Fatherland

What would have happened if Hitler had won World War II?

In 1975 Nina Bunjevac’s mother fled her marriage and her adopted country of Canada and took Nina back to Yugoslavia to live with her parents. Peter, her husband, was a fanatical Serbian nationalist who had been forced to leave his country at the end of World War II and migrate to Canada. But even there he continued his activities, joining a terrorist group that planned to set off bombs at the homes of Tito sympathisers and at Yugoslav missions in Canada and the USA. Then in 1977, while his family were still in Yugoslavia, a telegram arrived to say that a bomb had gone off prematurely and Peter and two of his comrades had been killed. Nina Bunjevac tells her family’s story in superb black-and-white artwork. Fatherland will be recognised as a masterpiece of non-fiction comics, worthy to stand beside Persepolis and Palestine.

From extensive research, including a remarkable interview with the unrepentant chief of Hitler’s Women’s Bureau, this book traces the roles played by women – as followers, victims and resisters – in the rise of Nazism. Originally publishing in 1987, it is an important contribution to the understanding of women’s status, culpability, resistance and victimisation at all levels of German society, and a record of astonishing ironies and paradoxical morality, of compromise and courage, of submission and survival.

1945 to 1980 marks an extensive period of mass migration of students, refugees, ex-soldiers, and workers from an extraordinarily wide range of countries to West Germany. Turkish, Kurdish, and Italian groups have been studied extensively, and while this book uses these groups as points of comparison, it focuses on ethnic communities of varying social structures-from Spain, Iran, Ukraine, Greece, Croatia, and Algeria-and examines the interaction between immigrant networks and West German state institutions as well as the ways in which patterns of cooperation and conflict differ. This study demonstrates how the social consequences of mass immigration became intertwined with the ideological battles of Cold War Germany and how the political life and popular movements within these immigrant communities played a crucial role in shaping West German society.

From the bestselling author of Agent Zigzag and Double Cross the true story of Friedrich Nietzsche's bigoted, imperious sister who founded a 'racially pure' colony in Paraguay together with a band of blond-haired fellow Germans.

Against this background, Cleansing the Fatherland sends a stark message that is difficult to ignore.

“This book needs to join the ranks of the classic survivor stories of WWII such as ‘Diary of Anne Frank’ and ‘Man's Search for Meaning’. It is truly that amazing!” InD'tale Magazine “This type of raw, articulate, history-based storytelling pays homage to the war children who bore witness while struggling to survive.” Publishers Weekly (PW) Based on a true story and set against the epic panorama of WWII, SURVIVING THE FATHERLAND is a sweeping saga of family, love, and betrayal that illuminates an intimate part of history seldom seen: the children's war - a tale of two youths whose courage and resilience stands for the forgotten childhood of an entire generation. Solingen, Germany, 1940: When her father goes off to war, seven-year-old Lilly is left with an unkind mother who favors her brother and chooses to ignore the lecherous pedophile next door. A few blocks away, twelve-year-old Günter also loses his father to the draft and quickly takes charge of supplementing his family's ever-dwindling rations by any means necessary. As the war escalates and bombs begin to rain, Lilly and Günter's lives spiral out of control. Every day is a fight for survival. On a quest for firewood, Lilly encounters a dying soldier and steals her father's last suit to help the man escape. Barely sixteen, Günter ignores his draft call and embarks as a fugitive on a harrowing 47-day ordeal--always just one step away from execution. When at last the war ends, Günter grapples with his brother's severe PTSD and the fact that none of his classmates survived. Welcoming denazification, Lilly takes a desperate step to rid herself once and for all of her disgusting neighbor's grip. When Lilly and Günter meet in 1949, their love affair is like any other. Or so it seems. But old wounds and secrets have a way of rising to the surface once more.

Free-wheeling and surreal yet deadly serious, and including the viral hit 'Rape Joke' ('An oblique mini-masterpiece' Guardian), this book shows one of our most original poets at her virtuosic best. 'Lockwood has written a book at once angrier, and more fun, more attuned to our times and more bizarre, than most poetry can ever get' STEPHEN BURT, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, BOOKS OF THE YEAR 'Lockwood should enter the canon forever . . . her lines left me crying on the subway' KAT STOEFFEL, THE CUT 'The little hairs on my back rose often while reading Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals . . . That's biological praise, the most fundamental kind, impossible to fake' DWIGHT GARNER, THE NEW YORK TIMES