Belonging

<b>* Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award * </b><b>Silver Medal Society of Illustrators *</b><br> <br> <b>* Named a Best Book of the Year by <i>The New York Times,</i> <i>The Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, </i>NPR<i>, </i><i>Comics Beat, The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, </i><i>Kirkus Reviews, </i>and<i> </i><i>Library Journal</i></b><br> <br> <b>This<i> </i>“ingenious reckoning with the past” (<i>The</i> <i>New York Times</i>), by award-winning artist Nora Krug investigates the hidden truths of her family’s wartime history in Nazi Germany.</b><br><br>Nora Krug was born decades after the fall of the Nazi regime, but the Second World War cast a long shadow over her childhood and youth in the city of Karlsruhe, Germany. Yet she knew little about her own family’s involvement; though all four grandparents lived through the war, they never spoke of it.<br> <br> After twelve years in the US, Krug realizes that living abroad has only intensified her need to ask the questions she didn’t dare to as a child. Returning to Germany, she visits archives, conducts research, and interviews family members, uncovering in the process the stories of her maternal grandfather, a driving teacher in Karlsruhe during the war, and her father’s brother Franz-Karl, who died as a teenage SS soldier. In this extraordinary quest, “Krug erases the boundaries between comics, scrapbooking, and collage as she endeavors to make sense of 20th-century history, the Holocaust, her German heritage, and her family's place in it all” (<i>The Boston Globe</i>). A highly inventive, “thoughtful, engrossing” (<i>Minneapolis Star-Tribune</i>) graphic memoir, <i>Belonging</i> “packs the power of Alison Bechdel’s <i>Fun Home </i>and David Small’s <i>Stitches</i>” (NPR.org).