Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home - Nora Krug

Graphic nonfiction is a genre that I was completely unaware of until late 2016 when I discovered Sarah Glidden's Rolling Blackouts, her account of the trip that she and two friends took to Turkey, Syria, and Iraq in order to document the effect of the Iraq War on the civilian population in those countries.  Glidden's book, told in the graphic style most familiar to comic strip fans, is a surprisingly powerful and moving one.  And I do not believe it would have worked nearly so well had it been published as a traditional nonfiction book. I wondered at the time whether I would ever read another graphic nonfiction title, and now almost three years later, it has finally happened.  

Nora Krug's Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home uses a somewhat different graphic style than that used by Rolling Blackouts, but it is a style that works very well to explain what it was like for that generation of Germans who grew up unsure as to exactly the role their grandparents may have played in World War II.  Their parents themselves were often unsure of the family's exact history, but even if they had all the answers, they often withheld the details that would have allowed their children to do any of the research for themselves (not a good sign).

Nora Krug, who lives with her family in Brooklyn, decided decades after the war that it was high time for her to learn the truth about her own family.  She knew that the task would be made more difficult by the deaths of the last remaining members of her family who had actual memories of World War II, and that she could not afford to wait much longer because that inevitable time was fast approaching.  Krug returned to Germany both to do archival research and to visit family members she had not seen since she was a child - and there she learned about her maternal grandfather (a driving teacher during the war) and her father's brother (a teenage member of the SS who died in Italy). 

Krug began her research with a mixture of dread and hope: dread that her relatives may have been among the war's worst offenders, and hope that she would find that they had managed to avoid taking part in the atrocities associated with the German army of those years.  In Germany, she visited archives to study records made available to the public and interviewed an elderly aunt who provided her with answers to some of her most nagging questions.  What she learned, and how she felt about it, is brilliantly recounted in Belonging via Krug's drawings and enhanced photos.  Publisher Scribner correctly characterizes the book as a "visual memoir," a genre of which I am now a big fan.

Bottom Line:  If you are in the mood for something very different in the way of memoir or general nonfiction reading, this one is most definitely worth a look.  I hope now to find a third book in the genre - and I really hope it doesn't take three years to find a new one this time.

The following are pages from Rolling Blackouts for those who may be wondering about the contrast in styles that I mentioned:

Book Number 3,407

The Bronx Kill

The Bronx Kill is my first experience with a graphic novel and, frankly, I had no idea it was presented in that format when I ordered it. However, despite the surprise (I was unfamiliar with the Vertigo Crime imprint) about the book’s format, I found it to be an interesting reading experience and do not regret my mistake. After all, most boys of my generation honed their reading skills on the comic books of the day, and The Bronx Kill is pretty much a dark comic book for adults, a nostalgic reminder of those hundreds of comics I read as a kid.

Martin Keane, an insecure novelist, is battling the sophomore jinx. His second novel has been universally trashed by the critics and he is taking it personally. Even Erin, his wife, finally admits that she found the book to be slow and that while reading it she kept wishing he would just “get to the point.” Keane men, since the time of Martin’s great-grandfather have been cops, and Martin’s decision to be a writer instead of a cop has already ruined his relationship with his father. The last thing he needs now is to fail at the job by which he defines his whole world.

Martin, knowing that his third book has to be something completely different from his last, decides that his family’s tragic history has the makings of a good historical thriller. What he learns while researching his family history in Ireland for four months convinces him that he is right. But when his wife disappears one night after reading a few pages of the new manuscript, Martin finds himself eerily reliving the details of his own family history – and the pages of his new novel.

I suspect that most readers of The Bronx Kill will figure out where the book is heading long before Martin solves the mystery of his wife’s disappearance but that is not a big problem. The book’s strong suit is the dark, other worldly, mood it creates, a combination of the noir fiction of the 1940s and the best pulp fiction of earlier decades. James Romberger contributes much of that mood through his black and white illustrations, especially those set in the Bronx Kill area, a nasty, isolated patch of the inner city key to Keane family history.

Overall, The Bronx Kill succeeds in telling its complicated story with a minimum of words, but graphic novels leave little space for character development, and I found this to be a hard-to-overcome handicap. As I said earlier, since this is my first graphic novel, I am unable to compare The Bronx Kill to other novels of its type. However, I can say that, because of reading this one, I am more likely to pick up other graphic novels in the future – and that surprises me.

Rated at: 3.0

(review copy provided by publisher)