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gabesteller 's review for:
Heimat: A German Family Album
by Nora Krug
Wowza very unique blend of photos, prose, drawings, paintings, and comics all about confronting family complicity and what to make of German Culture/kitsch in the wake of Nazism. After living in the US for 12 years, and marrying into a jewish family, Krug finds herself missing so much of her former German life, but doesn't know how to talk about it now and realizes she never has!
Nazism shadows every thought on this subject and like many Germans Krug’s family has kept quiet about the extent too which they were involved in the Nazi party and this book is her resulting investigation.
What she finds is both suspenseful and totally revealing about sort of basic Human nature. Although obviously horrific, the faults her grandparents, and great-uncles etc show are like pretty normal ones. Some were nazis but they were also dumb patriotic 17 years olds, or they were middle-aged and mostly concerned with their own immediate concerns and their own lives. When it became way more convenient to join the party they do so and so on.
The latter doesn't excuse the former but both are true! Average people have the capacity for great good (say all the stories of heroism and solidarity you’ll hear after a natural disaster,) or acquiescence and support of terrible evil (Krug’s Nazi relatives) depending on what pressures they are put under. Human beings do all this stuff, and when you have mass evil like the nazis seemingly otherwise regular people get involved! How does that happen? worth investigating cuz as the giant in Twin Peaks says “ITS HAPPENING AGAINNNN”
Also the art is is soooo good, they way she combines watercolor and photos, documents and drawings, is so evocative, effective in communicating the concreteness and murkiness of memory and the past. Theres a part where one of her great uncles is writing home from the front and she draws a portrait of him below each letter and as he marches toward his death, the portrait gets fuzzier and fuzzier as pooling water colors replace sharp pencil lines until his face looks like a corpse ahhhhhhhgh!
If i had a criticism it would be that Krug's writing while mostly excellent does drift into sentimental and overly poetic territory on occasion, and the comic sections generally didn't work as well for me, as her faces all mostly look the same, and so individuals become hard to recognize.
(4.5)
ty 4 rec Hanna!
Nazism shadows every thought on this subject and like many Germans Krug’s family has kept quiet about the extent too which they were involved in the Nazi party and this book is her resulting investigation.
What she finds is both suspenseful and totally revealing about sort of basic Human nature. Although obviously horrific, the faults her grandparents, and great-uncles etc show are like pretty normal ones. Some were nazis but they were also dumb patriotic 17 years olds, or they were middle-aged and mostly concerned with their own immediate concerns and their own lives. When it became way more convenient to join the party they do so and so on.
The latter doesn't excuse the former but both are true! Average people have the capacity for great good (say all the stories of heroism and solidarity you’ll hear after a natural disaster,) or acquiescence and support of terrible evil (Krug’s Nazi relatives) depending on what pressures they are put under. Human beings do all this stuff, and when you have mass evil like the nazis seemingly otherwise regular people get involved! How does that happen? worth investigating cuz as the giant in Twin Peaks says “ITS HAPPENING AGAINNNN”
Also the art is is soooo good, they way she combines watercolor and photos, documents and drawings, is so evocative, effective in communicating the concreteness and murkiness of memory and the past. Theres a part where one of her great uncles is writing home from the front and she draws a portrait of him below each letter and as he marches toward his death, the portrait gets fuzzier and fuzzier as pooling water colors replace sharp pencil lines until his face looks like a corpse ahhhhhhhgh!
If i had a criticism it would be that Krug's writing while mostly excellent does drift into sentimental and overly poetic territory on occasion, and the comic sections generally didn't work as well for me, as her faces all mostly look the same, and so individuals become hard to recognize.
(4.5)
ty 4 rec Hanna!