Heimat: A German Family Album

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The author describes her quest as an attempt to find the Heimat she had lost, hoping that asking the questions that were painful to deal with would allow her "to move beyond the abstract shame."

Von Unwerth was born in Frankfurt in 1954 and grew up in an orphanage and a succession of foster homes. She has no recollection of her parents and not much inclination to reflect on their absence. “It’s what made my life,” she says. “I was free from influence and I was able to take the best from everywhere. I don’t really have a heimat.” So her heimat is wherever she happens to be? “Exactly.” For those who don’t fit into the AfD’s idyllic, German (and implicitly white) concept of Heimat, the word, and its presence so ubiquitous it appears in the name of a government ministry, can feel less like a nostalgic longing for hometown beer halls and grandma’s schnitzel and more like an implied threat of exclusion. Mentioning the word to a progressive-minded German might prompt cringing (by even those who may use the word casually when they describe visiting family for the weekend). Heimat can be as benign as the mentioning by my roommate in the eastern city of Görlitz last summer that she would spend the weekend at her parents’ home in her Heimatstadt. Or the suggestion of a woman in my local market hall in Berlin, upon her hearing my boyfriend’s Austrian accent, that he might like an Austrian cheese since it’s “a piece of Heimat.” It can also be as complicated as an activist’s telling me in Cottbus, a city in eastern Brandenburg that’s seen a disproportionate rise in right-wing extremism, that people are angry and lost, turning to the AfD because they feel as if they are “losing their Heimat… rapidly before our eyes.” And it can be as dangerous as AfD politicians’ wielding it as a rhetorical club against political enemies or those deemed too foreign to fit into their idealized German society. Krug therefore looked into the history of her father's and her mother's side. Like many other Germans, her ancestors were neither Resistance fighters nor part of Hitler's close circle. But to find out that someof them couldofficially be classified as "Mitläufer" — followers of the Nazi regime — was apainful revelation in her investigation:"I grew up with this narrative of my grandfather Willi as somebody who had voted for the Social Democrats all his life, who were the Nazis' major political enemies. So there had always been this myth of him having nothing to do at all with the Nazi regime," Nora Krug: Replacing German 'guilt' with 'responsibility' to defend democracy. "I saw myself confronted with a side of him that was uncomfortable to witness — of somebody who was opportunistic in his choices, and a bit of a coward."A highly original and powerful graphic novel that works on many levels...an unflinching examination of what we mean when we think of identity, of history and home. The result is a book that is as informative as a history and as touching as a novel. * The Financial Times * The Silesian protested, demanded that Rübezahl allow him to sleep too until the old Heimat had resurrected again as it once had been. But the dwarf rebuked him: “If you have lost the old Heimat , why would you be allowed to live on [to have] what you want?” Even though the German crimes were never named, the Silesian suddenly realized that it was the fault of human beings, not poor Rübezahl, that the “German” mountains of his Reich had been lost for the rest of their lifetimes. A terrible cost was being paid, and he accepted the dwarf’s command that he return to reality and raise his children in the West. Awake, with his daughter “snuggled confidently and securely” in his arms, the depression left him, and he knew that it was his duty “to be strong within myself and to erect the new Heimat around me for my child and my family,” even if the Heimat of memory laid in slumber for the rest of his mortal existence. Having undertaken an imaginary journey and “witnessed” the Heimat transformed, the Silesian accepted the reality that it was lost for the rest of his life. The art (mixed media collage and illustration) is undeniably powerful. The author's handles a complex web of family history deftly, despite its twists and turns.

While travelling frequently between the US and Germany, she says, she started a notebook to document behavioural oddities that she had previously been blind to. “For example, Germans apologise a lot less, whether that is for bumping into people in the road, or for graver things. To apologise in German entails an admission that you are guilty. In the English-speaking world, an apology doesn’t necessarily imply that: it can just mean ‘I didn’t intend that to happen’, and not ‘It is my fault’. An apology carries a lot of weight here.” If I had stayed in Germany, I would have never thought of writing this book,” she says over a coffee in a beer garden in central Berlin. “There’s that Hannah Arendt line: ‘If all are guilty, no one is.’ As a German in Germany you have already learned so much about the second world war, thought so much about it and talked so much about it, that I would have thought: what’s left to be said?” Extraordinary . . . The curious appeal of Krug's graphic memoir is that it never fully loses itself in the act of storytelling but constantly stops to turn over and reassess the means at its disposal.

It’s always changing, Heimat—it’s okay if the roads are changing, it’s okay if the people are changing. It’s okay,” she told me. “It’s about negotiating what kind of Heimat do we want? Is your Heimat my Heimat? Who is allowed to speak for our Heimat? Who can represent it? Is it diverse, or isn’t it?” Krug] is a tenacious investigator, ferreting out stories from the wispiest hints - a rumor or a mysterious photograph. . . . What Krug pursues is a better quality of guilt, a way of confronting the past without paralysis. The mixed art is very powerful. Krug uses a scrapbook-style scattering of images, clippings and traditional comic strip art to first explore her own upbringing, and then later to delve into her family's past. There's nothing simple about this book at all. It's both an informative read for the non-German reader, and an emotional memoir.

I slowly began to accept that my knowledge will have limits, that I’ll never know exactly what Willi thought, what he saw or heard, what he decided to do or not to do, what he could have done and failed to do, and why.REREAD (JUNE 2021): I decided to reread this wonderful graphic memoir because I'm currently in a massive READING SLUMP ... and I just now realized that I read it EXACTLY two years ago (started reading this on June 13 and finished it on June 14, both in 2019 and now in 2021). That's kinda funny. Heimat is an incredibly personal and moving book. Nora shares a lot of intimate information and makes herself very vulnerable through that. I admire that bravery. The honesty and the fact that she doesn't sugercoat anything deserves respect. By confronting her own fears and biases, by looking at her own education (and comparing it to the education of her elders), Nora slowly but surely manages to piece the picture together. Given the long-standing associations between Heimat and the far right , it’s understandable some would want to leave the word behind entirely. Others on the left say the term can still be saved—and have tried to redefine it in the political sphere.