Heimat Sweet Heimat?
Does it mean Belonging to or Belonging in a place?
Growing up in the 80s and 90s in Germany, Nora Krug was often exposed to the horrors of the Nazi regime and instilled by the schools with a strong recognition of the need for those sins to never again be repeated. However, it was only when she started moving abroad, that she encountered the stereotypes through which others still saw Germany and realized the own gaps in her knowledge of how The Shoah occurred in her hometowns and within her older family members who had never talked about the war. These experiences made her feel deeply uncomfortable, and she couldn’t help but give into a sense shame and guilt.
At first, she tried to avoid that sensation by hiding her Germanness with others. Internally she continued to struggle to embrace things she liked about her home-country or even to justify her feelings of homesickness, for fear of similarity to Nazi ideologies of “love for the fatherland.” Eventually however, she decided that instead of avoiding her questions, she should seek to answer them. The result of the quest is the hard to classify piece of literature known in English as “Belonging” and in German as “Heimat”. A mix of Comic book style strips, modified photographs, scanned in documents, and other forms of text and drawing, the work holds a surprise on every page as the reader follows the process of Krug’s investigation into her family's history.
Much of the discussion of this history relates to the German concept of Heimat. While it can be used similarly to how Americans talk about their hometowns, it has a special German connotation. Germany as a unified state is a recent phenomenon and during the long period of the Holy Roman Empire prior to its mid 19th century unification, residents of Germany formed identities around hyperlocal polities and environments. The number of officially independent territories in the confederacy varied at times between 300 and 1000! Thus, the German sense of Heimat prior to the Nazis rise to power combined wistful or nostalgic longing for people and places from childhood, local pride, affinity for natural surroundings, and even vestiges of nationalism — even though the places in question had ceased having aspirations for nationhood decades prior. The Nazis, as with most of aspects of German culture, amplified the negative aspects present in the concept and twisted all that remained to form their agenda. Leaving Germans after the war forced to grapple with a sense of Heimat muddled both by the Nazi’s actions, as was their intentional misappropriation of the word. Krug was partially able to confront this confusion because of the distance given to her by living and working in foreign areas for so long. As part of a review and interview that made the cover of Die Zeit Magazin in 2018, she states that she hopes her work can motivate other Germans of her generation and younger to continue to research about their own local and family histories as it relates to World War 2, its leadup, and the aftermath. These people make up the book’s contemporary. She hopes that their learning can shift them from a sense of overwhelming guilt towards one of collective responsibility and thus enable appreciation of positive moments in their country while simultaneous reinvigorating efforts to safeguard its liberties and the rights of others. She adds in an interview with the New Yorker that reckoning with past enables one to learn from it, and that that skill is needing not just in Germany, but also in America and around the world. Almost all reviews for the book in both languages were either heavy on synopsis or took the form of interviews.
“the U.S. has arrived at its own moment of identity crisis, and the question of whether we’ll learn from the past — our own and that of other countries — seems more pressing than ever before.”-Nora Krug
The concept of Heimat is very German and difficult to translate. But the sense of pining it references is common to an Exile, gentle homesickness frequent in immigrants and travelers of all sorts. Even members of a diaspora, happily settled into a country they have grown up in, can end up feeling homesick for a place they have only ever visited — a fate that seems very possible for Krus’s newborn child. Die Zeit Magazin states that its use as once again fallen out of favor in much of Germany as it has been popularized in the far-right. I personally distinctly remember first seeing the word as part of a menu item: Heimat Wurst (No idea what was in that one, I didn’t try it. But I do love Currywurst). It was also on a small mural outside the school I attended in Dortmund, next to words such as Feminismus and graffiti purportedly by Antifa. For me these things are “typisch Deutsch”, a very different use of the term than the pejorative for narrow-mindedness Krug used it as.
It’s never clear whether the Engligh title Belonging really matches with the title Heimat. The english subtitle of “A german reckons with history and home” is almost entirely represented by the German word Heimat. It functions as a decent translation for what the term really means. This leaves Belonging to take up the narrative work done by the German subtitle, “Eine Familien Album”, a family album. Perhaps this is less about a place in space, but a place in time. Where does her family belong in history? And where does she belong within her family?
