War and the decade following it. What she neglects - possibly because her family was not directly touched - is the topic of Bolshevism and the threat it constituted for the West. We must realize that this threat was considerably greater than the present danger presented by islamic fundamentlism, because the ideas of the extreme left were shared by many people in the West and backed up by an immensely powerful country. Its leaders were moved by the will to bring about a world revolution and they had the means to realize their aims - how would we react today to a similar situation? Even someone like your reviewer

My Father's Country

How was the ground prepared for a Adolf Hitler? The highlight is on the life-(style) of one family, their friends, their up-bringing and way of thinking; it helps understanding, yet not always comprehending. We read excerpts from letters or diaries. We shake our head in awe or horror, yet, there are moments when one can't help but grin. A great book!

Understanding

This is one of those books that disturb me. This is the story of a girl(lady) analyzing her father and the vanquished German state, who seems to be just as "distanced" from what happened as the young German-speaker from Texas who arrived in Berlin in 1961. Frau Bruhns has some memories, some facts and a ton of unspoken questions. She and I are about the same age, so I guess if my father had died when I was a toddler, I probably would be just as "lost" as her. Other "war orphans" who I have interviewed seem to have many of the same characteristics. There is a sense of isolation and desolation that they cannot whisper out, "Dad, explain to me what you did and why?", but no answer comes.