Nora Krug’s graphic memoir Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home
Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home (original German title: Heimat ) is not a typical memoir. Written by award-winning illustrator and professor Nora Krug, it is a visual hybrid—part graphic novel, part scrapbook, part archival detective story.
As I stand in front of the old family home, now a relic of a bygone era, I feel the weight of history bearing down on me. The half-timbered house, with its worn wooden beams and weathered roof, seems to whisper stories of the past. My ancestors lived here, laughed, loved, and suffered within these walls. I, too, have a story to tell, one that is inextricably linked to this place, to Germany, and to the complex emotions that come with belonging.
Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home – Why You Need the PDF (and the Graphic Memoir)
Have you read Nora Krug’s ‘Belonging’? Share how this book changed your view of inherited history in the comments below.
Perhaps the most devastating and necessary section of Belonging is Krug’s treatment of her uncle’s death. For decades, the family held him up as a tragic, innocent boy—a victim of war. Through dogged research, Krug discovers that he was not killed accidentally but was executed for desertion. He had refused to fight for the Nazi regime in its final days. This revelation is shattering: the family had preferred a narrative of pitiable victimhood over one of moral courage. Krug does not judge her uncle’s act as heroic in a traditional sense—he was a frightened teenager—but she recognizes in his desertion a refusal to belong to an evil collective. In claiming him, she claims a different form of German identity: one based on resistance to false belonging. She writes, “He chose not to belong. And that is why I belong to him.”
Throughout the memoir, Krug's personal narrative takes center stage, as she recounts her experiences growing up in post-war Germany, her complicated relationships with her parents and grandparents, and her own struggles with identity and belonging. Her account is marked by a profound introspection, as she grapples with the ways in which her family's past and her own experiences have shaped her understanding of herself and her place in the world.
In an era of rising nationalism, migration crises, and debates about “cancel culture,” Krug offers a third way. She does not excuse her grandparents. She does not burn down her passport. Instead, she does the hard work of research . She visits the small town where her mother grew up. She finds the graves of disabled children euthanized by the regime. She acknowledges that her family’s silence was a form of complicity.