The German-American illustrator Nora Krug is facing her own family history through personal accounts and searches in the archives. There is the expectation and the disappointment, the excuse and the harshness of the verdict. Sometimes, there is a sparkle of hope: maybe he - there is the men´s side of the family which represent the main subject of the political investigations of the past - was not so bad, who knows, maybe he saved a Jew...
´How do you know who you are when you don´t know where are you coming from?´But what exactly can you do with the information about where are you coming from? What to do when you find out that you have oncles and grandfathers who actually were involved in the killing machine of the Reich. That even benefited from looted Jewish properties?
Maybe if this dark episode of the past would have been discussed and analysed and exposed earlier after the war, many would have been nowadays more reluctant to utter racist and Nazi-friendly policies. Indeed, Krug said that ´even inherited memory hurts´ but silence is hurtful too. How one can feel when faced with a terrible hidden past? How one can use those information in order to prevent similar situations to repeat?
There are so many questions finally asked openly. It´s frustrating to know how easy fragments of that past were hidden and way too many former Nazi believers were smoothly re-integrated into the everyday life of the ´democratic´ republic(s).
Nora Krug married a Jewish man whose family escaped Hitler´s Germany. She, she wrote this short memoir about her family and her search for the truth. It is a testimony that adds up to other similar stories. Such works are two generations late, after one generation of silence when all went ´business as usual´.
I had access to the book in audiobook format, performed by the author herself.
Rating: 3 stars
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