Fatherland Quotes

“The downside of erasing history is that you lose what’s beautiful as well as what’s hard to bear.”
― Burkhard Bilger, Fatherland: A Memoir of War, Conscience, and Family Secrets

“I’ve never been to America,” he said. “But I’ve read that you tend to put people on a pedestal or tear them down. They’re heroes or traitors. But man is by nature flawed, and he has to live with the fact that he contradicts himself. That’s what makes him a man. Otherwise, he would be a cuckoo clock.”
― Burkhard Bilger, Fatherland: A Memoir of War, Conscience, and Family Secrets