Overview

* 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).

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9781476796628

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Reviews

Nora Krug has created a beautiful visual memoir of a horrific time in history. A time that torments us to this day. Asking questions and searching for the truth, she will not turn away from the legacy of her family and her country. She asks the question of how any of us survive our family history. Ultimately, the only course is not to veil the answers. --Maira Kalman, author of Beloved Dog and My Favorite Things Belonging 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 and Tribe To belong to a place is not to be able to choose what it takes from you. But we can choose what we take from it. Nora Krug takes from her German homeland, and then gives to us, a sense of what it is like to be German today, and a guide to how a reckoning with the past can begin. -Tim Snyder, author of On Tyranny and The Road to Unfreedom A page-turning scrapbook/collage of memory, meaning and accountability, Ms. Krug draws the reader through her family history with the directness of imagery, handwriting and, ultimately, a disquieting direness that has echoes in our American life, right now. Belonging is valuable, readable and, needless to say, highly recommended. --Chris Ware, author of Building Stories 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, among others, of Calamities of Exile and A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers

Deeply personal--and deeply moving ... As multilayered as memory, the book intertwines text, photo, graphic art, and thematic complexity into a revelation almost as powerful for readers as it must have been for the author. --Kirkus Reviews, starred review Nora Krug has created a beautiful visual memoir of a horrific time in history. A time that torments us to this day. Asking questions and searching for the truth, she will not turn away from the legacy of her family and her country. She asks the question of how any of us survive our family history. Ultimately, the only course is not to veil the answers. --Maira Kalman, author of Beloved Dog and My Favorite Things Belonging 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 and Tribe To belong to a place is not to be able to choose what it takes from you. But we can choose what we take from it. Nora Krug takes from her German homeland, and then gives to us, a sense of what it is like to be German today, and a guide to how a reckoning with the past can begin. -Tim Snyder, author of On Tyranny and The Road to Unfreedom A page-turning scrapbook/collage of memory, meaning and accountability, Ms. Krug draws the reader through her family history with the directness of imagery, handwriting and, ultimately, a disquieting direness that has echoes in our American life, right now. Belonging is valuable, readable and, needless to say, highly recommended. --Chris Ware, author of Building Stories 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, among others, of Calamities of Exile and A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers Belonging is a heart wrenching, suspenseful and fascinating odyssey that straddles, and seeks to uncover, an uncharted, inaccessible, unfathomable past. It is a kaleidoscope of interrupted lives, leading inexorably to its ultimate conclusion. I couldn't stop reading it. --Hava Beller, writer and director of The Restless Conscience

Deeply personal--and deeply moving ... As multilayered as memory, the book intertwines text, photo, graphic art, and thematic complexity into a revelation almost as powerful for readers as it must have been for the author. --Kirkus Reviews, starred review Lush as it is meticulous ... This work of stunning craftmanship stands as a testament to speaking out as a necessary first step to healing. --Publishers Weekly A deep and affecting mix of text and illustration. --Booklist Nora Krug has created a beautiful visual memoir of a horrific time in history. A time that torments us to this day. Asking questions and searching for the truth, she will not turn away from the legacy of her family and her country. She asks the question of how any of us survive our family history. Ultimately, the only course is not to veil the answers. --Maira Kalman, author of Beloved Dog and My Favorite Things Belonging 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 and Tribe To belong to a place is not to be able to choose what it takes from you. But we can choose what we take from it. Nora Krug takes from her German homeland, and then gives to us, a sense of what it is like to be German today, and a guide to how a reckoning with the past can begin. -Tim Snyder, author of On Tyranny and The Road to Unfreedom A page-turning scrapbook/collage of memory, meaning and accountability, Ms. Krug draws the reader through her family history with the directness of imagery, handwriting and, ultimately, a disquieting direness that has echoes in our American life, right now. Belonging is valuable, readable and, needless to say, highly recommended. --Chris Ware, author of Building Stories 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, among others, of Calamities of Exile and A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers Belonging is a heart wrenching, suspenseful and fascinating odyssey that straddles, and seeks to uncover, an uncharted, inaccessible, unfathomable past. It is a kaleidoscope of interrupted lives, leading inexorably to its ultimate conclusion. I couldn't stop reading it. --Hava Beller, writer and director of The Restless Conscience

Author Information

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.

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