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gbatts 's review for:
Heimat: A German Family Album
by Nora Krug
I was interested in this on a personal level, as my grandfather is a displaced person from the former eastern German territories and my grandmother’s father was a small town German businessman in the west. I have had similar thoughts and questions of my own family history.
Overall, the tone was very melodramatic and was more about finding answers than an in-depth reflection of why her, family members would act as they did. It read like, “Nazis were bad, PLEASE don’t allow that my family members would have been bad people.” This led to a lack of nuance in the writing and the snow metaphor was particularly unsubtle.
The mixed media presentation was engaging; the use of official forms was paradoxically emotional in their starkness. It was annoying how Krug would place a picture in the middle of a sentence so your eyes had to jump across the image.
We (hopefully) all know that Nazis were and are bad. The interest lies in why people, who see themselves as good, get involved in extreme ideas. For this reason the first half of the book was more interesting where Krug was asking questions and exploring the enduring German shame.
Overall, the tone was very melodramatic and was more about finding answers than an in-depth reflection of why her, family members would act as they did. It read like, “Nazis were bad, PLEASE don’t allow that my family members would have been bad people.” This led to a lack of nuance in the writing and the snow metaphor was particularly unsubtle.
The mixed media presentation was engaging; the use of official forms was paradoxically emotional in their starkness. It was annoying how Krug would place a picture in the middle of a sentence so your eyes had to jump across the image.
We (hopefully) all know that Nazis were and are bad. The interest lies in why people, who see themselves as good, get involved in extreme ideas. For this reason the first half of the book was more interesting where Krug was asking questions and exploring the enduring German shame.