Heimat: A German Family Album

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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 * Started yesterday, finished this morning: this is the first adult picture book I've wanted to read, and as anticipated, I couldn't put it down. Too many people build a family tree of names and dates or get their DNA print out and consider their quest done. Nora Krug does the hard research and bravely reaches into her family history. This is recent history: only two generations past. How did her grandparents, uncles and aunts react to the Nazi’s? How deeply were they into Nazi dogma. Provocative…as lush as it is meticulous…this work of stunning craftsmanship stands as a testament to speaking out as a necessary first step to healing.”

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. 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. 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. BERLIN — During my second week in Germany nearly three years ago, I joined 15 other Americans standing in front of a large world map in a sleek conference room in Stuttgart. We’d just moved to Berlin as part of a yearlong fellowship with the Robert Bosch Foundation, and had traveled down to the foundation’s headquarters for a few days of orientation before diving into German language classes and work placements across the country. 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.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). Generic picture books devoted to representing “all of Germany” also preserved the myth of pristine eastern provinces, ever alive as an intrinsic part of a united whole, even though now they only existed in the past. Whereas contemporary photographs illustrated the modern, postwar life of cities in the West and often even in the DDR, pictures from the former eastern provinces usually dated to before the war, complete with old cars or horses. Only occasionally did a contemporary image appear to feature reconstructed monuments like the Breslau town hall, whose repair after the city’s destruction was usually attributed to unknown forces. Under a brilliant color photo of the town hall, one picture book merely noted that “one can see that the damages from the war are completely remedied.” Such books preserved Germany’s 1937 territories outside political realities: united and intact with the common heritage of Kant from Königsberg, Eichendorff from Neisse, Luther from Wittenberg, and Beethoven from Bonn.

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? It's also a belief that fuels much of "woke" culture today, that because of slavery, because of the massacre of the Native Americans (and other horrible crimes), the descendants of white Europeans owe a debt, and not just a financial debt, to the descendants of those slaves and various indigenous peoples who were murdered or cast off their land. kad nacizmo ir Vokietijos antram pasauliniam kare istorija pasidaro tokia įvairiapusė ir įvairiabriaunė, toks kitokia nei dabartinis "ir aš buvau Aušvice" bumas, biški nupiginantis šiaip jau baisius dalykus. Pasakoja, kiek įmanomų elgesio kare, dalyvavimo nacizme, šeimos iširimo arba išlikimo variacijų, kiek individualių istorijų ir kaip sunku - bet įmanoma - jas atsekti po 50 metų.Those deep ties to nostalgia, utopia and identity preservation made it easy for 20th-century political groups to weaponize the word for their own purposes. During World War I, it featured prominently in national propaganda: Soldiers fought bravely to protect their threatened Heimat. Under the Nazis, the idea of cultural preservation combined with Hitler’s “Blood and Soil” ideology to make Heimat a catch-all reference to the racially pure society the Nazis aspired to. Under Hitler’s ideology, Jews were Heimatlos—a people without a Heimat—and therefore suspect in the future society he envisioned. 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 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

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. She goes and talks to relatives still living in Germany, and finds source documents, to find the story of those that came before her. BelongingÂis an astoundingly honest book that conducts a devastating–and irresistible–investigation into one’s family struggle with the forces of history. I could not stop reading it and when I as 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.”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. -- Parul Sehgal * The New York Times, 'Top Books of 2018' * When AfD politicians or supporters talk about Heimat, they mean “a homogenous, Christian, white society in which men have the final say, women above all focus on having children and other life realities are out of the question,” Fatma Aydemir and Hengameh Yaghoobifarah, both Germans who are descended from migrants, explain in the foreword to their 2019 collection of essays Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum (“Your Heimat is Our Nightmare). “In recent decades, the word has aided right-wing populists and extremists as a concept to deprive all those people who don’t fit this ideal of their right to exist.”