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

“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

Acknowledgments

I extend thanks to Sue Ellen Wright for answering questions about Leitz folders and binders, and historic forms of German handwriting. My deepest gratitude goes to my mother Helga Keusen Jones for raising me to feel and appreciate the complexities of German Heimat, and to my husband and colleague Mark Bracher, for prodding me, always, to consider the contemporary relevance of literary interpretation, for his willingness to provide endless feedback, and for making the often lonely work of scholarship feel less isolating and, actually, fun.