Heimat: A German Family Album

Product Information

In a 2017 speech commemorating German reunification, for example, President Frank-Walter Steinmeier sought to bridge the divide between the nostalgic Heimat of the right and an open, inclusive Heimat of the left. “I am convinced that those who long for their Heimat are not from yesterday. To the contrary: The faster the world around us spins, the stronger this longing for Heimat,” he said. “But we can’t leave this longing for Heimat to those who construct Heimat as ‘us against them,’ as blood-and-soil nonsense, that conjures up a holy German past that never existed.” Germany’s current government announced in March this year that it would establish the first ever Heimat ministry, though appropriately for such a conceptually overloaded word, there has yet to be any announcement on what such a ministry would do. Krug’s approach, by contrast, is refreshingly materialist. In contrast to the official histories detailed in Chapter 2, local chronicles seldom featured a cyclical approach to historical events, in which German progress repeatedly intervened to repair devastation from regular invasions from the East (implying an inevitable pattern of death and resurrection, making another resurrection through Heimkehr inevitable). Rather, often tapping into material from earlier, interwar chronicles, amateur historians (pastors, schoolteachers, mayors, farmers) presented a linear and tragic account of ever-increasing progress, happiness, and Germanness in a cozy Heimat village that suddenly died and was buried under foreign invasion in 1945. Freikorps, Communists, Nazis – these remained conspicuously absent in most accounts, replaced by a tale of stability, culture, productivity, pastoral serenity, and urban vitality. The sudden rupture of loss at the story’s end made it clear that only the Heimat of memory survived, in part through the service of the chronicler. For what reason? She's not sure. Perhaps to absolve them in her mind; perhaps to adequately blame them. Whatever the reasoning, I felt every bit of the author’s desperation to find out about her grandparents. I sat along as she dug into their history and hoped so very much that they weren’t guilty of the worst crimes. I, too, wanted it to not be them. I wanted them to have been the good guys. Or would it be easier to navigate my shame if I had been able to prove his guilt, if I had learned that he had been a Nazi through and through, without the shadow of a doubt?"

Krug probes her family's actions in Nazi Germany, conducting interviews and roaming archives and flea markets. She confronts past and present in a book that's been praised for its invention and bravery. The Guardian, 'The 50 biggest books of autumn 2018'Nora Krug’s book BelongingÂis 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.” It's an idea that has helped bankroll many religions, including Christianity, which tells us that thanks to "original sin" (Adam and Eve's initial act of eating those bad apples) we all now need salvation. This would be a great companion read to Svetlana Alexievich's The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II. The Silesian protested, demanded that Rübezahl allow him to sleep too until the old Heimat had resurrected again as it once had been. But the dwarf rebuked him: “If you have lost the old Heimat , why would you be allowed to live on [to have] what you want?” Even though the German crimes were never named, the Silesian suddenly realized that it was the fault of human beings, not poor Rübezahl, that the “German” mountains of his Reich had been lost for the rest of their lifetimes. A terrible cost was being paid, and he accepted the dwarf’s command that he return to reality and raise his children in the West. Awake, with his daughter “snuggled confidently and securely” in his arms, the depression left him, and he knew that it was his duty “to be strong within myself and to erect the new Heimat around me for my child and my family,” even if the Heimat of memory laid in slumber for the rest of his mortal existence. Having undertaken an imaginary journey and “witnessed” the Heimat transformed, the Silesian accepted the reality that it was lost for the rest of his life. 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' *

Despite its complicated history and fraught associations, polling suggests Germans overwhelmingly view Heimat as a good thing: 92 percent view the concept positively, according to a 2017 Kantar Emnid survey. Asked about their definitions of Heimat in a 2015 poll for the broadcaster ARD, 82 percent associated the word somewhat or strongly with family and loved ones; 88 percent with the place they live; 86 percent with deeper feelings of safety, comfort and happiness; and 75 percent with language, traditions and customs. Heimat features prominently in campaign rhetoric, including this 2018 poster from the Bavarian Christian Social Union Krug's journey to discover the extent of her family members' involvement in Nazi atrocities is revelatory, for me at least. I was surprised to learn just how extensive (but not always effective) the Allies investigation of, it seems, every German's crimes was. I was even more impressed by how deliberate and systematic is German's education of their own citizens of the crimes of the past. On the other hand, it made me wonder if it goes too far maybe. Krug's pain at inability to love any part of her homeland or being proud for anything German whatsoever is quite palpable. It's no surprise really that the nationalist movement is on the rise in Germany. Whether or not we are responsible for the sins of past generations is a fascinating question, one that in our increasingly trivialized culture sees people shouting from the extremes on both sides.Generic picture books devoted to representing “all of Germany” also preserved the myth of pristine eastern provinces, ever alive as an intrinsic part of a united whole, even though now they only existed in the past. Whereas contemporary photographs illustrated the modern, postwar life of cities in the West and often even in the DDR, pictures from the former eastern provinces usually dated to before the war, complete with old cars or horses. Only occasionally did a contemporary image appear to feature reconstructed monuments like the Breslau town hall, whose repair after the city’s destruction was usually attributed to unknown forces. Under a brilliant color photo of the town hall, one picture book merely noted that “one can see that the damages from the war are completely remedied.” Such books preserved Germany’s 1937 territories outside political realities: united and intact with the common heritage of Kant from Königsberg, Eichendorff from Neisse, Luther from Wittenberg, and Beethoven from Bonn. I considered for a moment before placing my pin, weighing the new word in my mind. Was my Heimat the small town in the San Francisco Bay Area where I’d grown up, where my mother still lives and to which I return regularly? Was it Philadelphia, where I attended college and learned how to think critically? Was it the University of Cambridge, where I studied abroad and which remains a sort of intellectual utopia in my mind? Or was it Washington, the city from which I had just come, where I had lived my entire postcollegiate life? Like for many in my generation, my life and communities have been spread out across multiple cities; the right choice wasn’t immediately obvious. In the event, to be contrarian, and counter the high concentration of pins across the United States, I chose Cambridge. A highly original and powerful graphic novel that works on many levels...an unflinching examination of what we mean when we think of identity, of history and home. The result is a book that is as informative as a history and as touching as a novel. The Financial Times Although I’ve long considered writing about Heimat, I intended to do it differently: From the rolling hills of Bavaria, home to the country’s first Heimat ministry under Seehofer; from Hesse, where the Greens sought to reclaim and redefine the word; or perhaps from North Rhine-Westphalia, which holds a “Heimat Congress” every two years to explore the concept. The prospect of writing about the topic in the midst of a global pandemic, from my apartment and in cafes in my neighborhood as Berlin tentatively reopens, never crossed my mind. A significant segment of the population also believes its Heimat is under threat. More than a quarter of Germans said in a 2018 Allensbach Institute survey the things that make their Heimat home are “increasingly being lost.” Top reasons included the shuttering of many local businesses (78 percent), level of immigration (69 percent), rapid pace of change (67 percent) and that traditions are no longer preserved and practiced (60 percent).