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emleemay 's review for:
Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home
by Nora Krug
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.
This is not an easy book to read. It's a graphic memoir of what it was like to grow up in a post-Hitler Germany. In Krug's childhood, the Holocaust looms in the background of everything but is rarely spoken about. 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.
The mixed art is very powerful. 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. There's nothing simple about this book at all. It's both an informative read for the non-German reader, and an emotional memoir.
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.
For what reason? She's not sure. Perhaps to absolve them in her mind; perhaps to adequately blame them. Whatever the reasoning, I felt every bit of the author’s desperation to find out about her grandparents. I sat along as she dug into their history and hoped so very much that they weren’t guilty of the worst crimes. I, too, wanted it to not be them. I wanted them to have been the good guys.
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.
Not a simple read, or fully satisfying, but thought-provoking nonetheless. CW: antisemitism; holocaust (disturbing images).
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