Does Belonging Belong to Comics?

Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home. Nora Krug. Scribner, 2018. 288 pp. $30.00 (cloth).

Scribner hedged its bets. When publishing Nora Krug’s Belonging (or Heimat, since the UK edition preserves the German title), they referred to it on the dust jacket as both a “visual memoir” and a “graphic memoir.” Most reviewers (the New Yorker, NPR, The Guardian) have preferred “graphic,” presumably aware that the term places the memoir in the same genre as Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home—not only as a work of nonfiction in the comics form but also as the author’s personal interrogation of her family and Nazi heritage, Krug’s horrifying sweet spot between her predecessors’ subject matters.

But the New York Times went with “visual.” While the adjective is perfectly accurate, it inappropriately severs Krug from any formal and artistic traditions of graphic narratives—or what I prefer to call by their slightly more expansive though traditionally lowbrow synonym, comics. Lauren Redniss stirred similar semantic confusion when her Radioactive became a finalist for the National Book Award in 2011. Was it a “nonfiction graphic narrative” or a “visual nonfiction book”? Though Redniss preferred the latter, I call Radioactive a comic too. Terminology is especially relevant when reviewers allude to it directly, as when the New York Times’s Luc Sante praises Richard McGuire’s 2015 Here as a “brilliant and revolutionary [book], for which the term ‘graphic novel’ feels awfully small.” Ironically, Will Eisner’s late-1970s use of the term “graphic novel” was an attempt to escape the smallness of “comics.” Spiegelman faced a similar nomenclature dilemma in 1991 when the New York Times placed Maus II on its best-seller fiction list. He wrote to the editors: “I shudder to think how David Duke—if he could read—would respond to seeing a carefully researched work based closely on my father’s memories of life in Hitler’s Europe and in the death camps classified as fiction.” Maus II premiered at number thirteen on the nonfiction list the following week, formally inaugurating the comics subgenre of graphic memoirs.

And that is Krug’s subgenre too. The Comics Journal’s Jake Murel,

after initially assuming that the designation “visual memoir” on his review copy was “a semantic device for distancing an essentially comic text from the supposed lowbrow, commercial escapism often attributed to comics,” asks, “does Belonging employ comic art as one story-telling device among many, or does its format necessitate expanding the definition of comics as a medium (or does it reveal that such an expansion has already transpired)?”

The answer is: no, yes, yes.

The decades-long disagreement over the definition of “comics” characterizes the field of comics studies—a field that can’t seem to agree on what it’s studying. Setting aside supplementary terms such as “graphic novel” and “graphic narrative” coined to replace rather than define “comics,” the ur-term has at least four overlapping yet competing meanings: comics the form (roughly, any sequence of images); comics the conventions (a subset of image sequences that use panels, gutters, talk balloons, etc.); comics the cartoon (a set of image style conventions that simplify and exaggerate forms but not necessarily in sequences); and comics the publishing history (which prevents the anachronistic application of the term to art created before the 1890s and also to any image or image sequence not understood to be a comic by the artist or curator).

Various comics scholars champion the various definitions, though usually without acknowledging that more than one is at play or that apparent disagreements are the result of talking past each other, since a comic is not a comic is not a comic. Thus Gary Larson’s one-panel The Far Side poses an unsolvable riddle for comics the form, while posing no challenge at all to comics the cartoon or comics the publishing history. I could map the origins of the confusion (Punch magazine, 1843), but I’d rather discuss Krug’s Belonging, since it, happily and extraordinarily, both encompasses and challenges all four definitions.

In order to document her family history and her quest to determine whether her uncle and grandfather were Nazis culpable not only for accepting racist propaganda but also for spreading it and harming specific victims directly (spoiler alert: it’s kinda hard to tell), Krug employs a dizzying range of visual techniques that both reflect the morally shifting ground she’s excavating and impose a kind of order on her findings—albeit a paradoxically chaotic one.

Of the memoir’s 288 pages, any viewer might identify 43—a little less than one-sixth—as comics, though not necessarily for the same reasons. Each consists of multiple images (the form), divided into grids of framed panels (the conventions), with minimally detailed and very loosely proportional figures (the cartoon), all of which overlap with the publishing history, a categorization bolstered by Krug’s previous, unrelated publication, “Kamikaze,” which editor Françoise Mouly selected for the 2012 Best American Comics.

That’s the easy part—since anyone using any definition, consciously or unconsciously, would call those pages “comics.” It’s the rest and majority of the memoir that poses the most intriguing difficulties.

Krug loves words. But not in the way most memoirists or most comic artists love them. Prose memoirists treat words as concepts that exist in the minds of authors and readers, as disembodied language. Prose-only works encourage readers not to consciously register the physical words as a type of image. We are to be transported into the word-triggered world of the story, forgetting we’re reading at all. Traditional comics partially employ that strategy too, rendering narration and dialogue in easily read and visually consistent fonts, except when a word is overtly incorporated into the artwork—those explosively onomatopoetic BAM! and POW!! sound effects.

Krug violates both sets of norms. Her words appear handwritten in an idiosyncratic but not explosive style, and they often require effort to decode because of their placement. Unlike her conventional comics sections where text is contained neatly in captioned boxes, most of Krug’s pages feature complex image-text designs. Sometimes words look as if they’re written on the pages of her uncle’s school notebook. They also appear within the cloud shapes of a panoramic skyline—Krug’s playful riff on conventional thought bubbles. Other rows of words are divided by images, such as when her grandfather’s head appears to be aflame while he reads a letter officially designating him an “Offender,” a scene that forces readers to piece together Krug’s fragmented sentences one word at a time. And they can appear in strips spaced between photographs, while also divided letter-by-letter in each photograph’s corner, requiring readers to painstakingly decode them (F, E, M, A, L, E, P, R, I, S, O, N, G, U, A, R, D, S) at the same time as we experience the faces of those guards.

Belonging is a comic in the form sense. It is a sequence of images. Most of those appear as part of image-texts, with a pleasantly atypical degree of attention given to the graphic-design element of word placement. While experts across the terminology divide might feel that Krug’s idiosyncrasies do not meet the requisite qualities of comics—either because they are atypical of comics generally (Murel) or because their effects are more interesting than most other publications in the medium (Sante)—I applaud Belonging as one of an expanding list of works that reveal the underexplored range and depth of comics, unbound by its history of conventions (panels, gutters, talk balloons, etc.).

Formal fascinations aside, the content of Krug’s memoir speaks to our cultural moment in the US. “Family heritage” is the rallying cry of some Americans born and raised in former Confederate states who value unexamined loyalty to past generations over the moral and emotional excavations that Krug models. That heritage remains in monuments that solidify a glorified interpretation of the South’s role in the Civil War, and awareness of this stance expanded nationally with Charlottesville’s Unite the Right rally, with an Iowa congressman’s query about when the terms “white nationalist” and “white supremacist” became offensive, and with the president’s equivocations about fascism.

Most US history books ignore the role our country played in the creation and expansion of fascism, allowing Americans to remain unaware that the pseudoscience of eugenics that defined Nazi Germany was cultivated here before it was exported to Germany. The gas chambers that culminated in Auschwitz were first suggested in 1911 by a Carnegie-funded eugenics organization in Long Island—only instead of centralized camps, they advocated for every town in the US to maintain a single gas chamber for euthanizing their locally unfit.

The danger of Krug’s memoir is that it might reinforce a moral complacency (even as she rejects such an attitude by focusing our attention outwardly on Germany in the aftermath of Hitler, the single most vilified name in the US lexicon). Readers might say to themselves, “At least we’re not as bad as them,” or simply enjoy Krug’s memoir as a thoroughly diverting read about a soul-searching descendant’s firsthand struggle with family history and culpability—while never thinking to apply her methods to themselves, to turn their attention inward to their own family and nation.

It’s much easier to define “comic” than “responsibility.”

Read more from Issue 16.2.