Beyond Graphic Memoir: Visualizing Third-Generation German Cultural Identity in Nora Krug's Belonging

Abstract

Beyond Graphic Memoir:Visualizing Third-Generation German Cultural Identity in Nora Krug's Belonging Tammy Clewell (bio) "We are made of the past."—Nora Krug In her 2018 visual memoir Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home, Nora Krug, a German-born artist in her early forties who has lived in New York for more than two decades, grapples with a personal and collective legacy that she describes as darkly shadowed by the Second World War (2018a). Krug's book—a formally innovative and visually stunning collage of comics, family photographs, journals, letters, and newspaper clippings, along with war memorabilia, official documents, phone books entries, and maps—responds to an unspecified yet trenchant sense of the collective guilt she feels as a German born in 1977, more than three decades after the war's end. In seeking to come to terms with what she describes as "the consequences of another generation's actions" (2018a, p. 16), Krug details her efforts to discover all she can about the wartime activities of her family members, including her maternal grandfather, whom she describes as an "in-between man"—in her words, neither "a resistance fighter nor a major offender" (2018a, p. 191)—and her paternal uncle, who was drafted into the SS and killed in battle at the age of 19.1 In addition to conducting field research and gathering materials from German archives and flea markets, she also questions her mother and father, both of whom were born just after the [End Page 459] war's end, to ascertain whether they countered the widespread culture of silence, denial, and disavowal that persisted at least through the late 1950s by asking their parents and other relatives what they did and did not do during the war. The critical acclaim that Belonging has garnered in the U.S., Germany, and other European countries suggests that Krug's representation of a lasting legacy of collective guilt among the children and grandchildren of the war generation has touched a nerve still sensitive for some and ignited the imagination of others across multiple populations today. Winner of numerous awards, including the American 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award Prize (in autobiography), the British Victoria and Albert Museum's Book Illustration Prize, the German Youth Literature Prize and, also in Germany, the Protestant Book Prize, Krug's memoir begins by exposing what she regards as the incomplete nature of Vergangenheitsbewältigung—Germany's effort to come to terms with the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime. Following Allied initiatives, including the public recognition of war crimes at the 1945 Nuremberg trials and the process of denazification, and after a protracted period of silence and denial, the German struggle to acknowledge and overcome the negative consequences of the past, as was established in the 1960s and reconfirmed in the 1980s, has taken place through official programs of commemoration and, perhaps primarily, through formal education in the schools, where children, starting around the fifth grade, learn about Nazism and typically visit a concentration camp museum. Krug's German education reflects the country's longstanding and deep commitment to publicly acknowledge and reflect on the past; indeed, she remarks that her studies provided her with an understanding of "the scope of the atrocities committed" and "evidence of our collective guilt" (2018a, p. 22). However, this schooling failed her, she reports, in two significant ways. First, her education did not help her move beyond a paralyzing form of collective guilt, one that she describes as being heightened by the fact that she has lived most of her adult life outside Germany and that manifests, for instance, in her anxiety about speaking English on New York subways lest her accent reveal her German identity. In reflecting on her [End Page 460] education, Krug remarks, "Being FEHLERFREI (fault-free) was our universal goal. Our teachers' red pens divided our exercise books into right and wrong, and the red marks felt as reassuring in their clarity as they were forgiving" (2018a, p. 24). However, she concludes that the curriculum, for all its public openness about National Socialism, never encouraged students "to ask about one another's grandparents" (2018a, p. 24) or to inquire "about...