Heimat: A German Family Album

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The art (mixed media collage and illustration) is undeniably powerful. The author's handles a complex web of family history deftly, despite its twists and turns. 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. It's an idea that has helped bankroll many religions, including Christianity, which tells us that thanks to "original sin" (Adam and Eve's initial act of eating those bad apples) we all now need salvation. 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

It's also a good little piece of investigative journalism, though nowhere near as dispassionate as that sounds. Krug finds herself asking the difficult questions that no one in her family seems willing to ask. She wants to know - she has to know - what role her grandparents played in the Nazi atrocities. On an individual level, Heimat is the place you don’t have to explain yourself: where you feel comfortable, where people know you, where you belong. But if your Heimat is somewhere you believe you belong but others see you as a perpetual outsider, can it truly be your Heimat? And what happens to those who have lost theirs, who settle somewhere new seeking another Heimat? Such questions have become increasingly urgent in recent years as more than a million refugees came to Germany in 2015 and 2016.Although I’ve long considered writing about Heimat, I intended to do it differently: From the rolling hills of Bavaria, home to the country’s first Heimat ministry under Seehofer; from Hesse, where the Greens sought to reclaim and redefine the word; or perhaps from North Rhine-Westphalia, which holds a “Heimat Congress” every two years to explore the concept. The prospect of writing about the topic in the midst of a global pandemic, from my apartment and in cafes in my neighborhood as Berlin tentatively reopens, never crossed my mind. Willi, her grandfather from her mother's side, was a driving teacher in Karlsruhe during World War II. How much did he have to compromise with the Nazis to keep running his business? Was he personally involved in Karlsruhe's Kristallnacht pogrom against the Jews in November 1938? In hindsight, Krug says, the family history she embarked on was the kind of project she wished she had done when she was much younger: “What I found problematic about the way in which we were taught at school about the Holocaust and the war was that it conveyed a very generalising sense of guilt. You learned about the facts, but you weren’t encouraged to research what happened in your own city, or your own family. 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 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.

At the end of an imaginary journey, the return from dream to reality often appeared as a second expulsion, claiming every dear space until the next fantasy. After indulging in a novel-length journey to the cherished past world, even guiding the reader through the intimate spaces of his house and garden, Wolfgang von Eichborn relived his winter expulsion and felt it steal the intimate spaces away: “Village by village, church tower by church tower, the Heimat was engulfed by the dissolving loss of the white night. The pyramids of the mountains moved nearer, moved further, disappeared; the landscape of the Heimat sank into the dreamful certainty of memory.” Every feature of Heimat remained dear in his memory, but they were lost in reality and could only be recovered when he closed his eyes. Heimat features prominently in campaign rhetoric, including this 2018 poster from the Bavarian Christian Social Union 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?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. 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 I was hugely taken by Nora Krug's Heimat, a beautifully produced and thoughtful piece of family history by a second generation German immigrant to the US. -- Tim Martin * The Spectator * While travelling frequently between the US and Germany, she says, she started a notebook to document behavioural oddities that she had previously been blind to. “For example, Germans apologise a lot less, whether that is for bumping into people in the road, or for graver things. To apologise in German entails an admission that you are guilty. In the English-speaking world, an apology doesn’t necessarily imply that: it can just mean ‘I didn’t intend that to happen’, and not ‘It is my fault’. An apology carries a lot of weight here.”

What price needs to be paid? Should there be reparations for slavery? Do policies like affirmative action help lighten this "white man's burden"? Is it righting past wrongs when Native Americans are able to attend college and university tuition free while others are buried up to their ears in debt? Krug’s memoir Heimat: A German Family Album seeks to wade through this moral quagmire, what she calls the “grey zone of war”, full of “people you can neither classify as resistance fighters or as victims, nor as war criminals”. It is a surprising mission for a writer born in 1977. The task of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, of coming to terms with the National Socialist era, is in Germany mainly associated with the literature and films of Krug’s parents’ generation. 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?” But my original views still stand. This is one of the best memoirs I've ever read and certainly the best graphic memoir (even though Satrapi's Persepolis and Sacco's Palestine come close — BUT NORA'S ART AND CREATIVITY IS UNMATCHED!!).Just uploaded a video talking about my favorite comics of all time. You bet Heimat showed up in there. ///

If I had stayed in Germany, I would have never thought of writing this book,” she says over a coffee in a beer garden in central Berlin. “There’s that Hannah Arendt line: ‘If all are guilty, no one is.’ As a German in Germany you have already learned so much about the second world war, thought so much about it and talked so much about it, that I would have thought: what’s left to be said?” 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.Nora Krug’s graphic memoir explores the impact of Second World War–and the Nazi regime– on German families That was my first, but far from last, encounter with Heimat in the nearly three years I’ve lived in Germany. At the time, it didn’t feel especially noteworthy; all I remembered was thinking Heimat sounded like a nice concept and that it was a shame we didn’t have an equivalent in English. The same thought occurred again the following week when, upon starting German classes in Berlin, I saw our textbook’s first lesson focused entirely on Heimat. 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. The Financial Times This book is a good deed but the naive tone of it "I wanted to make peace with my family's past and so I did, yay" was a bit annoying to me, maybe because in the end Nora is off to be far from Europe and Germany and its problems and we see everything from closer perspective, and I also see that history is very much alive and never a closed chapter... but if it helped her - well, good for her. I'm pretty sure there were questions unanswered left but they were off the general topic and none of our business. 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.