Heimat: A German Family Album

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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? As you can see here today, our culture is an important topic,” Andreas, a 33-year-old FPÖ supporter, told me that day, gesturing to the celebration around him as he explained why he supports the party. “I think that probably deserves more attention in our politics.” The nature of my work in Germany means I often speak with people who feel their Heimat, the place that matters to them most, the place they idealize and long for, is under threat and changing in ways that make it unrecognizable. Watching fires burn and tear gas fired across America these last days, feeling an immense sadness and an urge to be there, I think I better understand how powerful that concept can be. Ultimately, though, it's not that easy and Krug knows it all too well. Most Germans were complicit in some way; the true "good guys" didn't live to tell the tale. Despite an extensive investigation, many answers remain out of reach.

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 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. In retrospect, the map and that question about Heimat were a fitting prelude to exploring the political issues facing Germany today and the rise of the populist far right here and across Europe. Indeed, the concept lies at the heart of the debates about belonging and identity in a changing Germany; it tends to take on prominence when society is trying to process various fundamental changes to the country and its way of life. Some see the word as self-evident, a regular and integral part of their vocabulary; others recoil, believing it to be entirely lost to far-right politicians; still others want to “save” it, reframing it to represent the more inclusive society they want Germany to be. Nora Krug's book Heimat is 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 Hava Beller, Director of 'The Restless Conscience' I bring this up, because the author of this story, is one such German, who knows about the war, but it is not talked about, though her father's older brother fought and died in World War II. This memoir of how she doesn't feel that she has a home in her former homeland, and how she goes in search of what her family did in the war, and what happened to them.Provocative…as lush as it is meticulous…this work of stunning craftsmanship stands as a testament to speaking out as a necessary first step to healing.” Also, I don't like that holocaust is sort of a crutch to the personal story. Yes, I know it's not really a book about holocaust. But it annoys me. A theme that runs through the book is the unreliability of memory. This is probably especially true in Germany, where people want to distance themselves from the crimes of the Nazi regime, and any participation they might have had in them. For instance, hundreds gathered to watch the burning of the town synagogue, but later few would admit having been there, and even those were old people decades after the war who no longer had to fear any repercussions; the others all claimed that they had been “out in their fields” or doing something else when it happened. Nora Krug was born decades after the fall of the Nazi regime, but the Second World War cast a long shadow throughout her childhood and youth in the city of Karlsruhe, Germany. For Nora, the simple fact of her German citizenship bound her to the Holocaust and its unspeakable atrocities and left her without a sense of cultural belonging. Yet Nora knew little about her own family’s involvement in the war: though all four grandparents lived through the war, they never spoke of it. 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

And last fall in the Austrian Alps, watching lederhosen-clad young men herd elaborately decorated cows down from mountain pastures during the annual Almabtrieb ceremony, I better understood the sorts of images politicians from Austria’s far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) evoke when they speak about preserving Austrian Heimat and traditions. 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.”Belonging wrestles with the idea of Heimat, the German word for the place that first forms us, where the sensibilities and identity of one generation pass on to the next. In this highly inventive visual memoir—equal parts graphic novel, family scrapbook, and investigative narrative—Nora Krug draws on letters, archival material, flea market finds, and photographs to attempt to understand what it means to belong. A wholly original record of a German woman’s struggle with the weight of catastrophic history, Belonging is also a reflection on the responsibility that we all have as inheritors of our countries’ pasts. 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.