deservingporcupine 's review for:

Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home by Nora Krug

2.0

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This book does not sit quite right with me. It’s so crucial a story as I think about the white US’s inability to reckon with our history of colonizers and enslavers. I’d always believed that Germany got the reckoning right, and I appreciated that the beginning and end of this book make it clear that they have not. And yet, the sections of this book in which the author seems to be searching for absolution ... just feel wrong. I guess I believe that excusing Nazis just because you want to feel better isn’t worth reading about and doesn’t feel like facing history to me. The absence of Jewish voices is also quite glaring in a book about WWII. I’m glad that I read this book, because it did give me a lot to think about in terms of the complexities of history and family and responsibility, but it’s more an example of the wrong way to approach questions like these. Also, though I liked the scrapbook structure, there were parts that were very hard to read due to color choices.