This reading group guide for Belonging includes an introduction, discussion questions, and ideas for enhancing your book club. 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). 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). 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. Yet she knew little about her own family’s involvement though all four grandparents lived through the war, they never spoke of it.Īfter 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.
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. 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. * 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 Krug presents her book with a visual presentation and discussion at Greenlight.* Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award * Silver Medal Society of Illustrators *
Belonging wrestles with the idea of Heimat, the German word for the place that first forms us, where the sensibilities and identity of one generation pass on to the next, and reflects on the responsibility that we all have as inheritors of our countries’ pasts. In her late thirties, after twelve years in the US, Krug realizes that living abroad has only intensified her need to ask the questions about her family’s history in World War II she didn’t dare to as a child and young adult, and returns to her hometown in Germany on an extraordinary quest to piece together her family’s troubling story.
St Joseph's University (Brooklyn Voices Series)īook Launch: Nora Krug presents Belonging: A German Reckons with History and HomeĪward-winning artist and Greenlight neighbor Nora Krug presents her new book Belonging, a revelatory, visually stunning graphic memoir telling the story of her attempt to confront the hidden truths of her family’s wartime past in Nazi Germany and to comprehend the forces that have shaped her life, her generation, and history.
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