Belonging

A German Reckons with History and Home

By: Nora Krug

Narrated by: Nora Krug

* 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, andLibrary 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).

Gained wisdom from this book

I think about this book often and it might become something I listen to once a year. So much wisdom to gain here

pertinent for today also

I am glad she read it. It is a terrible history she has to unfold. Follower...will always think of this book, this time period from now on.

wish it was longer!

loved the book. i wish i knew this much about my family. I will probably read it again....now i have to buy some Uhu

This book really speaks to me personally

First, I love the graphic novel styling of this book! It kept me engaged and gave me visual images as I read. But beyond that, this book really spoke to me personally as the daughter of a German father who was born in Berlin in 1942. My grandparents and father immigrated to America in 1953. My grandfather served in the German army. I know very little about their life in Germany before the war and have always wondered how much they knew about what the Nazis were doing. Nora Krug’s story is like a blueprint for what I would love to explore in my own family’s history. Even some of the names of her relatives are the same as mine. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand how Germans felt during and after the war, and even in the next generation as they try to understand how Nazism took hold of a nation and destroyed so many lives.

Impactful

Listening to this book has opened my heart and mind. This book is a great read for the time we live in.