Heimat: A German Family Album

Product Information

In hindsight, Krug says, the family history she embarked on was the kind of project she wished she had done when she was much younger: “What I found problematic about the way in which we were taught at school about the Holocaust and the war was that it conveyed a very generalising sense of guilt. You learned about the facts, but you weren’t encouraged to research what happened in your own city, or your own family. 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 would be a great companion read to Svetlana Alexievich's The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II. This book is a good deed but the naive tone of it "I wanted to make peace with my family's past and so I did, yay" was a bit annoying to me, maybe because in the end Nora is off to be far from Europe and Germany and its problems and we see everything from closer perspective, and I also see that history is very much alive and never a closed chapter... but if it helped her - well, good for her. I'm pretty sure there were questions unanswered left but they were off the general topic and none of our business. When he bemoaned the “schmaltzy kitsch” of Heimat in 1957, the expellee from Liegnitz accused Heimat films of propagating imagery of lost eastern lands as colorful and false as Technicolor American westerns. Although he conceded that the “overexposure” ( Überbetonung) of Heimat was spreading at least some awareness of the former East, he feared that the real essence of Heimat was being lost. But what was the real essence of Silesia, when the physical experience of the old Heimat drifted further away with the passage of time, and contemporary, Polish Silesia diverged into something so alien from what they remembered? Regardless of whether the Heimat of memory offends one’s taste as “false” or “kitsch,” it was chiel y through residing in an idealized aesthetic of what had been that expellees managed to continue on without losing a sense of their own identity. To illustrate how this process functioned, this section explores two of the more prevalent and interconnected mediums that stimulated interchange between the two images of Heimat: chronicles of the parochial history and “character” of local communities too small to have been known far outside of the immediate vicinity, and imagery commemorating the Heimat ’s history, landscapes, and monuments.

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?” As you can see here today, our culture is an important topic,” Andreas, a 33-year-old FPÖ supporter, told me that day, gesturing to the celebration around him as he explained why he supports the party. “I think that probably deserves more attention in our politics.” 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. Bracing honesty ... the informal feel and arresting candor of a diary -- Francoise Mouly * New Yorker * As the 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 failures to attend? -- Lawrence Weschler * author of Calamities of Exile and A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers *The word “Heimat” has been used for centuries, although its meaning has shifted and expanded significantly along the way. Hardly the wide-ranging, philosophical concept it’s become today, it was originally associated with a legal term, Heimatrecht, which meant the right to live in and enjoy the protection of a particular town or community—either where one was born or had lived a certain amount of time. In many parts of the German-speaking world, people carried a Heimatschein, or document identifying and proving their Heimat. (Even today, the Swiss identification card is called a Heimatschein.) 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.

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.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' 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. Picture-perfect Wilhelmsplatz, a park square in the eastern German city of Görlitz, has been at the center of debates about refugees and integration there 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. And thus her graphic memoir is more of a graphic statement, a snapshot not only of her own family history, but also of the reality of possibilities for any type of storytelling about cultural heritage.”

Krug probes her family's actions in Nazi Germany, conducting interviews and roaming archives and flea markets. She confronts past and present in a book that's been praised for its invention and bravery. The Guardian, 'The 50 biggest books of autumn 2018' Nora Krug was born decades after the fall of the Nazi regime, but the Second World War cast a long shadow throughout her childhood and youth in the city of Karlsruhe, Germany. For Nora, the simple fact of her German citizenship bound her to the Holocaust and its unspeakable atrocities and left her without a sense of cultural belonging. Yet Nora knew little about her own family’s involvement in the war: though all four grandparents lived through the war, they never spoke of it.

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. Rather than placing the small pins we’d been given where we were born or on the cities from which we’d just moved, our program leaders asked us to identify our Heimat—a word with no English equivalent, that most closely translates as “home,” “homeland” or “native region.” Imparting that basic definition, they went on to explain that the word gets at a much deeper idea: It’s a place you feel at ease, where people understand you, that you long for when you’re away; one colleague remembers them describing Heimat as “where your heart feels at home.” Most important, they told us, it was up to us to interpret. Residing in Memory: Private Confrontation with Loss Andrew Demshuk (2012) - The lost German East December 26, 2022 4a. Residing in Memory: Private Confrontation with Loss