It's also a good little piece of investigative journalism, though nowhere near as dispassionate as that sounds. It's both an informative read for the non-German reader, and an emotional memoir.
There's nothing simple about this book at all. Krug uses a scrapbook-style scattering of images, clippings and traditional comic strip art to first explore her own upbringing, and then later to delve into her family's past.
The book looks at the collective shame of the German people- a shame drilled so deep that the word "heimat" or "homeland" brings no sense of pride a shame that means hiding your accent to avoid provoking strong and painful emotions in those you meet. In Krug's childhood, the Holocaust looms in the background of everything but is rarely spoken about. It's a graphic memoir of what it was like to grow up in a post-Hitler Germany. I slowly began to accept that my knowledge will have limits, that I’ll never know exactly what Willi thought, what he saw or heard, what he decided to do or not to do, what he could have done and failed to do, and why. A highly inventive, “thoughtful, engrossing” ( Minneapolis Star-Tribune ) graphic memoir, Belonging “packs the power of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and David Small’s Stitches ” (NPR.org). In this extraordinary quest, “Krug erases the boundaries between comics, scrapbooking, and collage as she endeavors to make sense of 20th-century history, the Holocaust, her German heritage, and her family's place in it all” ( The Boston Globe ). Returning to Germany, she visits archives, conducts research, and interviews family members, uncovering in the process the stories of her maternal grandfather, a driving teacher in Karlsruhe during the war, and her father’s brother Franz-Karl, who died as a teenage SS soldier. Yet she knew little about her own family’s involvement though all four grandparents lived through the war, they never spoke of it.Īfter twelve years in the US, Krug realizes that living abroad has only intensified her need to ask the questions she didn’t dare to as a child. Nora Krug was born decades after the fall of the Nazi regime, but the Second World War cast a long shadow over her childhood and youth in the city of Karlsruhe, Germany. This “ingenious reckoning with the past” ( The New York Times ), by award-winning artist Nora Krug investigates the hidden truths of her family’s wartime history in Nazi Germany. * Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Comics Beat, The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Kirkus Reviews, and Library Journal * Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award * Silver Medal Society of Illustrators *
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