How many of us really think about the history of our cultures, or country, or of how much we benefited or lost due to events that occured before we were born? This German author is born after the fall of the Nazi regime, but how does one grapple with the legacy of the Holocaust and its unspeakable atrocities? Through this story you can see how Nazism took over a small town. You see the The Nazis “politicized, paganized and nationalized” Heimat, Celia Applegate writes in her book A Nation of Provincials, arguing that they perpetrated the “ultimate perversion of the idea of Heimat.” At the center of this pioneering work in modern European history is the German word Heimat—the homeland, the local place. Translations barely penetrate the meaning of the word, which has provided the emotional and ideological common ground for a variety of associations and individuals devoted to the cause of local preservation. Celia Applegate examines at both the national and regional levels the cultural meaning of Heimat and why it may be pivotal to the troubled and very timely question of German identity. Heimat can be as benign as the mentioning by my roommate in the eastern city of Görlitz last summer that she would spend the weekend at her parents’ home in her Heimatstadt. Or the suggestion of a woman in my local market hall in Berlin, upon her hearing my boyfriend’s Austrian accent, that he might like an Austrian cheese since it’s “a piece of Heimat.” It can also be as complicated as an activist’s telling me in Cottbus, a city in eastern Brandenburg that’s seen a disproportionate rise in right-wing extremism, that people are angry and lost, turning to the AfD because they feel as if they are “losing their Heimat… rapidly before our eyes.” And it can be as dangerous as AfD politicians’ wielding it as a rhetorical club against political enemies or those deemed too foreign to fit into their idealized German society.

Nora Krug’s book BelongingÂis a heart-wrenching, suspenseful and fascinating odyssey that straddles, and seeks to uncover, an uncharted, inaccessible, unfathomable past. It is a kaleidoscope of interrupted lives, leading inexorably to its ultimate conclusion. I couldn’t stop reading it.” Nora Krug takes us down memory lane. She says that as a young girl, when she learned about the Holocaust in school, she wanted to show solidarity by sewing a Yellow badge for herself. She says that her aunt once advised her to tell people that she is from the Netherlands when traveling abroad. One of the most peculiar books I’ve ever held in my hands. … an intelligent, visually wonderfully opulent picture book for adults. … HeimatÂby Nora Krug represents a form of self-ascertainment, of finding one’s position, and a moral compass. Nora Krug’s autobiographical search for traces is differentiated, intelligent and sublime, both in its images and in its words, and she thus creates the possibility of the book itself becoming a Heimat.” And thus her graphic memoir is more of a graphic statement, a snapshot not only of her own family history, but also of the reality of possibilities for any type of storytelling about cultural heritage.”I'm glad I read this, but was deeply disappointed by where the author's focus lay. I don't know how to recommend this to others, unless they were interested in reading a societally-powerful person's insufficient grappling with shame, or a meditation on collective shame that has little to do with meaningful reparation/accountability. I think this narrative meant to tease apart the crucial nuance between guilt and shame, but these aren’t thoughtfully explored — instead, Krug’s need to know just what her ancestors did or did not do overwhelms the stories, and is resolved only after barreling past a tremendous amount of trauma (those of Jewish folks, and also her dad’s obviously traumatic relationship with his sister).

REREAD (JUNE 2021): I decided to reread this wonderful graphic memoir because I'm currently in a massive READING SLUMP ... and I just now realized that I read it EXACTLY two years ago (started reading this on June 13 and finished it on June 14, both in 2019 and now in 2021). That's kinda funny. But how far down our family trees does our guilt extend? For the actions of which ancestors are we responsible? Does time bury guilt, or will we all one day find ourselves united in our shame while our ancestors' crimes are excavated for all to see? Detached from any real circumstances, imaginary journeys did occasionally lead an expellee to demand actual return to magically restored memory landscapes in the physical Silesia, even though the fanciful nature of their own memories proved to most expellees that such proposals were unrealistic. Imagining the streets of Bunzlau in 1957, H. K. envisioned a ghostlike, uninhabited world, frozen under the ethereal gaze of the moon. He pretended that this fantasy in fact represented the town’s contemporary appearance: Bells tone from the towers of the city. After little side trips, we eventually come through the little church alley to St. Mary’s. Holy figures stand around the old gothic church, and we can recognize their contours clearly in the light of the moon. Our glance wanders upwards from the enormous gothic structure to the tower and then to the heavens. Countless stars twinkle and glow off the city between the hills and heath. Slowly we move onward. Once again, we use the old, crooked alley with its wonderful gables which dream in the moonlight just as though they wait for the master to paint them.

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But these last few months, I’ve often found myself thinking about the topic—not as it relates to Germans’ Heimat, but my own. Heimat came to mind when, as the pandemic intensified this spring, I felt a visceral but sustained urge to return to a place where I feel fully at home, where everyone understands me, where I don’t need to speak German or navigate unfamiliar bureaucracy, where I would be able to be physically near many of the people in my life I care about most. Nora Krug created something completely new by inventing a new medium. (...) And with every new form of visual representation she uses, she is able to gain a new perspective on herself and on her history. Ijoma Mangold, literary critic at Die Zeit It’s always changing, Heimat—it’s okay if the roads are changing, it’s okay if the people are changing. It’s okay,” she told me. “It’s about negotiating what kind of Heimat do we want? Is your Heimat my Heimat? Who is allowed to speak for our Heimat? Who can represent it? Is it diverse, or isn’t it?” As part of an essential process known as " Vergangenheitsbewältigung," or coming to terms with one's political past, the curriculum in German schools brought students to thoroughly discuss and analyze the mechanisms that led to such atrocities; they'd also visit concentration camps andcommemorate victims of the Holocaust. These are real people, so their stories are not simple. What really happened with her grandfather and his Jewish employer? What of her young uncle who died in the war and how did it relate to her father being cast out on his own? Did her family participate in the burning of the town’s synagogue or the drowning of a Jew in the town’s fountain? Each piece of research poses more questions.

Krug, who was born in 1977 in Karslruhe and is now based in Brooklyn, felt that despite the educational efforts to reveal the most painful episodes of hercountry's history, the details of what had happened in one's own family and surroundings often remained somewhat taboo. The rest of the book then follows a conventional Searching for Your Ancestors narrative. In particular, she was trying to understand the lives of her grandfather, who was a member of the Nazi party, and her uncle, who was in the Waffen-SS and only eighteen years old in 1944 when he died in combat in Italy. She talks to relatives and the men’s former friends and neighbors to try to connect with them, and searches archives for historical documents. There are some details on them to be found, but as with all books like this, the quest is ultimately self-defeating, since after all, how far can we ever get into the minds of others, not being immersed in their times and the context of their lives? There are no diaries or intimate letters to reveal their innermost thoughts, just faded memories and disjointed facts.

Mixed feelings about this one. It was really interesting in a certain personal context to me - my best friend lives in Germany since 2000, we both had granddads that fought in war against nazis and we often have conversations about Germans and their historical past and especially WWII times as well as about nowadays. BERLIN — During my second week in Germany nearly three years ago, I joined 15 other Americans standing in front of a large world map in a sleek conference room in Stuttgart. We’d just moved to Berlin as part of a yearlong fellowship with the Robert Bosch Foundation, and had traveled down to the foundation’s headquarters for a few days of orientation before diving into German language classes and work placements across the country. Applegate asks that we re-examine the continuities of German history from the perspective of the local places that made up Germany, rather than from that of prominent intellectuals or national policymakers. The local patriotism of Heimat activists emerges as an element of German culture that persisted across the great divides of 1918, 1933, and 1945. She also suggests that this attachment to a particular place is a feature of Europeans in general and is deserving of further attention. Krug] is a tenacious investigator, ferreting out stories from the wispiest hints - a rumor or a mysterious photograph. . . . What Krug pursues is a better quality of guilt, a way of confronting the past without paralysis. Parul Sehgal, The New York Times, 'Top Books of 2018' One thing most people can agree on is that the way the majority of Germans have reacted to the atrocities of the Second World War should serve as a model for the rest of us. But where is the line between "making sure it can't happen again" and feeling nothing but shame for your country, your heritage, your family, for things that happened before you were even born?