And now we have so many technological possibilities to find information that wasn't available maybe 15 years ago certain files have only been made public recently. I found it difficult to live with gaps in my family narrative. I wanted to ask as many questions as I could, and find out as much as possible. But I personally think it's always better to know than not to know. Your book details your quest to find out more about your ancestors' involvement in the war would you encourage other Germans to do that research too?Įverybody has their own way of dealing with the past, so I wouldn't say that there's one way of handling it. Read more: 'Maus' cartoonist Art Spiegelman turns 70 So that's why I wrote the book in English first.Īnd then I realized that the German publishing world was actually the one that was the most excited about it, because living with this legacy is still such a trauma for the Germans as well. When I first wrote the book, I really had an American audience in mind because, as a German living among non-Germans in America, I had been often confronted with negative stereotypes about Germans, but also with a lack of knowledge of what we do with the legacy of the war. The US version of the book has the title: "Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home" Image: Penguin Books Ltdĭid you initially conceive your book for Germans or for English-language readers? And that's how it should be looked at, as something that's not static but that's allowed to change and mean different things to different individuals. And it's also a term that changes over time, just as we change and our society changes. The goal of the book wasn't to provide easy answers or to understand what being German means, but more an attempt to better understand the German war experience.Īnd even after the whole process of writing the book, I can't really say that I know what the term Heimat means to me personally, partly because I've been living abroad for all in all 20 years. I don't think I have a clear definition of the word Heimat yet. But did you also come up with an easy way to define the term in interviews? Your graphic memoir offers a complex, very poetic interpretation of the concept of Heimat. I believe it should be possible to both look critically at our past and express love for our country The book is both a quest to find out what it means to be German and it's also a commitment to Germany - in a positive sense. That's exactly why we decided to call the book "Heimat," because we felt that we needed to claim the term back from the extreme right. Edgar Reitz, the director of a series of films in the 1980s called "Heimat," told DW in an interview that he wouldn't have called his project that way today he finds the term to difficult to defend. "Heimat" is a loaded German term it was misappropriated by the Nazis and more recently by the far right.
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