Why did some family members join the German army? What did they think, say, and do as children growing up under Hitler’s regime? How did they respond to the country’s growing anti-Semitism? Did they try to help their Jewish neighbours, employers, and coworkers? Did they respond indifferently (is there even such a thing as indifference in times like these?), or did they support Nazi efforts? Why did her grandfather join the party? Krug seeks to understand her family’s actions in the years preceding and during the war.

The book chronicles her efforts to unravel this family history, and determine what role her family may have played in Nazi Germany. Krug, who left home young and moved to the United States, where she married a Jewish man, has grappled with questions of German identity as an expatriate whose own family history is murky, confusing, and full of awkward silences. She takes a single idea – her family’s involvement in the Second World War – and pursues it with relentless, forensic determination.

Where some contemporary comics drop tantalizingly big ideas but fail to follow through with sufficient thoroughness to do their subjects merit, Krug’s work lies at the opposite end of the spectrum.

Not in terms of size – although at nearly 300 pages, it is that, too – but in terms of ideas, ambition, and scale.

Belonging krug