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? 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?" 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 * 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 bring this up, because the author of this story, is one such German, who knows about the war, but it is not talked about, though her father's older brother fought and died in World War II. This memoir of how she doesn't feel that she has a home in her former homeland, and how she goes in search of what her family did in the war, and what happened to them.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. It's also a good little piece of investigative journalism, though nowhere near as dispassionate as that sounds. Krug finds herself asking the difficult questions that no one in her family seems willing to ask. She wants to know - she has to know - what role her grandparents played in the Nazi atrocities.

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.On an individual level, Heimat is the place you don’t have to explain yourself: where you feel comfortable, where people know you, where you belong. But if your Heimat is somewhere you believe you belong but others see you as a perpetual outsider, can it truly be your Heimat? And what happens to those who have lost theirs, who settle somewhere new seeking another Heimat? Such questions have become increasingly urgent in recent years as more than a million refugees came to Germany in 2015 and 2016. Nora Krug grew up as a second-generation German after the end of the Second World War, struggling with a profound ambivalence towards her country's recent past. Travelling as a teenager, her accent alone evoked raw emotions in the people she met, an anger she understood, and shared. I had expected it to be a more scholarly approach to how the Germans dealt with their Nazi past, but this is definitely not scholarly. It is a personal, almost diary-like examination of Nora Krug’s own history and her search to understand relatives who had been part of the Nazi regime. She herself is two generations removed from World War II; her parents were born after the war and she in 1977. For me the most interesting part of the book was the description of her childhood, growing up not fully understanding why some topics could not be discussed, and some words could be used only in reference to animals, never to people. 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?

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?” Nora Krug has created a beautiful visual memoir of a horrific time in history. A time that torments us to this day. Asking questions and searching for the truth, she will not turn away from the legacy of her family and her country. She asks the question of how any of us survive our family history. Ultimately, the only course is not to veil the answers Maira Kalman, American illustrator, artist and writerHeimat 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. 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. Rather than one definitive Heimat, immigrants to Germany might have Heimaten, the word’s less-used plural. When I met Görlitz Mayor Octavian Ursu last summer, I asked what the word means to him. He was born in Bucharest, Romania, and moved to Görlitz at 22. After spending more than half his life in Germany, he was elected mayor for the center-right CDU last June. Ursu ran a close race against the AfD’s Sebastian Wippel, who grew up in Görlitz. In campaign materials, Wippel’s slogan was “A Görlitzer,” inherently implying Ursu wasn’t. As part of an essential process known as " Vergangenheitsbewältigung," or coming to terms with one's political past, the curriculum in German schools brought students to thoroughly discuss and analyze the mechanisms that led to such atrocities; they'd also visit concentration camps andcommemorate victims of the Holocaust.