In 1979, the distinguished German foreign correspondent Wibke Bruhns returned from a trip to Israel to her Hamburg flat. She couldn't sleep so she poured herself a whisky and put a cassette into the video recorder. It was a documentary about the 1944 trial of a group of German officers who had tried to kill Hitler at his HQ in East Prussia. The plot famously failed; Hitler survived; most of those involved, including Claus von Stauffenburg who hid a bomb under the Führer's desk, were arrested and shot. Those not immediately executed faced an excruciating show trial before a Nazi court in Berlin.
One of the defendants was Wibke Bruhns'sfather, Hans Georg Klamroth - who had apparently known about the plot but had said nothing to the nazi authorities. The video showed an intelligent, defeated man in civilian clothes, his hands folded in apparent resignation. The court convicted him of treason and he was hanged 11 days later. Bruhns was just six.
"I stared at this man with this extinguished face. I didn't know him," Bruhns wrote later. "But I recognised myself in him - his eyes were my eyes. I know that I look like him. I wouldn't be anything without him. And what did I know about him? I knew nothing."
This late-night encounter with her long-dead father prompted her to begin a slow and painful journey into her family's past, and to write a book about the man she never knew, My Father's Land. The memoir, which has just been published in Germany and is riding high in the bestseller list, raises several awkward questions. How did a "nice", well-to-do merchant family like the Klamroths "slide", as Bruhns puts it, into Nazism, like so many Germans in the 30s? Do we ever really know our parents? And should one generation judge the preceding one?
After the second world war, Bruhns'smother Else, refused to talk about her husband. There was, Bruhns writes, a "diffuse family agreement" not to speak of the terrible public and private disaster that had engulfed them. It was only after Else's death in 1987 that Bruhns was gradually able to piece together the truth about her parents' marriage.
Hidden in a drawer in her mother's desk, she found her father's diary, some of it written in Greek code, as well as hundreds of letters, photos and documents. This voluminous correspondence allows Bruhns to evoke her father's traditional Prussian childhood in the east German town of Halberstadt, where the family owned a prosperous seed business.
Bruhns's father, Hans Georg, whom she calls HG, was shy, intelligent and loyal to the Kaiser. As a young officer in the first world war, he was forced to shoot a German soldier for stealing; afterwards the experience haunted him. By the late 1920s, Bruhns discovered, her parents were involved in a remarkable ménage-a-quatre with another married couple. After bridge sessions HG would disappear to bed his neighbour's wife Cläreliese; her mother, meanwhile, consoled herself with Helmuth.
"In the late 20s and the first half of the 30s, these people lived their morality in ways that were looser than in the 60s," Bruhns says. "I didn't expect it."
There were, Bruhns soon realised, plenty of other women in her father's life: in 1934 he bedded a 17-year-old Danish family friend who came to stay, punctiliously recording the event in his diary. (Bruhns tracked down the woman on her Stockholm deathbed; when asked about HG, she beamed.) Throughout the 30s, the man whom postwar Germany would laud as a resistance hero repeatedly betrayed his wife and in the months leading up to his execution the marriage had collapsed.
Rather worse, however, was the discovery that her father had joined the Nazi party immediately after Hitler took power in 1933; the same year he voted to expel a Jewish businessman from Halberstadt's business circle. Her mother became a Nazi party member in 1937 - a painful fact that she only discovered after her mother's death 50 years later.
And yet, Bruhns concludes, her father was never an anti-Semite. At the family business, he employed a Jewish secretary who, amazingly, survived the war. At home, the Klamroths sang Hitler songs around the piano; but at the same time, Bruhns said, "they never really figured out" the Third Reich, or its intrinsic horror.
"They were conservative nice guys. Like a lot of conservative nice guys, they thought they were going to run the country again. They wanted to use Hitler. It turned out this was a mistake," Bruhns explains.
At some stage, however, HG realised the predicament that Germany was in. Bruhns only recently discovered that her father, who spent two years during the war as a German secret agent in Denmark, had been in touch with the resistance. In early 1942 HG volunteered to serve on the eastern front; though his frequent letters home fail to mention this, HG must have known about the mass executions of Jews in Russia and Poland, Bruhns believes, and grown even more disillusioned with the Third Reich after the disaster of Stalingrad.
HG returned home from the front; Bruhns's mother, who has been looking after five children, then discovered a love letter to another woman in his pack. In February 1944, as his marriage disintegrated, HG met with several of the conspirators who were preparing to assassinate Hitler. They included Bernhard Klamroth - a distant family relative who had just married Bruhns'seldest sister Ursula. Five months later Berhand handled the explosives which were used in the attempt to blow up the Führer. But Hitler survived the explosion at his Wolfschanze HQ with superficial injuries.
The denouement was swift. Recounting his death, Bruhns writes to her lost father. "I want to tell him he is not alone, even after 60 years. Here I am, who have accompanied him through his whole life, and I am not going to let him go. I would have liked to have laughed with you, HG, and enjoyed your jokes and warmth ... I would have liked to have loved you. I thank you."
After the fall of the Berlin wall, the family even got their enormous house in Halberstadt back, where, in 1945, Russian soldiers danced on the sofas. Klamroth was only recognised as a hero in the 1960s, Bruhns said. In the immediate postwar years, the headmaster who expelled her from boarding school described her father as a "traitor".
Bruhns first childhood memory is of going into the kitchen after Germany's defeat and asking her mother why nobody said "Heil Hitler" any more. Her mother clipped her round the ear. She concludes: "Perhaps I should have asked: why did anybody say it?"
