Ferocious Link: Line Hoven in conversation with Nora Krug: author of Belonging or Heimat

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Below is a link that is close to my heart and experience, but with one difference, Nora Krug was born in 1977 while I go back to late WWII and post-War experiences. Many of you will no doubt enjoy Krug’s graphic method and style of telling her family story. Her book, peppered with lively illustrations, also shows a way of bearing responsibly, a seemingly abstract guilt for the atrocities committed by previous generations of her and my birth-country – without, I might add, losing empathy for the human condition of both Holocaust survivors and disagreeable fellow-travellers of the Nazi regime.

My way was that of social science and specifically anthropology. But I deliberately kept notes, some diary entries, and letters where I recorded not the doing part of research, which notes were kept separately, but the heeding of happenings while I was interacting with the people I researched. During fieldwork where I met – as Nora Krug did in New York – the so-called “Other” was in my case freeing, not least because the human similarities outweighed the differences.

The virtues of Nora Krug’s work – and my analysis is here rather casual – are some of these:

·       1. Illustrations allow distancing and a fresh perspective involving different perceptive faculties

·    2. Personal family documents added the inevitable need for context to help responsible understanding of the times then

·       3. Hand-written words invite intimacy in the sense of being close to the source

·       4. Illustrations protect against overwhelming reactions of pain not only for the atrocities committed against Jews, which came first, but also for the retaliatory civilian bombing and displacements of millions of people 

   5.Importantly, the combination of illustrations, story, and fact exclude bitterness and hate. Emphasis is on maintaining an acceptable, respectable, and genuine moral tone.

If the link does not work by clicking, copy it and view it on Google. How she works will fascinate you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGXqNldGqoM

Take off like a Seagull