The emotions are high in this one, though I’m sure that’s no surprise.Ī note on the physical presentation of this, that really enhanced the whole experience. In her own family perhaps, but also by her hometown, by her home country. This story present so much of that conflict, of wanting to feel empathy, pride, heritage, while also trying to balance the knowledge of the wrongs that were done. The idea is that every single German knew what was happening, what would happen - and those who didn’t try to stop it deserved every moment of pain that came their way. And because they are German, the sense is that they are not allowed to be pitied or empathized with.

BUT - a lot of those lives were also German lives, lives of citizens just trying to survive. So many lives lost, and so much hatred and pain and resounding consequences across the world. Rightfully so, too, as the Haulocaust is… unfathomable, truly. My perspective comes from my childhood and life in the United States, but I can say for sure here that we hear lots and lots about World War 2 growing up. German pride to her seems not just distasteful, but hateful. If her grandfather was a party leader, an officer, or just one of the crowd – what would be worse? How does she make reparations for it? She struggles so much with feeling like her family and her heritage make her live her life as an apology. She deals with a lot of guilt as a German, and especially with her ignorance or how deep that guilt should run. It tracks the author’s research into her family to try to determine how involved with the Nazis they were, if at all, during the genocide and war.

Her quest, spanning continents and generations, pieces together her family’s troubling story and reflects on what it means to be a German of her generation. Returning to Germany, she visits archives, conducts research, and interviews family members, uncovering in the process the stories of her maternal grandfather, a driving teacher in Karlsruhe during the war, and her father’s brother Franz-Karl, who died as a teenage SS soldier in Italy. In her late thirties, after twelve years in the US, Krug realizes that living abroad has only intensified her need to ask the questions she didn’t dare to as a child and young adult. Yet Nora knew little about her own family’s involvement in the war: though all four grandparents lived through the war, they never spoke of it. For Nora, the simple fact of her German citizenship bound her to the Holocaust and its unspeakable atrocities and left her without a sense of cultural belonging. Nora Krug was born decades after the fall of the Nazi regime, but the Second World War cast a long shadow throughout her childhood and youth in the city of Karlsruhe, Germany.

Belonging nora krug