Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home

"Yes! You know, she had such an interesting story. She felt guilt about her family’s German past—she wasn’t sure if there was a Nazi connection, although she suspected there might be. The way that she tells this story is very visual, like a scrapbook. She has photographs. Sometimes they’re just old photographs that she bought at a flea market, they aren’t even her own family’s photos. Some of them are her family’s, some of them are little newspaper clippings that she found through her research. Some of it is her own words, handwritten. And so, it’s just this sort of patchwork of research and pictures and ephemera and family stories, and it just goes deeper and deeper and deeper. She does find culpability, on a minor scale. She finds that one of her relatives let Nazis park in his garage, and in order to do that, he had to join the Nazi party. So there are all these complicated themes of guilt and survival, and what you do to get along and live your life in a society that is going insane—and then, how does a family come out of that? It wasn’t her generation and it wasn’t her parent’s generation. This goes back several generations and yet, she had this sense of responsibility, the sense that her family had not done right and she needed to explore that. I agree. They are. Another purpose of memoir, I believe, is to give you an insight into a completely different way of living—into what that looks like and feels like. González’s book does that really, really well. I just felt like I was at his side through that whole book. It’s very vivid, it’s very descriptive, not just of himself and what he was going through but also of his surroundings. The Chung, perhaps not as much. But place is not as important in that book, it’s more about family relationships and her own emotional journey than it is about a particular place. And the characters in her book are vivid and unforgettable. So I think what you want memoir to do really depends on the story."