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' *

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. This would be a great companion read to Svetlana Alexievich's The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II.

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In contrast to the official histories detailed in Chapter 2, local chronicles seldom featured a cyclical approach to historical events, in which German progress repeatedly intervened to repair devastation from regular invasions from the East (implying an inevitable pattern of death and resurrection, making another resurrection through Heimkehr inevitable). Rather, often tapping into material from earlier, interwar chronicles, amateur historians (pastors, schoolteachers, mayors, farmers) presented a linear and tragic account of ever-increasing progress, happiness, and Germanness in a cozy Heimat village that suddenly died and was buried under foreign invasion in 1945. Freikorps, Communists, Nazis – these remained conspicuously absent in most accounts, replaced by a tale of stability, culture, productivity, pastoral serenity, and urban vitality. The sudden rupture of loss at the story’s end made it clear that only the Heimat of memory survived, in part through the service of the chronicler. 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. Nora Krug is German-American, married to a Jewish man. Like I imagine many Germans and those in exile, she had some anguished curiosity about her family's (possible/probable) implication in the Holocaust, so she spent several years getting answers. The resulting book is multi-genre, part illustrated story, part comics, part family history, part history, part mystery. Much of what she discovers is not particularly surprising, but there are indeed revelations worth waiting for. Just uploaded a video talking about my favorite comics of all time. You bet Heimat showed up in there. /// But how far down our family trees does our guilt extend? For the actions of which ancestors are we responsible? Does time bury guilt, or will we all one day find ourselves united in our shame while our ancestors' crimes are excavated for all to see?

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.” 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!†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.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.” 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. * The Guardian * The rest of the book then follows a conventional Searching for Your Ancestors narrative. In particular, she was trying to understand the lives of her grandfather, who was a member of the Nazi party, and her uncle, who was in the Waffen-SS and only eighteen years old in 1944 when he died in combat in Italy. She talks to relatives and the men’s former friends and neighbors to try to connect with them, and searches archives for historical documents. There are some details on them to be found, but as with all books like this, the quest is ultimately self-defeating, since after all, how far can we ever get into the minds of others, not being immersed in their times and the context of their lives? There are no diaries or intimate letters to reveal their innermost thoughts, just faded memories and disjointed facts.