Heimat: A German Family Album

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this remarkably executed graphic narrative which combines drawing, archival photography, typography and different kinds of artwork, she tells of a spiritual and existential quest that doesn’t allow for a simple division into good and evil. Equally dense and intensive, historical and personal, and with a feminine point of view, HeimatÂwas received very well in the United States. Well-deserved!â€

I was hugely taken by Nora Krug's Heimat, a beautifully produced and thoughtful piece of family history by a second generation German immigrant to the US. Nora Krug's book Heimat is a heart-wrenching, suspenseful and fascinating odyssey that straddles, and seeks to uncover, an uncharted, inaccessible, unfathomable past. It is a kaleidoscope of interrupted lives, leading inexorably to its ultimate conclusion. I couldn't stop reading it -- Hava Beller, Director of 'The Restless Conscience' As a Jewish heir of grandparents who themselves had to flee the upsurge of fascism in their German homelands, I found granddaughter Nora Krug’s heartrending investigation of her own family’s painstakingly occluded history through those years especially moving. But as an American living through these, our very own years of a seemingly inexorable drift into one’s still not quite sure what, I found Krug’s achingly realized graphic memoir downright unsettling, for what will our own grandchildren one day make of us and our own everyday compromises and failure sot attend?” The nature of my work in Germany means I often speak with people who feel their Heimat, the place that matters to them most, the place they idealize and long for, is under threat and changing in ways that make it unrecognizable. Watching fires burn and tear gas fired across America these last days, feeling an immense sadness and an urge to be there, I think I better understand how powerful that concept can be. Next door in Austria, the FPÖ has also long made Heimat a central part of its identity. Like Germany’s NPD, it bills itself as “the social Heimat party” and ran its 2019 parliamentary campaign on the slogan “Fair. Social. Loyal to the Heimat.” After the party lost big in those elections, leader Norbert Hofer announced the newly rebranded party would focus even more strongly on the idea of “Heimat protection.”

This graphic memoir is a mix of text, illustrations, photographs, and art. It's not an easy read, but is well worth the time it takes to do so. This would be a great companion read to Svetlana Alexievich's The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II.

Comparing pristine and timeless prewar images of Löwenberg with the rubble and lifeless streets of postwar Lwówek, recounting story after story from former residents who had suffered abuse and witnessed wanton destruction and plundering, Möller left his readers with little doubt that, in contrast to all previous wars, the rupture of 1945 had ended the world they had known. This book is a good deed but the naive tone of it "I wanted to make peace with my family's past and so I did, yay" was a bit annoying to me, maybe because in the end Nora is off to be far from Europe and Germany and its problems and we see everything from closer perspective, and I also see that history is very much alive and never a closed chapter... but if it helped her - well, good for her. I'm pretty sure there were questions unanswered left but they were off the general topic and none of our business. As you can see here today, our culture is an important topic,” Andreas, a 33-year-old FPÖ supporter, told me that day, gesturing to the celebration around him as he explained why he supports the party. “I think that probably deserves more attention in our politics.” In retrospect, the map and that question about Heimat were a fitting prelude to exploring the political issues facing Germany today and the rise of the populist far right here and across Europe. Indeed, the concept lies at the heart of the debates about belonging and identity in a changing Germany; it tends to take on prominence when society is trying to process various fundamental changes to the country and its way of life. Some see the word as self-evident, a regular and integral part of their vocabulary; others recoil, believing it to be entirely lost to far-right politicians; still others want to “save” it, reframing it to represent the more inclusive society they want Germany to be.Or would it be easier to navigate my shame if I had been able to prove his guilt, if I had learned that he had been a Nazi through and through, without the shadow of a doubt?" Both authors try to unearth and record the unspoken, suppressed truths of the WWII. The difference is that Russians were mandated to forget the ugly parts of the war to elevate the winners' narrative of heroism and bravery, and Germans - to hide their guilt and shame, not only from the others, but themselves and their families.