The valuable questions that are raised by this memoir came afterward, from conversations with others. The author's questions seem to focus obsessively on how relieved or disappointed she feels, as she uncovers new information and sorts the truth from apologist family lore. Intrigerend boek, zit erg goed in elkaar en beantwoordt de vraag die ik mijzelf vaak stelde: 'Hoe voelt het (of kan het voelen, want één verhaal maakt niet alle verhalen) om na zo'n allesvernietigende oorlog Duits te zijn.' Nora Krug geboren in 1977, Karlsruhe, haar ouders net na de oorlog en ze is getrouwd met een joodse man. De tweede wereldoorlog hing als een grote stilzwijgende schaduw over haar jeugd en leven. Ze had vragen, ze voelde schaamte, ze had problemen met haar identiteit. Na jaren gaat ze op onderzoek uit om meer te weten te komen over haar eigen familie, op zoek naar antwoorden. Het leverde een prachtige graphic novel op. Op zijn breedst, want het is onderzoeksjournalistiek in een graphic novel jas, ze maakt daarbij gebruik van brieven, foto's, oude schoolschriften, archiefmateriaal en spullen van de rommelmarkt. Dat ze oorspronkelijk een opleiding tot documentaire maakster heeft gedaan aan het Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts is goed te zien. Erg mooi en goed gedaan. One thing most people can agree on is that the way the majority of Germans have reacted to the atrocities of the Second World War should serve as a model for the rest of us. But where is the line between "making sure it can't happen again" and feeling nothing but shame for your country, your heritage, your family, for things that happened before you were even born? 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.”

Mixed feelings about this one. It was really interesting in a certain personal context to me - my best friend lives in Germany since 2000, we both had granddads that fought in war against nazis and we often have conversations about Germans and their historical past and especially WWII times as well as about nowadays. These are real people, so their stories are not simple. What really happened with her grandfather and his Jewish employer? What of her young uncle who died in the war and how did it relate to her father being cast out on his own? Did her family participate in the burning of the town’s synagogue or the drowning of a Jew in the town’s fountain? Each piece of research poses more questions.Krug probes her family's actions in Nazi Germany, conducting interviews and roaming archives and flea markets. She confronts past and present in a book that's been praised for its invention and bravery. -- The Guardian, 'The 50 biggest books of autumn 2018' As the 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 failures to attend? Lawrence Weschler, author of Calamities of Exile and A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers That sense of in-betweenness gave birth to a personal research project that came in three stages: over a period of two years, Krug regularly returned to her father’s hometown of Külsheim in Swabia, in the south-west, and combed through village archives, markets and junk shops. Towards the end of her book and investigation into her maternal grandfather's activities during WWII, Krug ruminates on which outcome would be preferable. Would she rather discover that her father actively opposed the Nazis, even going so far as to hide a Jewish man in his shed?

Heimat is an astoundingly honest book that conducts a devastating - and irresistible - investigation into one family's struggle with the forces of history. I could not stop reading it and when I was done I could not stop thinking about it. By going so deeply into her family's history, Krug has in some ways written about us all -- Sebastian Junger * author of The Perfect Storm * At the end of an imaginary journey, the return from dream to reality often appeared as a second expulsion, claiming every dear space until the next fantasy. After indulging in a novel-length journey to the cherished past world, even guiding the reader through the intimate spaces of his house and garden, Wolfgang von Eichborn relived his winter expulsion and felt it steal the intimate spaces away: “Village by village, church tower by church tower, the Heimat was engulfed by the dissolving loss of the white night. The pyramids of the mountains moved nearer, moved further, disappeared; the landscape of the Heimat sank into the dreamful certainty of memory.” Every feature of Heimat remained dear in his memory, but they were lost in reality and could only be recovered when he closed his eyes. Nora Krug created something completely new by inventing a new medium. (...) And with every new form of visual representation she uses, she is able to gain a new perspective on herself and on her history. Ijoma Mangold, literary critic at Die Zeit For what reason? She's not sure. Perhaps to absolve them in her mind; perhaps to adequately blame them. Whatever the reasoning, I felt every bit of the author’s desperation to find out about her grandparents. I sat along as she dug into their history and hoped so very much that they weren’t guilty of the worst crimes. I, too, wanted it to not be them. I wanted them to have been the good guys. But my original views still stand. This is one of the best memoirs I've ever read and certainly the best graphic memoir (even though Satrapi's Persepolis and Sacco's Palestine come close — BUT NORA'S ART AND CREATIVITY IS UNMATCHED!!).How many of us really think about the history of our cultures, or country, or of how much we benefited or lost due to events that occured before we were born? This German author is born after the fall of the Nazi regime, but how does one grapple with the legacy of the Holocaust and its unspeakable atrocities? Nora Krug created something completely new by inventing a new medium. (...) And with every new form of visual representation she uses, she is able to gain a new perspective on herself and on her history. -- Ijoma Mangold, literary critic at Die Zeit Von Unwerth has a peculiar talent for getting famous and beautiful women (Claudia Schiffer, Madonna, Naomi Campbell, Rihanna, Kate Moss) to remove their inhibitions – and frequently their underwear – while retaining control. Her images are often provocatively sexual, but it’s usually her subjects who are doing the provoking. “I always give them something to do,” she confides. “When somebody’s not moving I get bored. I take two pictures and I say: ‘Great, I have it now.’ But I love the body in movement. I like the nude body in movement.” Through this story you can see how Nazism took over a small town. You see the