gabesteller's review against another edition
5.0
Wowza very unique blend of photos, prose, drawings, paintings, and comics all about confronting family complicity and what to make of German Culture/kitsch in the wake of Nazism. After living in the US for 12 years, and marrying into a jewish family, Krug finds herself missing so much of her former German life, but doesn't know how to talk about it now and realizes she never has!
Nazism shadows every thought on this subject and like many Germans Krug’s family has kept quiet about the extent too which they were involved in the Nazi party and this book is her resulting investigation.
What she finds is both suspenseful and totally revealing about sort of basic Human nature. Although obviously horrific, the faults her grandparents, and great-uncles etc show are like pretty normal ones. Some were nazis but they were also dumb patriotic 17 years olds, or they were middle-aged and mostly concerned with their own immediate concerns and their own lives. When it became way more convenient to join the party they do so and so on.
The latter doesn't excuse the former but both are true! Average people have the capacity for great good (say all the stories of heroism and solidarity you’ll hear after a natural disaster,) or acquiescence and support of terrible evil (Krug’s Nazi relatives) depending on what pressures they are put under. Human beings do all this stuff, and when you have mass evil like the nazis seemingly otherwise regular people get involved! How does that happen? worth investigating cuz as the giant in Twin Peaks says “ITS HAPPENING AGAINNNN”
Also the art is is soooo good, they way she combines watercolor and photos, documents and drawings, is so evocative, effective in communicating the concreteness and murkiness of memory and the past. Theres a part where one of her great uncles is writing home from the front and she draws a portrait of him below each letter and as he marches toward his death, the portrait gets fuzzier and fuzzier as pooling water colors replace sharp pencil lines until his face looks like a corpse ahhhhhhhgh!
If i had a criticism it would be that Krug's writing while mostly excellent does drift into sentimental and overly poetic territory on occasion, and the comic sections generally didn't work as well for me, as her faces all mostly look the same, and so individuals become hard to recognize.
(4.5)
ty 4 rec Hanna!
Nazism shadows every thought on this subject and like many Germans Krug’s family has kept quiet about the extent too which they were involved in the Nazi party and this book is her resulting investigation.
What she finds is both suspenseful and totally revealing about sort of basic Human nature. Although obviously horrific, the faults her grandparents, and great-uncles etc show are like pretty normal ones. Some were nazis but they were also dumb patriotic 17 years olds, or they were middle-aged and mostly concerned with their own immediate concerns and their own lives. When it became way more convenient to join the party they do so and so on.
The latter doesn't excuse the former but both are true! Average people have the capacity for great good (say all the stories of heroism and solidarity you’ll hear after a natural disaster,) or acquiescence and support of terrible evil (Krug’s Nazi relatives) depending on what pressures they are put under. Human beings do all this stuff, and when you have mass evil like the nazis seemingly otherwise regular people get involved! How does that happen? worth investigating cuz as the giant in Twin Peaks says “ITS HAPPENING AGAINNNN”
Also the art is is soooo good, they way she combines watercolor and photos, documents and drawings, is so evocative, effective in communicating the concreteness and murkiness of memory and the past. Theres a part where one of her great uncles is writing home from the front and she draws a portrait of him below each letter and as he marches toward his death, the portrait gets fuzzier and fuzzier as pooling water colors replace sharp pencil lines until his face looks like a corpse ahhhhhhhgh!
If i had a criticism it would be that Krug's writing while mostly excellent does drift into sentimental and overly poetic territory on occasion, and the comic sections generally didn't work as well for me, as her faces all mostly look the same, and so individuals become hard to recognize.
(4.5)
ty 4 rec Hanna!
sullimca's review
4.0
I was nervous throughout the book as to what point she would drive home in the end. We see her struggle with what it means to be a part of a certain culture, and how that influences who you are and what you call home. She realizes that history is a tough pill to swallow, and so she scrambles through archives and family interviews to find a glass of water to get it down. History isn’t just the events that have happened (that's just a timeline), but it's how we interpret them and let it influence our future, and I think that was her purpose in how she describes her pregnancy at the end as being unconscious and pure, as a way of emphasizing that inherited guilt is valid, but it's a taught mechanism by those before us to help us comprehend rights and wrongs rather than have it be a direct implication.
rambolola's review against another edition
5.0
Intenso e importante. Credo che leggerlo possa offrire un punto di vista completo sul senso di colpa tedesco che ha afflitto più di una generazione di persone. Che non hanno avuto niente a che fare con la guerra perché nate dopo la sua fine ma che hanno subito le conseguenze del nazismo sulle loro vite. Oggi alcuni sentimenti di rivalsa si stanno ripresentando, forse anche proprio per rifiutare quella vergogna, e le conseguenze potrebbero essere rilevanti per la storia dell'Europa. Leggere Heimat per capire la storia della Germania moderna dal punto di vista delle persone può aiutare a capire.
bookishbab's review
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
fast-paced
5.0
Magnificent. Her writing is gorgeous, personal, reflective and honest without being trite. Of course she is searching for absolution, but she never really gets it and is ultimately okay with it. I think the way she reflects on her grandfather being formally classified as a “coward” is really thought-provoking and important for all of us to consider when we see oppression (on a macro and micro level) happening in real time. Fact woven in with family history beautifully. A masterclass in making history personal. And of course, visually stunning. I’ve never seen a graphic novel quite like it.
n1kk1's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.25
booksybookbooks's review
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
tense
medium-paced
5.0
susiejo124's review
4.0
This graphic adult novel is about the author, Nora Krug and her quest to find out more about her German family and their role during the war. The author's parents grew up in Germany and then moved to the United States. She was interested in learning more about her grandparents and her parents' siblings. She traveled to Germany many times, interviewing and researching her family's history. She wrote this novel in a very unique fashion in that it was like a graphic novel. The reader is able to see pictures, drawings, copies of newspapers, etc in a way that made the content come alive.