Skip to main content
Control Panel
Untitled design (4)

In-person

Meet the Author: Bjørn Westlie, "My Father's War: Confronting Norway's Nazi Past"

Date

Admission

Join us for an in-person Meet the Author with Bjørn Westlie, author of My Father's War: Confronting Norway's Nazi Past. Westlie will be in conversation with the book's translator, Dean Krouk.

About the Book: 
“An important and timely contribution to the field, with an informative and lucid introduction. My Father's War is part memoir and part documentary narrative, an exploration of a son’s relationship to an estranged father intertwined with a terrifying history of Norwegian men who enlisted in the Waffen-SS and committed atrocities in Ukraine.”—Marianne Stecher-Hansen, editor of Nordic War Stories: World War II as History, Fiction, Media, and Memory

My Father’s War is simultaneously a history of the Nazi occupation of Norway in World War II and a son’s sincere attempt to understand the silences, motivations, and experiences of an estranged father. In this carefully researched book, combining family memoir and historical retelling, Bjørn Westlie uncovers his father’s actions as a volunteer soldier for the Waffen-SS, the military wing of the infamous Schutzstaffel (SS), in the invasion of the Soviet Union. Balancing his role as both son and critical investigator, Westlie unflinchingly interrogates his father’s fascist convictions, which speak to the appeal Hitler’s ideology held for a small, disgraced segment of Norway’s mid-century population. A story of collaboration, tragedy, and treason, My Father’s War reveals the little-known history of Norway's frontkjempere (front fighters), the atrocities the Waffen-SS committed against Ukrainian Jews, and the complex legacies of ethnonationalism in Norway.

With an insightful introduction from translator Dean Krouk, My Father’s War is a contemporary classic of war literature. Committed to genuine understanding without falling into undue sympathizing, this sober and reflective book presents an eye-opening, moving, intense, and necessary account of the allure of fascism in a world at war—and its personal costs.

Speakers

  • Bjørn Westlie

    Bjørn Westlie

    Bjørn Westlie, who has worked as a journalist and historian, is the author of of nine books, including Oppgjør i skyggen av Holocaust (Reckoning in the Shadow of the Holocaust).

  • Dean Krouk

    Dean Krouk

    Dean Krouk, associate professor of Scandinavian studies at the University of Wisconsin– Madison, is the author of two books, including The Making of an Antifascist: Nordahl Grieg between the World Wars.