This is Spectator Radio and you're listening to The Books Podcast with Sam Leith.

Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Books Podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, Literature of The Spectator.

And this week I'm joined by the writer and cartoonist and artist Nora Krug, whose new book is Haimatt, a German family album.

Nora was born and grew up in Germany and now lives in the United States.

And this is a book about her attempt to understand her German heritage and her family's past.

Nora, welcome.

Thanks so much for having me.

Haimatt, the title you've given to your book, has a kind of quite complicated valence in Germany.

Can you talk a little about why you called it what you did and how it encapsulates what you're after in the book?

Well, Heimat describes the place that you feel most connected to emotionally, that you feel

most rooted in. For many people, it's the place where they grew up, that they associate with

a particular landscape or language or food. And in Germany, it has been a sort of conflicted term because, like many other things, the Nazis

misappropriated it to convey the idea of a space that's basically very clearly defined and

doesn't allow for a variety of perspectives. And so Germans, for decades after the the war shied away from using it and claiming it, basically.

And I think Edgar Wright's, the wonderful filmmaker, was maybe the only and first one who did in the 80s by calling his TV series Haimat.

And in recent years, the term has become more popular again. I think

some of the reasons are obvious. One is probably the, you know, globalization that people feel like

they're losing grip of their own cultural identity and they're trying to seek it again. And so the

term has been printed on coffee mugs and t-shirt and has become

quite commercialized. But then it's also been claimed by the extreme right. And so my publisher

and I, initially I didn't want to call it Haimat because of this conflicted past, our

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