Belonging, Nora Krug
Belonging, Nora Krug
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Belonging
A German Reckons with History and Home

Author: Nora Krug

Narrator: Nora Krug

Unabridged: 3 hr 44 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/02/2018


Synopsis

* 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).

About 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.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Emily May on January 18, 2019

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. This is not an easy book to read. It's a graphic memoir of what it was like to......more

Goodreads review by Manny on December 28, 2018

This is an unusual book, which somehow manages to be both lyrical and extremely matter-of-fact. Nora is German, and although she has lived most of her life in the US and was anyway born long after the events in question, she feels horrible guilt about what her country has done. Over six million peop......more

Goodreads review by Bean on February 13, 2019

Must write a detailed review later but I have many, many thoughts. - It seems the author's central motivator is ascertaining what amount of guilt and shame she feels (personally, ancestrally, culturally) is actually 'reasonable', based on what her relatives 'did' or 'did not' do. Along the way, the a......more

Goodreads review by Dave on August 02, 2019

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......more

Goodreads review by Dovilė on February 05, 2021

Dviem prisėdimais surijau savo, jau dabar žinau, vieną iš 2021-ųjų KNYGŲ. Skruostai dega, gumulas gerklėj. Bandau prisiminti, ką man seneliai yra pasakoję apie savo kaimynus žydus. Ar galiu tuos atsiminimuose įtarti meilę? O gal būta kokio šešėlio? Ryškiai, kaip šiandien, galvoje ataidi mano amžiną j......more