Burkhard Bilger

May 28, 2024 | rsn.org | Burkhard Bilger

After the Berlin Wall fell, agents of East Germany’s secret police frantically tore apart their records. Archivists have spent the past thirty years trying to restore them. The man who stopped Salomea Genin on the street in West Berlin, on that August morning in 1961, smiled as if he knew her. He was a “rather handsome gentleman,” she recalls, though he would have been hard to pick out in a crowd.

May 26, 2024 | newyorker.com | Burkhard Bilger

The man who stopped Salomea Genin on the street in West Berlin, on that August morning in 1961, smiled as if he knew her. He was a “rather handsome gentleman,” she recalls, though he would have been hard to pick out in a crowd. He brought her greetings from East Berlin, from a woman whom Genin had met on a recent visit there—a secretary in one of the Arab embassies. He wondered if Genin would like to join him for coffee the next day.

May 26, 2024 | flipboard.com | Burkhard Bilger

Having failed to find a buyer, Berlin's city council is now offering to give away the former Nazi leader's mansion on the outskirts of the German …

May 18, 2024 | newyorker.com | Burkhard Bilger

George Miller’s film career began with barely averted violence. In 1971, when he was a twenty-six-year-old medical student in Sydney, Australia, he took a job at a construction site while he waited to start an internship at a hospital. One day, he was standing next to another worker when a brick fell from fourteen floors above them and hit the ground between them with a crack. “This was in the days before helmets,” Miller told me recently.

Nov 29, 2023 | highbrowmagazine.com | Burkhard Bilger |Lee Polevoi

Fatherland: A Memoir of War, Consciences, and Family SecretsBy Burkhard BilgerRandom House 314 pages“I was twenty-eight years old when my mother first told me that her father had been imprisoned as a war criminal.”So Burkhard Bilger, a staff writer for The New Yorker, tells us in the early pages of his new memoir, Fatherland. Bilger’s maternal grandfather, Karl Gönner, served as a school principal, responsible for “re-educating” local children on behalf of the Third Reich.