Heimat: A German Family Album

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It's also a belief that fuels much of "woke" culture today, that because of slavery, because of the massacre of the Native Americans (and other horrible crimes), the descendants of white Europeans owe a debt, and not just a financial debt, to the descendants of those slaves and various indigenous peoples who were murdered or cast off their land. Rather than one definitive Heimat, immigrants to Germany might have Heimaten, the word’s less-used plural. When I met Görlitz Mayor Octavian Ursu last summer, I asked what the word means to him. He was born in Bucharest, Romania, and moved to Görlitz at 22. After spending more than half his life in Germany, he was elected mayor for the center-right CDU last June. Ursu ran a close race against the AfD’s Sebastian Wippel, who grew up in Görlitz. In campaign materials, Wippel’s slogan was “A Görlitzer,” inherently implying Ursu wasn’t. I considered for a moment before placing my pin, weighing the new word in my mind. Was my Heimat the small town in the San Francisco Bay Area where I’d grown up, where my mother still lives and to which I return regularly? Was it Philadelphia, where I attended college and learned how to think critically? Was it the University of Cambridge, where I studied abroad and which remains a sort of intellectual utopia in my mind? Or was it Washington, the city from which I had just come, where I had lived my entire postcollegiate life? Like for many in my generation, my life and communities have been spread out across multiple cities; the right choice wasn’t immediately obvious. In the event, to be contrarian, and counter the high concentration of pins across the United States, I chose Cambridge.

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' *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. I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings but I don't think that everybody over there is so historically conscious and trying to be a decent human being and at least learn about possible their ancestors' crimes as Nora Krug does in her novel. Seems like some people just "got over it" and lived on, skipping this historical period like it never happened at all and avoided any mentioning of holocaust or the many war crimes. 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. Comparing pristine and timeless prewar images of Löwenberg with the rubble and lifeless streets of postwar Lwówek, recounting story after story from former residents who had suffered abuse and witnessed wanton destruction and plundering, Möller left his readers with little doubt that, in contrast to all previous wars, the rupture of 1945 had ended the world they had known. Heimat is an astoundingly honest book that conducts a devastating - and irresistible - investigation into one family's struggle with the forces of history. I could not stop reading it and when I was done I could not stop thinking about it. By going so deeply into her family's history, Krug has in some ways written about us all Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm

For Buttlar, memory became a source ( Quelle) of strength from which Silesians should ladle and drink – always with sober recognition that the remembered Heimat was endangered. Even though many families tried to pass on customs of Heimat to the children, time would make even this lived tradition “vanish more and more and only live on in nostalgic ( wehmütig) memories.” She knew her imaginary journeys were only accessible to the intimate circle of those who had known Silesia before the rupture of 1945. When her generation died, imaginary journeys would cease. Krug therefore looked into the history of her father's and her mother's side. Like many other Germans, her ancestors were neither Resistance fighters nor part of Hitler's close circle. But to find out that someof them couldofficially be classified as "Mitläufer" — followers of the Nazi regime — was apainful revelation in her investigation:"I grew up with this narrative of my grandfather Willi as somebody who had voted for the Social Democrats all his life, who were the Nazis' major political enemies. So there had always been this myth of him having nothing to do at all with the Nazi regime," Nora Krug: Replacing German 'guilt' with 'responsibility' to defend democracy. "I saw myself confronted with a side of him that was uncomfortable to witness — of somebody who was opportunistic in his choices, and a bit of a coward."

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Towards the end of her book and investigation into her maternal grandfather's activities during WWII, Krug ruminates on which outcome would be preferable. Would she rather discover that her father actively opposed the Nazis, even going so far as to hide a Jewish man in his shed? Today, the word is seemingly everywhere: In restaurant names, on t-shirts, in advertising campaigns. It’s hard to fully explain the meaning of the word and myriad implications and subtexts it brings because it is ultimately whatever people want it to be. Heimat can be the feeling of pulling into your driveway or the sound of a childhood friend’s voice after many years apart; it can be the taste of the coffee at the cafe you’ve frequented every morning for years, or the smell of the grass in the park beside your house. Heimat is a screen onto which each of us projects our deepest longings and desires—which is partly what makes it so powerful and emotionally charged. For those who don’t fit into the AfD’s idyllic, German (and implicitly white) concept of Heimat, the word, and its presence so ubiquitous it appears in the name of a government ministry, can feel less like a nostalgic longing for hometown beer halls and grandma’s schnitzel and more like an implied threat of exclusion. Mentioning the word to a progressive-minded German might prompt cringing (by even those who may use the word casually when they describe visiting family for the weekend). Nora Krug has created a beautiful visual memoir of a horrific time in history. A time that torments us to this day. Asking questions and searching for the truth, she will not turn away from the legacy of her family and her country. She asks the question of how any of us survive our family history. Ultimately, the only course is not to veil the answers -- Maira Kalman, American illustrator, artist and writer

Heimat, the title of Krug’s book, is one of those terms whose prestige as an ultra-specific, “untranslatable” German word isn’t really deserved. The word, which was co-opted by National Socialist propaganda and only partially rehabilitated by Edgar Reitz’s arthouse soap opera, made in the 80s and 90s, of the same name (of which Krug is a fan), oscillates between referring to a specific geographic location, a “homeland”, and a vaguer, more spiritual sense of “home-ness”. 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? 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. Bracing honesty ... the informal feel and arresting candor of a diary -- Francoise Mouly * New Yorker *

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When he bemoaned the “schmaltzy kitsch” of Heimat in 1957, the expellee from Liegnitz accused Heimat films of propagating imagery of lost eastern lands as colorful and false as Technicolor American westerns. Although he conceded that the “overexposure” ( Überbetonung) of Heimat was spreading at least some awareness of the former East, he feared that the real essence of Heimat was being lost. But what was the real essence of Silesia, when the physical experience of the old Heimat drifted further away with the passage of time, and contemporary, Polish Silesia diverged into something so alien from what they remembered? Regardless of whether the Heimat of memory offends one’s taste as “false” or “kitsch,” it was chiel y through residing in an idealized aesthetic of what had been that expellees managed to continue on without losing a sense of their own identity. To illustrate how this process functioned, this section explores two of the more prevalent and interconnected mediums that stimulated interchange between the two images of Heimat: chronicles of the parochial history and “character” of local communities too small to have been known far outside of the immediate vicinity, and imagery commemorating the Heimat ’s history, landscapes, and monuments. 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?

Extraordinary . . . The curious appeal of Krug's graphic memoir is that it never fully loses itself in the act of storytelling but constantly stops to turn over and reassess the means at its disposal. Next door in Austria, the FPÖ has also long made Heimat a central part of its identity. Like Germany’s NPD, it bills itself as “the social Heimat party” and ran its 2019 parliamentary campaign on the slogan “Fair. Social. Loyal to the Heimat.” After the party lost big in those elections, leader Norbert Hofer announced the newly rebranded party would focus even more strongly on the idea of “Heimat protection.” A highly original and powerful graphic novel that works on many levels...an unflinching examination of what we mean when we think of identity, of history and home. The result is a book that is as informative as a history and as touching as a novel.