Hi, I'm Alan Erwin from Amarillo and I've been reading Belonging, a graphic novel by Nora Krug.
Nora asks us, in the words of the immortal Bo Diddly, “who do you love?”
Who are these people and places that share and shape our lives? How well do we know the people we know?
She uses the German word “heimat,” denoting “an immediate sense of familiarity.” It can mean a generational, familial sense or a sense of place, either physical or emotional. Those markers which help define our history and idea of self.
What if our heimat is incomplete or incorrect? Who then are we?
Nora immigrated to America from Germany to attend college. One of her first encounters was with an elderly woman in New York City. The woman asks Nora if she is from Germany. Nora replies that she is and asks if the woman had ever been to Germany. The woman replies, “a long time ago,” but will not look Nora in the eyes. She then went on to describe her life in a concentration camp during World War II.
Nora understands this is an unavoidable artifact of her German heritage. How does she, as someone born long after those horrors, react to this element of her heimat? Living in America was a frequent source of reminders of this past.
Nora finally returns to Germany in 2014 to confront the place and people she knew growing up. What roles did her family play before and during the WWII years? These are not stories she was taught as a child. Even as an adult it is difficult to pursue such information. These are places and people you love, from which you were formed, how you became you. What if there is another truth to your story?
Nora learns that members of her own family, some she knew personally and others she knew only as names, had been participants, in varying degrees and actions, to all that had happened. The difficulty lies in separating the truth from one's heimat. Can the story be so complicated and still be her truth?
I'm going to switch stories for a moment and examine my own heimat.
My parents were Oklahoma Dust Bowl kids. Both of them were born in the mid-1920s. Their heimat was working the families' dusty fields, going to school and imagining that this was going to be their lives. When suddenly, on a December day in 1941, everything changed. Young Americans, even these dust bowl kids, now were sent out into the world.
They were told they were the light and hope of the world. Life, liberty and the American way were our obligation to gift to those not lucky enough to be born into such beauty. Avoiding, of course, the reality that the U.S. did not live up to that ideal. But it's the heimat that matters. Right?
My parents were married in January 1942. Within a year, my dad was on a small boat in the South Pacific and my mom was living in a trailer in the Mojave Desert, working as a waitress and waiting for over 2 years for her husband to return.
What was their world during this time? It certainly wasn't the one they had grown up imagining. My parents never talked about the years they were apart. As I've aged and seen the world, I've wondered what my sense of history and family would be if I knew more of that time in their lives?
Which brings me back to Nora and her story. How dangerous is it to find out the truth about ourselves and our history? What should we do if these are unpleasant truths? Once known, they can never be unlearned. What happens to our heimat when it is forced to confront reality?
I'm Alan Erwin for the HPPR Radio Readers Book Club.
