As you read Belonging (Scribner, $30), you will consult the endpapers’ bearing the author’s maternal and paternal family trees with more and more trepidation the further Nora Krug digs into that history. Belonging is a spellbinding, visually inventive graphic memoir about one German immigrant’s meticulous investigation of those lives during the Nazi era. Visually, it combines Krug’s handwritten text with her soft pencil and color-wash drawings, family photos, flea-market finds of postcards and WWII collectibles, and bureaucratic forms. A facsimile of her uncle’s essay on “The Jew, A Poisonous Mushroom” (with teacher’s corrections and cartoons) is bone-chilling. Written when he was thirteen, Franz-Karl would be dead five years later, fighting on the Italian front. (Krug’s father, born just after the war, is named Franz-Karl in his honor.) Krug wrestles with family tales and memories, and keeps searching for facts—whether exonerating or damning.  The book takes us on an inexorable, powerful journey—one person’s wrestling with Heimat, and what being German means today.