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erica_s 's review for:
Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home
by Nora Krug
What a captivating, fascinating, thought-provoking, & beautifully-illustrated book!
I appreciated the way the author revealed her developing process from childhood to adulthood to parenthood grappling with difficult entanglements & shifting perspectives, allowing herself & readers to absorb one aspect at a time of her family's involvement in a shameful episode of human history; the holocaust the Nazis perpetrated before & during World War 2.
In a way, this works as a roadmap for anyone in Germany (or the United States or a handful of other nations who have decimated minority ethnic groups) to excavate their own family history. She investigates personal questions - some that have ephemeral evidence at the moment but won't soon, others that never had documentation, along with public questions of cultural predilections, social patterns, civic history, and the evidence & testimony reported in international courts. She considers the significance of tiny scraps of the story - a receipt here or there, one line from a letter, a memory of learning the vocabulary of the Holocaust - and tries to piece together whether or not she could be "fault-free" and whether her "sense of belonging" ("heimat" in German) to a culture with such a heinous past can also be something positive in her life.
On the closer side; Was Nora's own grandfather or any other family member present at the ReichsKristallnacht in Karlsruhe in November, 1938, when the town's Jewish citizens were beaten & rounded up, shipped to a concentration camp, and their businesses, homes, & synagogues smashed & burned? If they were present, what did they see, do, & think? Were members of her family directly responsible, tangentially culpable, or actively resistant?
On the further side; In the thirties, what portion of the population deeply supported, reluctantly voted for, or actively resisted the party that relied on racism to sell its platform & policies? Are the measures the German people are taking now leading to healing & a transformation that will avoid a repetition?
Through her collages of the ephemera Krug finds at garage, thrift, & e-bay sales, copies of historical documents from the town's records, family letters & photos, and her clarifying graphic novel re-enactments, we see all the possibilities, as well as the narrowing likelihood that anyone in Germany could ever claim unaffected ignorance of this episode.
By the time she concludes that her family probably took a few small actions to preserve friends who were Jews or other non-Jewish friends who were helping Jews, it is clear that this is the absolute bare minimum to escape culpability. (ex: charging Nazi soldiers an extra 5 pfennig for beer when they occupied their town, taking over operations of a Jewish mechanic's business so it wouldn't be used by Nazis, friendship with a known Communist, etc.)
If Krug's family had been deeply entrenched in the Nazi party, racists, Holocaust-deniers, or were in the photo of perpetrators of Kristallnacht, what would she have taken that in her book? In a way, as difficult as this clearly was to work through, this is the easiest version to tell; a family that supports her investigation - some by reluctantly pointing her to the few in the family who are willing to talk about it, some by sending her letters they couldn't bring themselves to read, some by being fully open to reminiscing & having frank conversations. All of them kept some small thing from the period, but none of it is incriminating, so she can speak her mind & allow her ruminations to unfurl.
If Krug's family had any specific thing to feel even deeper shame about - worse even than simply standing by when assholes & bullies perpetrated genocide - it seems unlikely that she would've been encouraged - from childhood on - to collect ephemera, turn hard questions over & over in her mind, indulge herself in all the feelings of connection & disconnection, and create artwork that reveals her whole family's history to the world.
So, even though we may never hear anyone admit to having a vicious, dedicated, fully enthusiastic Nazi in their family, Nora Krug's personal investigation reveals the various ways any & all of us are fully culpable by just trying to make a living & support our families, avoiding politics, and loving our birthplaces, when our government and a significant portion of our citizens are perpetrating atrocities in our name & with our tax dollars.
I appreciated the way the author revealed her developing process from childhood to adulthood to parenthood grappling with difficult entanglements & shifting perspectives, allowing herself & readers to absorb one aspect at a time of her family's involvement in a shameful episode of human history; the holocaust the Nazis perpetrated before & during World War 2.
In a way, this works as a roadmap for anyone in Germany (or the United States or a handful of other nations who have decimated minority ethnic groups) to excavate their own family history. She investigates personal questions - some that have ephemeral evidence at the moment but won't soon, others that never had documentation, along with public questions of cultural predilections, social patterns, civic history, and the evidence & testimony reported in international courts. She considers the significance of tiny scraps of the story - a receipt here or there, one line from a letter, a memory of learning the vocabulary of the Holocaust - and tries to piece together whether or not she could be "fault-free" and whether her "sense of belonging" ("heimat" in German) to a culture with such a heinous past can also be something positive in her life.
On the closer side; Was Nora's own grandfather or any other family member present at the ReichsKristallnacht in Karlsruhe in November, 1938, when the town's Jewish citizens were beaten & rounded up, shipped to a concentration camp, and their businesses, homes, & synagogues smashed & burned? If they were present, what did they see, do, & think? Were members of her family directly responsible, tangentially culpable, or actively resistant?
On the further side; In the thirties, what portion of the population deeply supported, reluctantly voted for, or actively resisted the party that relied on racism to sell its platform & policies? Are the measures the German people are taking now leading to healing & a transformation that will avoid a repetition?
Through her collages of the ephemera Krug finds at garage, thrift, & e-bay sales, copies of historical documents from the town's records, family letters & photos, and her clarifying graphic novel re-enactments, we see all the possibilities, as well as the narrowing likelihood that anyone in Germany could ever claim unaffected ignorance of this episode.
By the time she concludes that her family probably took a few small actions to preserve friends who were Jews or other non-Jewish friends who were helping Jews, it is clear that this is the absolute bare minimum to escape culpability. (ex: charging Nazi soldiers an extra 5 pfennig for beer when they occupied their town, taking over operations of a Jewish mechanic's business so it wouldn't be used by Nazis, friendship with a known Communist, etc.)
If Krug's family had been deeply entrenched in the Nazi party, racists, Holocaust-deniers, or were in the photo of perpetrators of Kristallnacht, what would she have taken that in her book? In a way, as difficult as this clearly was to work through, this is the easiest version to tell; a family that supports her investigation - some by reluctantly pointing her to the few in the family who are willing to talk about it, some by sending her letters they couldn't bring themselves to read, some by being fully open to reminiscing & having frank conversations. All of them kept some small thing from the period, but none of it is incriminating, so she can speak her mind & allow her ruminations to unfurl.
If Krug's family had any specific thing to feel even deeper shame about - worse even than simply standing by when assholes & bullies perpetrated genocide - it seems unlikely that she would've been encouraged - from childhood on - to collect ephemera, turn hard questions over & over in her mind, indulge herself in all the feelings of connection & disconnection, and create artwork that reveals her whole family's history to the world.
So, even though we may never hear anyone admit to having a vicious, dedicated, fully enthusiastic Nazi in their family, Nora Krug's personal investigation reveals the various ways any & all of us are fully culpable by just trying to make a living & support our families, avoiding politics, and loving our birthplaces, when our government and a significant portion of our citizens are perpetrating atrocities in our name & with our tax dollars.