Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home

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.