Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of discrimination, physical/emotional abuse, and death.

Writer and artist Nora Krug created Belonging as part of an emotional healing process and a journey of investigation into the truths of her family’s past. Krug was raised in the city of Karlsruhe, which was located right next to a US military base. She knew from a young age that she was living in the wake of something terrible and important, but her family was never open about the war. Her mother long insisted that her father, Willi, could never have been a Nazi, but Krug’s inquisitive and skeptical mind propelled her to find out for herself.

Today, she admits that she still struggles with feelings of shame and guilt, even in regard to aspects of German culture that are perfectly innocent. She reveals that she married a Jewish man, in some way in an attempt to absolve herself and prove that she does not carry those feelings of antisemitism. The memoir thus also became an exercise in bridging the gap between her heritage and how she feels about it. She included excerpts celebrating various German inventions and recollected fond memories of her childhood, all in an attempt to rid herself of the shame she felt about being German.