Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home

Krug’s exploration of inherited history is her way of healing from her family’s past and accepting it as part of who she is. She engages directly with external writings and views of Germans in the 1930s and beyond, particularly through a passage from Dr. Seuss’s wartime political writings. Seuss wrote of Germans and their supposed “need” for conquest and the “super-race disease” (9), and warned readers, “Don’t clasp that hand! It’s not the kind of a hand you can clasp in friendship. Trust none of them” (9). Krug includes these disturbing depictions to illustrate the challenge of reconciling national identity with Germany’s dark history.

As part of her journey toward understanding, Krug had to confront difficult truths about her family. Her quest led her to ask questions about her hometown’s past and investigate the specific roles her relatives may have played during the Nazi regime. This was not an easy task but a necessary one. Her father, for example, was named after his older brother, Franz-Karl, who died during the war. All that remained of him were photographs and notebooks filled with Nazi propaganda—objects that turned her family’s personal history into a microcosm of Germany’s national reckoning. The emotional weight of these artifacts introduces The Connections Between Collective and Personal Memory as a theme.

From the beginning, Krug shows herself as emotionally out of place. She introduces herself as “a homesick émigré” (1), and thus Finding One’s Homeland and a Place to Belong emerges as a theme. This emotional state explains her larger journey—a search for identity, clarity, and reconciliation with her German heritage after moving to the US. Despite being geographically distant, her emotional ties to Germany and the cultural weight it carries continue to define her self-perception.

Living in a foreign country, Krug wrestles with the challenge of being seen through the lens of history. People often assume that she is antisemitic, hate her for being German, or think that Germans in general are “evil” or “can’t be trusted,” illustrating the power of historical stereotypes. The process of hiding her accent and constantly being asked where she is from symbolizes a wider issue that all Germans face. Her sense of belonging is complicated by others’ projections and her internal struggle with shame about her national culture, which she was taught to feel from an early age. She writes about the experience of Germans living in the aftermath of the war: “We struggled to understand the meaning of HEIMAT” (25).

Krug notes that in postwar Germany, patriotism was discouraged. She notes that they did not sing the national anthem or learn hometown history, highlighting a deliberate distancing from national pride and identity. She also reflects that they were not taught about the Germans who resisted the Nazis—omitting positive, courageous narratives that could have offered a more balanced view of German identity. Instead, her education and upbringing left her with cultural shame, silence, and disorientation about what it meant to belong.

Over time, Krug began to feel more connected to her homeland—not through pride, but through knowledge: “You cannot know who you are if you don’t know where you come from” (26). This statement emphasizes that reconciliation requires confronting the past, not burying it. She ultimately describes her relationship with Germany as “an echo, a forgotten word once called into the mountains. An unrecognizable reverberation” (37), capturing the elusive nature of her search for home.

Throughout the memoir, Krug describes a persistent awareness of something being deeply wrong that stretches back to her early childhood and was exacerbated by Germans’ pervasive silence toward their history. This silence, shared by so many German families after World War II, left her with questions that had no answers and a history that felt more like a shadow than a memory.

The concept of inherited guilt becomes deeply personal when Krug discusses how her parents addressed the legacy of the Holocaust. They told her she was inheriting the collective guilt of their generation, and Krug believed that her marriage to a Jewish man was “mending my relationship to Judaism” (34). This illustrates the unresolved sense of responsibility that German families passed down to younger generations and that became part of their shared identity.