Postmemorial work and the creative reconstruction of identity in Nora Krug's belonging; 1ª ed.

Martínez-Alfaro, María Jesús

En : (Re)writing war in contemporary literature and culture : beyond post-memory
2025
Routledge New York
ISBN: 9781032663661
Pp: 27-37

Abstract: This chapter focuses on Nora Krug’s Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home (2018), a formally innovative memoir that records Krug’s attempts to reconstruct her family’s wartime history. The analysis connects Belonging with the so-called “turn to the perpetrator” (Crownshaw 2011, Adams and Vice 2012, Morag 2018) and with what Froma Zeitlin saw, back in 2006, as an emerging trend in Holocaust literature, consisting of stories that explore the lives of ordinary Germans under Nazism and also the legacy of the Nazi past on later generations. I approach Belonging as postmemorial work, analysing Krug’s graphic narrative as a means to reworking her own sense of individual and collective identity. As I contend, Krug’s reckoning with history and home involves acknowledging the past, but also seeks to incorporate a positive sense of belonging, of being part of a family, a nation, a culture. I discuss the work’s formal complexity too, the way in which graphic novel, family scrapbook and collage combine in a narrative so formally fragmented and multisided as memory itself. The chapter concludes by commenting on the roles that guilt and responsibility play in Krug’s sense of German identity as (re)constructed through her quest and through artistic creation.