Pascal Bruckner: My Father, the Anti-Semite

“Your father is the only one who ever succeeded in taking advantage of the Jews. I don’t know how he did it.” So Pascal Bruckner’s father René said one day to his grandson. The father remained a fanatical follower of Hitler even 60 years after the Nazi downfall. The son went in the opposite direction, toward friendship with French Jewish intellectuals like Alain Finkielkraut, and a partnership with Roman Polanski (Bruckner wrote the novel on which Polanski based his movie Bitter Moon). Bruckner’s first marriage was to a Jewish woman, his second to a Belgian of mixed Jewish and Tutsi ancestry. And so Bruckner’s father, his head still in the Fascist clouds, was treated to Jewish and mixed-race grandchildren.

These days Bruckner, the celebrated French intellectual, has been thinking about his father, the anti-Semite. The elder Bruckner died in 2012, and now Bruckner has published a book in France, Un bon fils (A Good Son) about their relationship.

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