German life in the darkest years
Nora Krug, a German-American author and illustrator, Heimat is small town in provincial southern Germany where her ancestors, farmers and traders have lived for generations, but she moved to Berlin first and then to New York.
In Heimat, Krug exemplifies the story of ordinary life in Germany during the darkest moment in the country’s history and the decades that followed.
Krug, throws light on her father’s older brother Franz-Karl, a teenage soldier who was killed in battle in Italy, and her grandfather Willi, who ran a driving school. The cherished first-born son cut down before his life had really began, the ordinary family man who did what he could to help Jewish fellow citizens facing persecution.
She uses original material from school reports and denazification forms to family photos and snippets of phone books and playful drawings and explains how her grandfather might have reacted when there was open persecution of the Jews in the town. There is the 17-year-old boy, his homework decorated with swastikas, who was conscripted into the SS and whose letters home take on unforgiving tone before he is killed just after his 18th birthday.
The Grandfather who, was a member of the Nazi party, but declared himself as a mere “ follower” who joined in order to keep his job and feed his family.
Heimat: A German Family Album by Nora Krug Particular Books £22, 288 pages.