Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home by Nora Krug
While a graphic memoir as opposed to a work of narrative political nonfiction, Nora Krug’s Belonging still reminded me at points of Masha Gessen’s The Future is History. In both books, the authors attempt to reconstruct the histories of their countries— histories rife with atrocity, oppression, authoritarianism, and mass murder—after these histories are suppressed. Whereas Gessen performs this reconstruction through a combination of interviews with Russians born during Perestroika, after the fall of the Soviet state. These Russians, too young to know the way the country used to be, still feel the tremors of the past running through their lives: through the silences of their parents, the opportunities they find available or lacking, and the way the country begins to shift and spiral in their adulthood, as Putin is elected.
Krug, born in the late 70s in Germany, charts a similar pattern. She grows up in a liberal, penitent Germany; she is taught about the Holocaust and the Third Reich in school, knows that it is socially unacceptable to wave a German flag, and feels deep shame at being German. And yet, for all the outward acceptance of the country’s complicity in one of the world’s most horrific genocides, Krug finds that within her family, her town, and maybe throughout the country as a whole, a great silence and refusal to look closely at each individual’s complicity in the past is also present.
Through family photo albums, clipped conversations, investigations into town archives, reunions with long-estranged family members, and plumbing her own memories, Krug begins to fill in the silences. She uses the graphic novel format to great effect: the multimedia combination of comic strips, scanned photographs, and scrapbook style meditations on everyday symbols of German culture (from bread to hot water bottles to a specific brand of glue) is able to hold a vast array of emotions, from stark horror at violent, racist atrocities committed to an ambivalent melancholy at the cohesive sense of self and family that was also lost as a result of the War.
Ambivalence, regret, and a guilty sense of loss pervade this memoir. Rather than making one cohesive argument through the course of her memoir, Krug instead lingers in the uncertain, broken spaces. While I found myself longing for some kind of more conclusive or triumphant climax, the absence of such a resolution felt pointed to me as a White US American descended from Puritan settler colonists: in seeking to understand both the human failures and the deep cruelties perpetrated by our ancestors, what we should be looking for isn’t any sort of conclusion or absolution. What we should be looking for is further understanding of where and who and how we come from, understanding that is dimensional, complicated, thorny, and probably very hard, so that we can carry this understanding forward to help us change where we’re going.