Nora Krug is a German-American author and illustrator whose drawings and visual narratives have appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde diplomatique and A Public Space, and in anthologies published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Simon and Schuster and Chronicle Books. A wholly original record of a German woman’s struggle with the weight of catastrophic history, Belonging is also a reflection on the responsibility that we all have as inheritors of our countries’ pasts. In this highly inventive visual memoir-equal parts graphic novel, family scrapbook, and investigative narrative-Nora Krug draws on letters, archival material, flea market finds, and photographs to attempt to understand what it means to belong. 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. Her extraordinary quest, spanning continents and generations, pieces together her family’s troubling story and reflects on what it means to be a German of her generation. 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 Italy. Now in her late thirties, after almost twenty years of living abroad (first in the UK, then in the U.S.), Krug realizes that living away from Germany has only intensified her need to ask the questions she didn’t dare, or didn’t think to ask a child and young adult.
Yet Nora knew little about her own family’s involvement in the war: though all four grandparents lived through the war, they never spoke of it. For Nora, the simple fact of her German citizenship bound her to the Holocaust and its unspeakable atrocities and left her without a sense of cultural belonging. Nora Krug was born decades after the fall of the Nazi regime, but the Second World War cast a long shadow throughout her childhood and youth in the city of Karlsruhe, Germany.
Deutsches Haus at NYU and the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU present a reading by the author Nora Krug from her recent graphic memoir Belonging followed by a conversation between her and the writer and editor Nicole Rudick.
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