There's also soap that's been made from ox gallbladders since the mid 1800s that "guarantees your shirts come out as white as snow" - a different form of whitewashing. These include a hot water bottle and dark, crusty sour German bread. Krug balances this terrible history with bucolic scenes of the German countryside, and a running feature titled "From the notebook of a homesick émigré," which flags iconic practical and comforting German items that she misses, but can only go so far to salve wounds. Seeing photographs of Germans forced, often barefoot and with hands over their mouths, to confront the atrocities committed in concentration camps, and reading about Karlsruhe's Reichskristallnacht in 1938 from Krug's point of view is powerfully affecting. But it's endlessly absorbing, and you wouldn't want to read this book in the dark anyway: Stark reminders of Nazism's brutality are haunting. There's a lot to take in, and with its scrapbook abundance, the book can be visually challenging - particularly when Krug deliberately fades her lettering to express hollowed out feelings. Her uncle's school essays, which are filled with ugly anti-Semitic propaganda, are disturbing, as are flea market finds like Hitler Youth toys that include a nasty caricature of a Jew. It is richly illustrated with cartoons, family photographs and letters, handwritten text, and archival German documents annotated in English by Krug. Krug's unease is not alleviated even after she emigrates to New York, a situation she expresses succinctly in a drawing of a tiered wedding cake festooned with script that reads, "Not even marrying a Jewish man has lessened my German shame."īelonging is both emotionally and graphically complex. Heimat's deeper meaning encompasses not just home, but the place that forms you and establishes a sense of belonging. She became increasingly baffled over her mixed feelings towards her homeland - Heimat in German, which is the original, stronger title of this book but a word now unfortunately tainted by its association with extreme right-wing politics. Studying abroad exacerbated Krug's sense of guilt and embarrassment over her accent. High school class trips involved visits to concentration camp museums in Germany, France, and Poland. Krug learned about the Holocaust in school right around the time she first menstruated, leading her to conflate the shame of being German with the shame of being a woman. Her parents grew up in what Krug calls "the age of oblivion," a time when escapist romance drama dominated German television. Krug was born in 1977, and her parents, both academics, were born in 1946 - the same year as Hegi. It also brings to mind Ursula Hegi's epic exploration of German guilt and suffering in her 1994 novel, Stones from the River. In its searching honesty and multi-layered, visual and verbal storytelling, it packs the power of Alison Bechdel's Fun Home and David Small's Stitches (though Krug's fraught relationship is with her homeland, not her parents). Pick up Nora Krug's reverberant graphic memoir, Belonging, and be prepared to lose yourself for hours in this unstinting investigation into her conflicted feelings about being German and her family's role in the Holocaust. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Belonging Subtitle A German Reckons With History and Home Author Nora Krug
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