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erine 's review for:
Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home
by Nora Krug
How responsible are we for the actions of our ancestors? Can we still have pride in our heritage or our country if it was responsible for committing massive atrocities? Is there any point in feeling guilt over these histories, and what should we do in the present to both acknowledge our troubled history and ensure we move forward in a healing way? Krug raises all these issues as she explores her family’s history in Germany during the Holocaust. These questions echo those in the U.S. as well: what responsibility do we today hold for the past atrocities of Native American genocide and African enslavement? How do you right the wrongs of the past, especially when they are still impacting people today?
Wallowing in guilt seems largely unproductive. But an honest reckoning with one’s past, looking it full in the face, does seem necessary. Krug waffles between the two: she is searching for her family’s truth in a foggy past, and it is clear that she struggles with guilt and blame. She hopes for reasons for her relatives’ wartime behaviors, she wants justifications, but in the end reaches a point where she just has to accept that she will never completely know her ancestors’ motivations.
At its core, this graphic novel is a simple family history investigation, uncovering stories, photographs, and documents that paint a picture. Some parts of the picture are clearer than others, and this is conveyed through both text and the artistic style of the book. I thought this worked very well as both a personal story and a more general commentary on how we deal with our shared history. Not that Krug’s approach is perfect: her search for family absolution frequently overshadows the horrors that took place in her families’ hometowns. She does make some effort to discover what happened to the Jewish people in those towns, but at least one of the documents she shared seems to reveal the extent to which the residents practiced selective amnesia. And her focus is definitely on her own family. It’s a hard balance to find, but there are many other books that deal in the depths of human cruelty during the Holocaust. This focuses more on the human impulse to deny responsibility or even just human indifference.
In that light, I found this an incredibly worthwhile read. We don’t need to paint over history with a rosy glow, or with a shame-soaked gray fog. We need to face it honestly and with acceptance of reality. And there is another aspect to this as well: what kinds of suffering are we indifferent to right in this moment that we will be tempted to claim we didn’t see and our grandchildren will anxiously inquire about our involvement in? History is always more relevant than we’d like to think.
Wallowing in guilt seems largely unproductive. But an honest reckoning with one’s past, looking it full in the face, does seem necessary. Krug waffles between the two: she is searching for her family’s truth in a foggy past, and it is clear that she struggles with guilt and blame. She hopes for reasons for her relatives’ wartime behaviors, she wants justifications, but in the end reaches a point where she just has to accept that she will never completely know her ancestors’ motivations.
At its core, this graphic novel is a simple family history investigation, uncovering stories, photographs, and documents that paint a picture. Some parts of the picture are clearer than others, and this is conveyed through both text and the artistic style of the book. I thought this worked very well as both a personal story and a more general commentary on how we deal with our shared history. Not that Krug’s approach is perfect: her search for family absolution frequently overshadows the horrors that took place in her families’ hometowns. She does make some effort to discover what happened to the Jewish people in those towns, but at least one of the documents she shared seems to reveal the extent to which the residents practiced selective amnesia. And her focus is definitely on her own family. It’s a hard balance to find, but there are many other books that deal in the depths of human cruelty during the Holocaust. This focuses more on the human impulse to deny responsibility or even just human indifference.
In that light, I found this an incredibly worthwhile read. We don’t need to paint over history with a rosy glow, or with a shame-soaked gray fog. We need to face it honestly and with acceptance of reality. And there is another aspect to this as well: what kinds of suffering are we indifferent to right in this moment that we will be tempted to claim we didn’t see and our grandchildren will anxiously inquire about our involvement in? History is always more relevant than we’d like to think.