Christopher P. Winner

On the morning of my father’s seventieth birthday, when I was barely a teenager, he greeted me with one of his customary morning announcements. Since we lived in Washington, the capital, I expected the comment, as it invariably did, would reflect on the vicissitudes of culture, something about politics or foreign affairs, or perhaps film, his other love. But no.

Madeleine Johnson Madeleine Johnson has been writing a column for The American | In Italia almost since its inception in 2004. A lifelong interest in the rise of Nazi Germany has turned into At Hitler’s Picnic: Discovering the 1934 Nuremberg Rally, a project that grew out of the discovery of some slides found when her family was cleaning out her childhood home.

Among small earthling families, intrinsic hives of mystery and half-truths, mine was in some respects more than a little peculiar. My intention here is to write about my aunt, my father’s sister, but I can’t begin to do that before noting that I was unaware I had such an aunt until age 11 and that I didn’t meet her until nearly a decade later.