Heimat: A German Family Album

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On an individual level, Heimat is the place you don’t have to explain yourself: where you feel comfortable, where people know you, where you belong. But if your Heimat is somewhere you believe you belong but others see you as a perpetual outsider, can it truly be your Heimat? And what happens to those who have lost theirs, who settle somewhere new seeking another Heimat? Such questions have become increasingly urgent in recent years as more than a million refugees came to Germany in 2015 and 2016. Started yesterday, finished this morning: this is the first adult picture book I've wanted to read, and as anticipated, I couldn't put it down. Bracing honesty ... the informal feel and arresting candor of a diary -- Francoise Mouly * New Yorker * At the center of this pioneering work in modern European history is the German word Heimat—the homeland, the local place. Translations barely penetrate the meaning of the word, which has provided the emotional and ideological common ground for a variety of associations and individuals devoted to the cause of local preservation. Celia Applegate examines at both the national and regional levels the cultural meaning of Heimat and why it may be pivotal to the troubled and very timely question of German identity.

Residing in Memory: Private Confrontation with Loss Andrew Demshuk (2012) - The lost German East December 26, 2022 4a. Residing in Memory: Private Confrontation with Loss Heimat, the title of Krug’s book, is one of those terms whose prestige as an ultra-specific, “untranslatable” German word isn’t really deserved. The word, which was co-opted by National Socialist propaganda and only partially rehabilitated by Edgar Reitz’s arthouse soap opera, made in the 80s and 90s, of the same name (of which Krug is a fan), oscillates between referring to a specific geographic location, a “homeland”, and a vaguer, more spiritual sense of “home-ness”.

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Krug] is a tenacious investigator, ferreting out stories from the wispiest hints - a rumor or a mysterious photograph. . . . What Krug pursues is a better quality of guilt, a way of confronting the past without paralysis. -- Parul Sehgal * The New York Times, 'Top Books of 2018' *

I was hugely taken by Nora Krug's Heimat, a beautifully produced and thoughtful piece of family history by a second generation German immigrant to the US. -- Tim Martin * The Spectator *Both authors try to unearth and record the unspoken, suppressed truths of the WWII. The difference is that Russians were mandated to forget the ugly parts of the war to elevate the winners' narrative of heroism and bravery, and Germans - to hide their guilt and shame, not only from the others, but themselves and their families.