Belonging by Nora Krug

​    I’m always up for an immigrant experience/ culture clash story, but this book is so much more than that. Also, I’m usually cautious about memoirs, graphic or otherwise, main reason being that oftentimes people who write memoirs haven’t lived the lives worth memoirlizing. The book must always, always have a good story.
    This book does. It isn’t just a memoir (been here, done that sort of thing), it’s a personal journey into reckoning one’s own life and family within the context of one’s culture, country and world. Krug might be an international person, citizen of the world, but there is past, an indelible weight of belonging to a country that has caused such devastation less that a century ago that it can’t be ignored.
    And so, after living stateside for years, Krug returns to her native Deutschland to track down her family and learn all about their personal involvement in WWII. It’s a brave personal quest and in the end definitely one worth taking and worth reading about. For the author it seems to offer a lot of closure. For readers it offers a fascinating first person perspective, cleverly cobbled out of art, biographical writing, photos, memorabilia entries, etc. into a mentality of being a modern day citizen of a modern progressive country, whose dark and terrible past still echoes and resonates globally, all these decades later.
     Great literature is meant to help us understand the world and people in it, though they may be wildly different from us and all we know. It makes you think about the world in more informed way and helps exercise the compassion muscles by providing context for the actions of others, incomprehensible as they may seem on the outside. This is what this book does and does it well. It takes what might have been (Nazi) caricatures and gives them dimensions and layers, makes them real, real people, often faces with terrible choices and trying to do their best. It’s really difficult to accept because, you know…Nazis. But it’s interesting to read about through the prism of such a personal perspective as Krug tries to objectively determine her family’s culpability and take stock of the subsequent trauma. Really interesting and well worth a read.
    The book is text heavy and very creative, not your traditional graphic novel in layout of stylistic choices, but very well done. The narrative voice is compelling and honest and the art really compliments the story.
   Not alight read by any means, quite heavy in fact, but very good. Certainly merits all the acclaim. Recommended.