Reclaiming Heimat
Coming to terms with one's past can be a difficult and long process, yet when looking back at the past, many personal questions can be answered.
While exploring her family’s past through photos, letters, and memories, Nora Krug is able to answer her question “How do you know who you are, if you don't understand where you come from?”
Heimat (in English, Belonging) by Nora Krug tells the personal story of what she found out and came to terms with, as an adult living in America, when she returned home to Germany to look into her family's history. She describes it as “an exploration of the aftermath of the second world war’s impact on families and how the memory of how the war has been communicated from generation to generation.”
This graphic novel, as described by the Minneapolis Star Tribune, is “part scrapbook, part memoir, delving deep into her family’s history and trying to find blame or exoneration. In the process, she tells the story of an entire generation.” Krug uses old notes, letters, archival material, flea market finds, and photographs to attempt to understand what it means to belong, especially to a place that one feels shame toward.
Krug was born in 1977, decades after the Nazi regime fell, and her parents were born in 1946 — a time she called “the age of oblivion.” She wrote, that even though there were educational efforts to teach the painful parts of Germany’s history during her childhood, the details surrounding one’s own family often remained somewhat taboo. For her parents, many topics surrounding this time were neglected and were brushed under the rug as the wounds of war were too fresh.
As Heller McAlpin from NPR puts it, “The key question that drives (the book) Belonging is, ‘How do you know who you are, if you don’t understand where you come from?’”
While many people in Krug’s generation are believed to have struggled with identity and the feeling of “collective German guilt” from the past, Krug wrote about how it shaped her life as she traveled abroad as a teenager. As an exchange student from Germany, she tried to cover her “German-ness” by hiding her accent and felt that the shame of history was in her genes. For many, this was a shared feeling.
Now, as an adult who has lived abroad on and off, Krug is reclaiming her history to better understand herself.
The German term “Vergangenheitsbewältigung,” is seemingly associated with collective German guilt and the Nazi era. As described by Deutsche Welle as “coming to terms with one’s political past,” overcoming a dark period of history is not always easy — especially when no one wants to talk about it. Vergangenheitsbewältigung is mainly connected to Germany’s process of coming to terms with the history of National Socialism and the Holocaust. Krug makes note of the efforts were made after the war to “de-Nazify” the way Germans viewed the world, Germans struggled not only to understand how Nazi atrocities could have come about but what the past meant for the next generation.
As Krug had to face a few hard truths to receive the answers she needed, she was finally able to piece together her family’s past.
Throughout her book, Krug takes a deeper look at the concept of Heimat, a term that refers to a feeling of belonging to a homeland, but later was claimed by Nazi propaganda, changing the word's connotation. The German edition of the book is titled Heimat and implies the exploration of the concept through her search for identity.
Many individuals who deal with the question of identity can relate to the struggle of “What is Heimat?” Again, the pressing question of “How do you know who you are, if you don’t know where you come from,” comes into play.
Taking a look at the word “Heimat,” German-to-English dictionaries define it as “home, native land, or homeland.” Yet, to Krug, none of those words capture the true meaning of the word.
German writer Jochen Bittner, of The New York Times, wrote an opinion piece about reclaiming the word Heimat in the modern political state. Bittner looked at the word from a modern point of view stating that “for many, Heimat describes not just a geographical place, but a state of belonging. For most Germans, like Krug, Heimat is about the landscape that left its mark on you, the culture that informed you, and the people that inspired you when you were growing up.”
The modern look at Heimat focuses less on the emotional connection to a place or an era, and more on the individual who takes a form of pride in their self and their culture. (Not a form of pride one might see in an extremist toward a country of origin.)
“Happy is the person who is able to celebrate this as part of Heimat, whether he wears lederhosen or not,” Jochen Bittner, The New York Times.
While both concepts of Vergangenheitsbewältigung und Heimat stem from more negative roots, it is important that Germans reclaim both words. Nora Krug faced both terms and took a trip into her family’s past through stories, letters, and photos, accepting that she might find something to actually feel guilty for. Yet, like Krug, by accepting their identities by understanding and being proud of their culture one can begin to find a true sense of belonging.
