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    Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home
    Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home
    Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home
    Audiobook3 hours

    Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home

    Written by Nora Krug

    Narrated by Nora Krug

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    * Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award * Silver Medal Society of Illustrators *

    * Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Comics Beat, The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Kirkus Reviews, and Library Journal

    This “ingenious reckoning with the past” (The New York Times), by award-winning artist Nora Krug investigates the hidden truths of her family’s wartime history in Nazi Germany.

    Nora Krug was born decades after the fall of the Nazi regime, but the Second World War cast a long shadow over her childhood and youth in the city of Karlsruhe, Germany. Yet she knew little about her own family’s involvement; though all four grandparents lived through the war, they never spoke of it.

    After twelve years in the US, Krug realizes that living abroad has only intensified her need to ask the questions she didn’t dare to as a child. Returning to Germany, she visits archives, conducts research, and interviews family members, uncovering in the process the stories of her maternal grandfather, a driving teacher in Karlsruhe during the war, and her father’s brother Franz-Karl, who died as a teenage SS soldier. In this extraordinary quest, “Krug erases the boundaries between comics, scrapbooking, and collage as she endeavors to make sense of 20th-century history, the Holocaust, her German heritage, and her family's place in it all” (The Boston Globe). A highly inventive, “thoughtful, engrossing” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune) graphic memoir, Belonging “packs the power of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and David Small’s Stitches” (NPR.org).
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateOct 2, 2018
    ISBN9781508278092
    Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home
    Author

    Nora Krug

    Nora Krug’s drawings and visual narratives have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, and Le Monde diplomatique. Her short-form graphic biography, Kamikaze, about a surviving Japanese WWII pilot, was included in the 2012 editions of Best American Comics and Best American Nonrequired Reading. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Maurice Sendak Foundation, Fulbright, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and of medals from the Society of Illustrators and the New York Art Directors Club. She is an associate professor at Parsons School of Design in New York and lives in Brooklyn with her family. Krug is the author of the graphic memoir, Belonging.

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    Reviews for Belonging

    4.5/5

    129 ratings7 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Extremely thoughtful, relatable, personal and revealing. Quick listens are always nice too.
    • 4/5
      The format of art, photographs, and writing perfectly fit this personal family history and investigation. Interesting viewpoint of history from your own family.
    • 5/5
      Ringo does it again with another excellent chapter in the BTR series. Ringo's strength is combining a zombie apocalypse with really good military tactics and leadership. If you're burned out on Walking Dead type antics where characters 6ISH YEARS INTO THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE ALL OF A SUDDEN REALIZE THAT THE WORLD HAS ENDED AND BAD STUFF HAPPENS...then this is a saving grace entry into the genre. Ringo is still able to keep the series fresh and fun and unloads a few good twists. Maybe the most unbelievable part is that there doesn't seem to be too many terrible characters this far into the plague. However, because sci-fi is so awesome, the outcome Ringo has come up with is not outside the realm of possibility - which makes it great sci-fi. If you liked the others in the series, this one will be just as great and the next one will be consumed as well. Final Grade - A-
    • 5/5
      I found this account to be both fascinating and moving. It grapples head-on with the unease of being part of a population coming to terms with acknowledging past abuses on a national scale, the topic of reparation and whether that can ever be enough, and the immediacy of identity dysphoria that inherited shame creates. This is a topic that I expect/hope to see more of in the future -- I think America has a lot of buried topics that we need to unearth and confront, and I admire this book as a sort of personal toolkit for examining difficult topics without flinching away. I think this kind of personal examination is the best possible way forward.

      It's also a fabulous nonfiction graphic novel, with layers of visuals that add significantly to the context of the narrative.
    • 4/5
      What an odd book. The briefest explanation I can make for that assessment is that what is good about it is very good, but it, in my opinion, has a questionable goal to begin with and then seems to not recognize what it accomplished while seemingly missing its goal. Let me explain. The author is the daughter of two parents who were born in Germany immediately after World War II. The author and her parents have all been living in America, not Germany, for some time. Her parents' parents (her grandparents) were alive and well in Germany during the Nazi regime. One grandparent served in the German Army. In some cases, siblings of the parents were alive as children before the war ended, but one fought and died in battle in the German SS toward the later part of the war. The author is quite cognizant of the Holocaust and her connection to relatives that were alive and active in Nazi Germany. She is also quite guilt ridden about the connection. Why is she guilt ridden? Neither she nor her parents were alive during Hitler's time. Feeling family shame? Okay, maybe, depending on what her relatives did or did not do. But guilty? Does she not know the difference? In investigating her family past to decide just how guilty she should feel, she (1) uses a highly creative mechanism for doing that blends well with what she trying to convey to the readers, and (2) she is remarkably adept, as someone with apparently no background in investigative journalism, at finding information, validating what she finds, and asking proper and detailed questions about what it means. In short, she does a bang up job. But, yet, to not quite decide whether she should feel guilty or not. In the author's defense, she does explain growing up in the We're-not-at-all-proud-to-be-Germans national orientation offered to her as a German youth, still years after the atrocities had ended, so she admits to feeling -- what? -- groundless in her heritage? I couldn't help trying to compare her struggle with guilt about Nazi Germany with the utter lack of guilt the average American displays for "...the abduction and enslavement of African people, the displacement and genocide of Indigenous people, and the annexation of Mexican lands..." which sociologist, Robin DiAngelo, tries to get white Americans to acknowledge in her book, White Fragility. Moreover, as historian, Timothy Snyder, makes clear in his book, Bloodlands, elements of the former Soviet Union also did a damn fine job of committing horrendous and massive civilian atrocities during the same period as the Germans. Should all Russians be equally racked with guilt? I guess I will repeat my point. The author pulls out lots of important and meaningful questions for all of us to ask ourselves...but it seems she never gets a satisfying answer to her own question that prompted the book to begin with. I find that, at best, unusual.
    • 2/5
      A German American immigrant feels guilty about her home country's perpetration of the Holocaust and starts to investigate family stories to find the truth of how involved her ancestors were in the Nazi party and the German military during World War II.First, I hate when I open a graphic novel and instead find giant blocks of handwritten text wrapping awkwardly around a single spot illustration or a photograph. Some pages Krug doesn't even bother to include the illustration or photograph. And the coloring is just a rainbow of ugliness.Despite the above, I initially found myself interested in the giant blocks of text. I was intrigued with the idea of exploring the guilt that hangs over Germans even several generations removed from the Holocaust, just as I as an American have to struggle with my country's history of slavery and the destruction and oppression of indigenous people. I also had some points of contact with the material as my mother's family came from Germany, though long before World War II, and like the author I had a grandfather named Alois. (By the way, each Alois was a farmer who had bad luck with a tractor: Krug's Alois was killed in Germany a couple years after the war, mine lost a leg in Wisconsin.)But as the book progressed I just became increasingly bored by its meandering nature even as revelations were made and Krug flailed about trying to find mitigating circumstances for her ancestors' sins. I could barely keep myself awake as I trudged through the final wad of hideously colored pages.
    • 5/5
      "I feel a sudden pain, shallow but sharp and all-consuming as a paper cut, because even inherited memory hurts." It's been a very long time since I have felt a book so deeply and I find it difficult to adequately express that depth of emotion. Having never given much thought to the subsequent generations that are coming after the war I am blown away by how blind I have been to the lasting and wide-spread impact of such a world event. This book was presented with such beautiful innocence and honesty, and was so completely immersive that maybe just a list of all the thoughts and feelings I experienced while reading it will do to convey my gratitude at having been lucky enough to experience it. Insightful, introspective, heart-wrenching, beautiful, moving, thoughtful, honest, intimate, painfully raw.Many, many,many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for allowing me to read an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.