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Zusatztext “A literary feat of extraordinary courage. . . . An intimate glimpse into the heart of darkness. . . . Illuminating.” — The Washington Times “A clear-eyed portrait of a flawed man living in complex-and nightmarish-times.” — Newsday “In a time of bogus memoirs that, when exposed to air, crumble before Oprah's baleful glare, My Father's Country is the genuine article.” — Chicago Sun-Times “Fascinating. . . . For anyone interested in the German psyche between the wars . . . [this] should be compelling reading.” — Providence Journal “A searing, painful inquiry.... Riveting and heartbreaking.”— Booklist Informationen zum Autor Wibke Bruhns was born in 1938 in Halberstadt. She has worked as a journalist in both TV and print and as a TV presenter and news reader. She worked as a correspondent for Stern magazine in the United States and Israel and headed the culture section at one of Germany’s largest television stations, ORB. She has two grown daughters and now lives and works as a freelance writer in Berlin. Klappentext 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 last century. On August 15, 1944, Major Hans Georg Klamroth was tried for treason for his part in the July Plot to kill Hitler. Eleven days later, he was executed. His youngest daughter, Wibke Bruhns, was six years old. Decades later, watching a documentary about the events of July 20, she saw images of her father in court suddenly appear on-screen. "I stare at this man with the empty face. I don't know him. But I can see myself in him.” How could her family succumb to Nazi sympathies? And what made her father finally renounce Hitler? Leseprobe I can immerse myself in the early photographs-the half-timbering, the baroque, ramshackle stables, the courtyards. The town had 43,000 inhabitants in 1900, the pictures suggest affluence and above all industry. Shops everywhere, markets, awnings outside the shops. The Kaiserhof patisserie by the fish market served its customers under parasols on a second-floor terrace. From 1887 there was a horse tram, replaced in 1903 by the electric one. From 1888 the people of Halberstadt were able to use the telephone. Charlemagne himself had established the diocese in 804, and even today when I drive across the incredibly flat North German landscape I see churches in the distance, many, many churches. For me Halberstadt is a metaphor. Halberstadt is "before." My memory of the town where I was born, the town of my early childhood, begins on April 8, 1945, the Sunday after Easter, at 11:25 in the morning. Allied bombers, supposedly 215 of them, reduced 82 percent of the old town to rubble. I was six at the time. All my memories prior to that are buried under ruins, consumed in the conflagration that raged for days. After that I remember a difficult postwar time everywhere and nowhere-that was the beginning of what became my life. Halberstadt isn't part of it. Whenever I drove there later on, what I found was gray, decaying everyday life in East Germany, brightened by family friends, but still strange to me. Today Halberstadt is a pleasure. The town always picks itself up, as it did after the destruction wrought by Henry the Lion, the Peasant War and the Reformation, the Thirty Years' War, French rule, and its storming by the Cossacks.At some point in the meantime the Klamroths arrived. "For when our forefather came out of the woods near Börnecke in the Harz . . . dapp-i-dee," they sang later at their family parties. The forefather appeared sometime around 1500. Thereafter Klamroths were living in the villages of the Harz mountains as foresters and saddlers to the court of Saxony, master brewers, and even one town councillor in Ermsleben. Things really got intriguing with Johann Gottlieb. He was a traine...
