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The book has been translated into 12 languages. A PDF version (authorized) is used in German schools alongside Mein Kampf excerpts to teach Vergangenheitsbewältigung —the struggle to overcome the past. belonging a german reckons with history and home pdf
One of the most compelling aspects readers encounter when opening Belonging is the genre-bending format. It is a graphic memoir, but it is also a scrapbook, a detective story, and an archive. Krug mixes illustrations with photographs, handwritten letters, official government documents, and flea-market finds.
Upon its release, Belonging was compared to Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis . But Krug offers a unique perspective: she is neither victim nor rescuer. She is the descendant of bystanders and joiners. The book has been translated into 12 languages
Her maternal grandfather, by contrast, died in 1940 under mysterious circumstances. She learns he was a staunch anti-Nazi who was killed in a bombing raid—or was he? Krug sifts through conflicting testimonies, showing how families mythologize the “good German.”
This absence drives Krug to archives in Berlin, Washington D.C., and rural Germany. It is a graphic memoir, but it is
, who died as a teenage SS soldier in Italy. A "Masterpiece" of Visual Storytelling