In december 1944, a letter from the front, about a missing German soldier: ”May the knowledge that this assignment was a part of the fight for this HEIMATS freedom give you strength to bear the pain.”
If it was for their heimat, which the nazis pursued the war and destruction in Europe for more than 70 years ago – which relationship is then possible to have the German village, which also smells of dark bread, galltvål and quiet forest?
This is the big question in the German-american artist Nora Krugs graphic novel ”Heimat”, where she with both shame and longing searching for the truth about his family’s doings during the war. As the wanderer above the mists in Caspar David Friedrich’s romantic painting the gaze of the author on the cover out over a pastoral landscape that is supposed to be the native place she can neither embrace or really leave. ”It feels as if I sat with the doctor and asked to be tested for a rare genetic disease,” writes Krug about the visit in the u.s. military archives – as if the historical crime was passed down through the bloodline.
the collective guilt as the recognition back and a possible vaccine for the future – for us all – gets details about their own family here the only relevant. And purely conceptually for Krug’s actually a pretty flat children around the perception of identity, connectedness, and collective guilt. The question ”How do you know who you are, if you don’t understand where you come from?” presented as eternal and universal, when in fact it is a cliché that is based on a very specific understanding of the human self, as a small branch on a large tree with deep roots.
all genealogy is marked ”Heimat” part of a self-centredness which, although it provides both colour and a natural setting, but that also creates a child-like myopia that cuts against history’s horrors. It is simply a bit of a naive move on the part of Krug as both cartoonist and storyteller, and it irritates especially initially reading.
The klippboksestetik she uses is, however, extremely välfunnen and also becomes truly meaningful as the last moment thickens. The unquestionable strength of the ”Heimat” is Nora Krugs tireless trenching in a story that-to put it mildly, has its own weight, irrespective of the author’s feelings. Krug is not content with explanations, how reasonable they may sound, but goes constantly to the shank. When a relative mjölkaffär to have been confiscated in July 1939 that the owner refused to accede to the nazis, studying Krug old telephone directories and see how the store remains under the same name, well into the forties.
the most freezing powerful moment of a scanned questionnaire from January 1946, in which the German grandfather, who kept silent through the decades, finally talks to her adult grandchildren. ”Yes.” He was a member of the nazi party. The man who, in march, 1933, voted for the social democrats went a couple of months later with the NSDAP, and the question of how the movement actually went to cut deep wounds into our own time.
Further on will be a question about how grandpa before the authorities classifies himself and his role during the war, with five options: Principal, congested, less congested, attacks, acquitted. The answer is standing there in blue ink, written with the grandfather’s neat handwriting – this is the best label he could hope for in the efterkrigsland which is now to be built: ”Mitläufer”.
