Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home - Memoir of Cultural Identity & Family Legacy | Perfect for History Enthusiasts & Multicultural Readers
Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home - Memoir of Cultural Identity & Family Legacy | Perfect for History Enthusiasts & Multicultural Readers

Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home - Memoir of Cultural Identity & Family Legacy | Perfect for History Enthusiasts & Multicultural Readers" (如果原始标题是中文,请提供中文内容以便准确翻译优化)

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Description

* Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award * Silver Medal Society of Illustrators * * Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Comics Beat, The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Kirkus Reviews, andLibrary Journal This“ingenious reckoning with the past” (The New York Times), by award-winning artist Nora Krug investigates the hidden truths of her family’s wartime history in Nazi Germany.Nora Krug was born decades after the fall of the Nazi regime, but the Second World War cast a long shadow over her childhood and youth in the city of Karlsruhe, Germany. Yet she knew little about her own family’s involvement; though all four grandparents lived through the war, they never spoke of it. After twelve years in the US, Krug realizes that living abroad has only intensified her need to ask the questions she didn’t dare to as a child. Returning to Germany, she visits archives, conducts research, and interviews family members, uncovering in the process the stories of her maternal grandfather, a driving teacher in Karlsruhe during the war, and her father’s brother Franz-Karl, who died as a teenage SS soldier. In this extraordinary quest, “Krug erases the boundaries between comics, scrapbooking, and collage as she endeavors to make sense of 20th-century history, the Holocaust, her German heritage, and her family's place in it all” (The Boston Globe). A highly inventive, “thoughtful, engrossing” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune) graphic memoir, Belonging “packs the power of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and David Small’s Stitches” (NPR.org).

Reviews

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Since the 1980's there has been a whole genre of books and movies by younger German generations who look into the Nazi pasts of their families and towns. This is an excellent example of that type of book - with a good twist thanks to it being an adult illustrated title.I first came across Krug when I read the graphic edition of Timothy Snyder's outstanding "On Tryanny". Her bio blurb sounded interesting, including this winner of numerous awards earlier title.There appears to be an English edition that shares the name of the German edition, "Heimat". This is a much better title, with connotations of her missing Germany (she now lives in NYC). But it was also a Nazi catch phrase for an imagined "pure" Germany from the past (no wonder Snyder chose her to illustrate his book!).I had a hard time putting it down each evening - what will come next in her search into her family's history?This is not only the story of her family's Nazi ties (or not), but also the stories and the truth and the interaction of her families from both sides (her father and his older sister have not spoken in decades). Thankfully there is a family tree for both sides on the end papers - it can become a bit confusing at times.She tells a powerful story here, stunningly complimented by her illustrations. Which are often more collages than drawings.And the occasional one page chapters on WWII photos and letters and other items she has picked up at German flea markets. Or, again, the one page chapters on things that are uniquely German (e.g., Persil, and the difference between American and German washing machines).Such odd twists within the family - such as her father, born after the war, being named the same as his much older brother. Who died in Italy fighting for the Germans, Or who really did the Bambi woodcuts in the family home (Hitler banned Disney films - remind you of someone else more current?).In the end she realizes she will never have definite answers, but she can come close. But I do wish she had spent a bit of time on who her father's father really is (there are DNA tests now, but it might be a bit uncomfortable asking your elderly father to give you a mouth swab!).Or, something you don't hear about much - German guilt, and the younger generations feeling it (she tries to hide her accent in NYC).Just a fantastic story, so well told and shown. I am looking forward to her new book coming out later this year, on Russia and the Ukraine!If I could give this book a 7 out of 5, I would have! One of the few books I finished and immediately handed over to my wife and said, "You've got to read this!"