A German review of Heimat by Nora Krug (2018)

A German review of Heimat by Nora Krug (2018)

There is probably some truth in the notion that even today a German migrating to an English-speaking country like the USA, UK, Canada, Australia or New Zealand will be more like confronted with Germany’s Nazi past than a German in Germany, sometimes on quite a personal basis. When in the early 70s I was invited to my New Zealand girlfriend’s home to meet her parents I was aware that various of their relatives had died as soldiers in WWII somewhere in Europe. Her father went to great lengths to make me feel comfortable by playing Wagner records and talking about the great German philosophers. Of course I wondered if any of my soldier relatives had killed theirs. Of course the subject was not raised in such polite society, quite unlike as in the great comedy act in Fawlty Towers when John Cleese cannot help himself not to mention the war to his German customers.

When Nora Krug arrives in New York in the 1980s the second person she meets is a Holocaust survivor and the silent question is whether or not any of her relatives were part of the Nazi murder machine. Her subsequent investigation into this question, as detailed in her illustrated/graphic ‘family album’ as she calls it, is of course as painful as it is revealing. Her grandfather was a paid up member of the NSPAP, something she found out amidst feigned ignorance amongst her other relatives (parents included).

Such lessons in personal history should be confronted by all Germans rather than just listen to the vague history lessons taught in German high schools (as I and Nora Krug can attest). However there is no point in beating oneself up for being a post-war German. In the bigger picture there are any number of atrocities, past and present, that need close investigation and brave conclusions. As Chomsky points out, if the Nuremburg Trials were to be applied to atrocities committed by Americans in Vietnam, Cambodia and Syria (just to mention a few places) then quite a few presidents and their henchmen would be found guilty. This is a universal issue as portrayed so well by the North American counter culture lyrics Universal Soldier and What are we fighting for. Nora Krug fails to see this in her book. Hannah Arendt, the great commentator on Germany’s Nazi past, noted that the rise of Hitler was not a big deal (there have been and will be any number of Hitlers in the abhorrent history of the world) but Auschwitz was (BTW I will review another of the current crop of graphic novel accounts, namely The three escapes of Hannah Arendt by Ken Krimstein).

So my complaint about Krug is the linguistic and cultural relativism that pervades this otherwise very good book on what it might mean to be a contemporary expatriate German living in the USA. Why entitle it Heimat when otherwise writing in English? The German word Heimat has of course many shades of meaning depending on the context. So has the English word home. In some contexts the German and English words (or their various Germanic roots and derivations) are interchangeable, as in 

Ich gehe heim.

I go home.

heimweh

homesick

It is well known that when translating from one language to another, there are what is called ‘lexical gaps’, i.e. a single word in one language cannot be translated by another single word in the other. This however is not proof for linguistic and cultural relativism. If a single word cannot be translated by another single word then two or more will do. This is called paraphrasing – something one can do even within one language, i.e. explain a word with two or more others (like in a dictionary definition). Indeed Krug presents a lengthy paragraph in which the German word Heimat is explained in its various contexts – some of which require a quite lengthy paraphrase or definition. Sure, there are some German words that have entered the English lexicon, like Zeitgeist or perhaps Schadenfreude but Heimatis not one of them, i.e. there are perfectly good translations available for Heimat, e.g. ‘home country’.

Having been based in New Zealand – as a German national – since the early 1970s, one is familiar with an obsession amongst certain New Zealand born New Zealanders who have to embark on a journey half way around the world to visit their ‘home country’, namely the UK, finding their ancestral roots, as it were. We also know another connotation of such roots in the Black American context. People who were forced from their home countries have obviously quite a different take on their respective home countries. Things can get astonishingly complicated, as for example in a recent documentary about the French New Caledonians who are of Algerian descent, their forefathers having been rounded up in Algeria and France before and during the war of independence and deported to New Caledonia. Should they now vote for independence from France, as the majority of the indigenous Kanaks do?

Many Americans who are descended from the home countries (England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland – the latter being a bit more complicated due to the existence of Northern Ireland) share the same enthusiasm for their Heimatas their compatriots in NZ, Australia and Canada, most notably in the infamous espionage arrangement known as the ‘five eyes’, namely to be English first and foremost, casting the proverbial sharp eye over anything that might endanger the English hegemony.

Such xenophobic and jingoistic trends are currently seen in Brexit and Trump’s US First politics (BTW there is a political Party in NZ called NZ First, and currently a coalition partner in NZ’s government that is otherwise lauded as progressive except that everything has to be seen through the lens of NZ First). 

I am not accusing Nora Krug of such tendencies but I am trying to make the point that to call a book Heimat, written in English, about being German, is a contentious choice. If the choice of word were ironic or better still, sarcastic, one would have to applaud, especially as Krug battles with Germany’s notorious Nazi past, trying to find out if her relatives, past and present, had anything to do with it. Given the Nazis’ exploitation of the term Heimat and the recent German neo-con reinvention of a Ministry of Heimat (so as not to be left behind the US where the Secretary of ‘Homeland’ Security wields immense power), one would have thought that this is a term to avoid at all costs in a serious personal investigation of Germany’s Nazi past and present. To the credit of Krug, she is suitably horrified when she finds out that her grandfather was a member of the NSDAP. That some of the towns people of Kuelsheim (note the suffix –heim), where most of her relatives come from, had participated in rounding up local Jews and sending them off to the concentration camps, is equally shocking to her. While she is relieved to some degree that none of her relatives were hardcore Nazi criminals (her grandfather was classified as a ‘follower’ by the Americans who investigated all known members of the NSDAP) she remains hugely embarrassed, not only because of the Nazi connection but also how her family treated the death of her granduncle, as a soldier in Italy. Surely as a pacifist one must decry all war casualties whether on the right or wrong side of history but as a member of a society (US and German in Krug’s case) that clearly supports the military option, one cannot be overly sentimental about a soldier’s death, as is most of Krug’s family, herself included. 

Such overwrought sentimentality finds its way into Krug’s other theme that I would call cultural relativism: this idea that certain cultural manifestations are as untranslatable as the corresponding words, ending up with cultural stereotypes and clichés that are best left to questionable jokes about nationalities. Krug’s volume is interspersed with what she calls ‘Things German (from the notebook of a homesick émigré)’, listing a brand of bandage (Hansaplast) and soap (Gallseife) among others, things she says she cannot do without even when in the USA (one can buy such things on the Internet these days). Personally I find neither product as particularly iconic. Krug is also off-side with the term émigré, especially as used in the US, for German émigrés were mostly Jews who settled in the US to escape the Nazis. Krug is simply a German immigrant. That she is homesick is another issue. Travelling back and forth between New York and Karlsruhe in search of mementos to include in her beautifully illustrated graphic book, one can perhaps understand a certain nostalgia for things German (she clearly believes in) when domiciled in a cultural pot boiler called New York where nobody knows what’s what anymore (other than the New Yorkers called Trump, Giuliani and Bloomberg). But then again why not express some nostalgia for some of the more positive German concepts, like Dichter und Denker, like Gustav Landauer (from Karlsruhe). 

In her Epilogue, Krug mentions that in the 2017 German national elections the ‘extreme right’ has claimed seats in the German parliament, and then thinking back to what the mayor of Karlsruhe wrote to his chief of police in 1940, namely that ‘constant complaints have been made about the fact that local Jews have been behaving brashly and provocatively … and have refused to give up their seats for German women.’ Krug juxtaposes this with being in the New York subway when a ‘man in a yarmulke standing next to me’ asks a woman in the seat in front to offer her the seat, seeing, as he does, that she is pregnant. A fine gesture no doubt but in light of the quote from the mayor a somewhat unfortunate narration. Perhaps Krug should have looked on the Internet to find out that Karlsruhe now has two ‘extreme right’ city councillors who will make similar complaints about recent refugees.  

Krug, inadvertently perhaps (or perhaps with a suspicious mind) comes close to the crux of the matter, multiple contradictions included: since she grew up in Karlsruhe backing onto the American military base, she knew even as a child that there was something odd going on. There were the American in clear sight across the fence but as a German you never interacted with them. At school she learned the American soldiers were stationed there to protect the Germans from ‘resurging Nazism and the threat of Communism’. Later at high school she also learned about the Holocaust. When I went to high school in Germany (Abiturjahr = graduation year 1969, so a bit before the time Krug writes about) we too learned something about the 3^rdReich and when some of us started to quiz our elderly history teacher as to what he had been doing the war, he threw a tantrum and forbade us to ever ask such questions again. We wrote to the Wiesenthal Institute asking for Holocaust material, saying we were doing a history project on this topic. They sent us a package with the most horrific photographs from the concentration camps (like one shown in Krug’s book). The director of our school was an associate of the Austrian mountaineer Heinrich Harrer, a known Nazi but treated as a hero in post-war Germany and Austria. Heinrich Harrer was often a guest-speaker at our school. Some of us radical students (with long hair) found out about all these matters rather late in our time at this high school but just in time to have our Abiturfeier (graduation ceremony) cancelled by pasting posters all over the school the night before, showing an adaptation of the Orwellian ‘all animals are equal but some are more equal than others’ by substituting ‘animals’ with ‘teachers’ and depicting them as pigs. The police was called but they didn’t find out who done it. Looks like Nora Krug in her high school days in Germany did not gain an understanding of this history other than to be flabbergasted by it – and not even wondering much if and how her own relatives might have been involved. The Americans across the fence had only one mission by then (as reinforced by the daily news on German TV): to protect the Germans and the rest of the free world from the evils of communism. Strangely though the American soldiers and their families still didn’t interact with the Germans. Why not? Krug unearths the evidence: one seriously famous Dr Seuss (also known as Theodor Geisel) had produced a US War Department training film in 1945, saying things like ‘the German people are not our friends … trust none of them … stand guard … that is your job in Germany’. Not sure if Krug knows about Geisel’s grandparents from both sides having been German immigrants and yet him advocating that all American-Japanese citizens were to be detained as potential traitors but extending the same privilege to German émigrés only if they showed communist tendencies (like Wilhelm Reich for example) and of course not including American-German citizens (like, it could be argued, Dr Seuss himself). 

When dealing with the forces of fascism, in particular the German version of it, the contradictions are many, and seemingly ordinary folk like Krug and her German family are caught in a maelstrom of half-truths, conjectures, false beliefs, greed, insanity – all mixed up into the banality of evil, as Hannah Arendt put it. Any subsequent feelings of national identity (and the whole identity politics) should have drowned in this horrific mess, be it German, American, French or whatever. In that sense Nora Krug has failed to show a way out, which in my opinion is, as a first step, to deny any adherence to any Heimat, nationality, race, religion, ideology, ethnicity and identity. What she did well was to graphically document the dreadful banality that Heimat implies, past and present, in Germany.