45 pages • 1-hour read
Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home
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Themes
The Personal and Moral Implications of Inherited History
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of discrimination, physical/emotional abuse, and death.
Krug’s memoir traces her effort to discover the truth about her family’s history and face the realities of living under the shadow of inherited guilt. Growing up in Germany, Krug was surrounded by a culture that encouraged recollection and guilt: public mourning rituals, school field visits to concentration camps, and a shame-filled national narrative. She recalls walking through a camp, stunned by the beauty of the poplar trees, which starkly contrasted the history of the place:
I remember walking past the train tracks, the barracks, and the electric fences, past the poplar trees that looked too beautiful, documenting it all with my camera in black and white, trying to understand the scope of the atrocities committed—right here—by my own people: acts that cannot and should not ever be forgiven (21).
Though she wasn’t alive during the Holocaust, Krug carried the burden of her family’s complacency, silence, avoidance, and shame. This foundation of inherited guilt shaped her morality before she even began to investigate her family’s past.
Her move to New York offered temporary escape, a chance to be just another person, but even halfway across the world she could not just be herself without being seen as a stereotypical German. A woman on a rooftop shared that she was imprisoned in a concentration camp, and although she was kind, the moment was a harsh reminder for Krug. Public perceptions of Germans—like those that Dr. Seuss expressed in wartime American writings, warning about the Nazis, “Don’t clasp that hand! It’s not the kind of a hand you can clasp in friendship. Trust none of them” (9)—remain lodged in the cultural memory. Krug, aware of these biases, began to question whether she could or should allow herself to let go of guilt. As she investigated her grandfather Willi’s wartime past, she confronted contradictory evidence: He was a Nazi Party member for seven years but later described himself as a Mitläufer (a noncommittal follower to avoid trouble). He supposedly joined the party only to take over a business.
This ambiguity, wherein documents suggest complicity while personal accounts defend innocence, forms the emotional center of Krug’s memoir. Photographs show Willi in uniform, but neighbors claimed that he never harmed anyone. A man whose wife was Jewish even said he never judged Willi. Whether he was a follower, an offender, or neither was uncertain, leaving her confused. She expresses both sorrow and anger, and she is relieved to know that offenders were “punished for having been a German soldier” (102). In the end, she refuses simple conclusions. Even though Walter told her she shouldn’t feel guilty, she’s haunted by the question, “Who would we be as a family if the war had never happened?” (269). The memoir concludes without an easy resolution, and she accepts that she is forever tied to Germany’s past.
The Connections Between Collective and Personal Memory
Krug’s memoir is more than just a personal journey; it is also an investigation into how collective memory molds, distorts, and overlaps with individual identity, personal memory, and family history. A national attitude of reckoning, half-told stories, and pictures of family members were all reminders of a history she never knew. She experienced the volatility and residual tension that followed Germany’s surrender because she lived close to a US military installation. Her mother described how, in an effort to elicit a moral awakening, residents of neighboring towns were forced to view the bodies in the concentration camps after the war. Her mother claims that this experience was about “learning their lesson,” suggesting that the actions of those who sided with the Nazis connect to all those who came after. Krug does not state her opinion on these excursions but points out that all they seemed to do was foster guilt.
When Krug looked into her family’s past, she discovered that memory is both concrete and illusive. Photographs and personal items, such as letters, uniforms, and even the German binder, which was created in 1896 and represented order and cultural ideals that have been passed down through the centuries, served as substitutes for the individuals she never met. These items, however, did not completely illuminate the past. Her father hardly ever talked about his own childhood since he was emotionally closed off. Krug uncovered these silences and contradictions, treating her family’s story as an archaeological site and noting that she “excavated the shards of my relatives’ existence, but [did]n’t know yet how to piece them back together” (227). At one point, she laments how even “inherited memory hurts” (221), a comment that captures the psychological toll of being haunted by stories that are both hers and not hers.
Her research exposes the dark fact that many people view the Nazi regime through a more superficial lens. Nazi photographs and memorabilia are sold on internet forums, turning a personal and national tragedy into a source of amusement. In addition to criticizing this unusual hobby, Krug goes further into how people can use memory for both denial and comprehension. She reconnected with surviving relatives, who provided fresh perspectives by letting her visiting her ancestors’ houses, places of employment, and graves. A pivotal moment came when she shared Willi’s story with her mother and finally saw him as a man who “had to fight to make ends meet” (230), a man whose struggle enabled her mother’s life and her own. By collecting stories and confronting silence, Krug illustrates that personal memory and collective memory are never entirely separate.
Finding One’s Homeland and a Place to Belong
Krug’s memoir is at its heart a search for Heimat, or homeland, which for Krug means emotional and cultural belonging. Growing up, she was taught to be ashamed of her national identity. Words like Volk (people), Held (hero), and Rasse (race) were censored in school in an attempt to rid those ideas from consciousness. German children were taught about Nazi atrocities but rarely about Germans who resisted or who tried to help those being persecuted. The national anthem was never learned or sung. Krug notes, “We struggled to understand the meaning of HEIMAT,” (25) and she includes photos of her peers sitting with guilt-ridden expressions during a concentration camp visit. In the US, Krug disguised her accent and sometimes experienced prejudice. People either expected her to be antisemitic or they seemed to pity her. This tension between cultural pride and inherited shame propelled Krug’s longing to find a place where she felt truly seen.
Throughout her memoir, Krug celebrates aspects of German culture she still loves: its forests (and the many German words containing the prefix Wald), its engineering (like the sturdy band aids and binders), and its language. Despite these fond examples of German culture, Krug writes that home feels like “an echo, a forgotten word once called into the mountains. An unrecognizable reverberation” (37). This alienation mirrored her family’s disconnection from its own past. Her father no longer considered his hometown of Külsheim his home, physically shaking with nervousness when he returned there. Krug’s search took her through the old homes and towns of her ancestors, where people told her she looked like her great-grandfather. This was unsettling for Krug: “Everybody here, except me, knows where I belong. Geographically. Historically. Genetically” (178).
Krug’s journey reached even greater emotional depth when she met distant relatives like Iris and Annemarie, visited the farmhouse where her father grew up, and stood in places shaped by generations of her family. These moments offered brief, flickering senses of wholeness. At one point she wondered, “What does it take to reconstruct a fractured family?” (218). By embracing the complexity of her past, she learned to accept “the unescapability of who we are” (270). Her final realization, which is that “HEIMAT can only be found again in memory, that it is something that only begins to exist once you’ve lost it” (273), is bittersweet. In the end, Krug found that cultural identity is not about erasing pain but integrating it.
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