PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Book Information:

"Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home" is a 280-page fully illustrated and hand-lettered visual memoir about WWII and author/illustrator Nora Krug's own German family history.

Krug was born decades after the fall of the Nazi regime, but the Second World War cast a long shadow throughout her childhood and youth in the city of Karlsruhe, Germany. For Nora, the simple fact of her German citizenship bound her to the Holocaust and its unspeakable atrocities and left her without a sense of cultural belonging. Yet Nora knew little about her own family’s involvement in the war: though all four grandparents lived through the war, they never spoke of it.

Now in her late thirties, after almost twenty years of living abroad (first in the UK, then in the US), Krug realizes that living away from Germany has only intensified her need to ask the questions she didn’t dare, or didn’t think to ask a child and young adult. 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 Italy. Her extraordinary quest, spanning continents and generations, pieces together her family’s troubling story and reflects on what it means to be a German of her generation.

"Belonging" wrestles with the idea of Heimat, the German word for the place that first forms us, where the sensibilities and identity of one generation pass on to the next. In this highly inventive visual memoir—equal parts graphic novel, family scrapbook, and investigative narrative—Nora Krug draws on letters, archival material, flea market finds, and photographs to attempt to understand what it means to belong. A wholly original record of a German woman’s struggle with the weight of catastrophic history, Belonging is also a reflection on the responsibility that we all have as inheritors of our countries’ pasts.


Please note:

Nora Krug is both the author and the illustrator of the book. Since the book is fully hand-lettered and designed by the illustrator and author, there was no art director for this project. The cover design was by Nora Krug and Jaya Miceli.

I do not have a Tiff-version of the cover, so I am attaching the same image twice.

BOOK INFORMATION

Trim Size: 6.5 x 9

Number of Pages: 288

Binding Method:

Paper:

Typefaces: Krug (customized)

CREDIT INFORMATION

Creative Director: n/a

Art Director: n/a

Book Designer: n/a

Jacket/Cover Designer: Nora Krug / Jaya Miceli

Illustrator: Nora Krug

Photographer: n/a

Picture Editor: n/a

Production Director: n/a

Production Coordinator: n/a

Production Artist: n/a

Other Credits: n/a

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