In her extraordinary graphic memoir Heimat, Krug dissects antisemitism in her own family’s history and Germany’s national guilt over the Holocaust – and the country’s recent far-right backlash

Of the hundreds of documents the German author and illustrator Nora Krug has wrenched from archives and flea markets for her sprawling, multilayered graphic memoir, two of the most emotionally arresting are about fungi.

The first is a page from her uncle Franz-Karl’s sixth-grade school exercise book, which Krug discovered in a musty drawer in her parents’ living room. Each line is filled with meticulously crafted Sütterlin script, a now largely obsolete form of German handwriting. The margins are populated by childish pine trees and toadstools with grinning faces.

“When you go to the forest and you see mushrooms that look beautiful, you think that they are good,” the text reads. “But when you eat them, they are poisonous and can kill a whole family.” Then the gut-wrencher: “The Jew is just like this mushroom.”

The short essay, called The Jew, a Poisonous Mushroom, got a C for spelling, C for handwriting and B for content. It is dated 20 January 1939, 10 days before Hitler declared that the outcome of another world war would be “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A page from Heimat: A German Family Album, showing a translation of Nora Krug’s uncle’s antisemitic 1939 school essay, and the original document. Illustration: Nora Krug

The second document is a letter Krug’s great-uncle Edwin wrote to his wife from the eastern front five years later. “I remembered the time when the two of us went into the woods together, and when we collected things from the forest. I’ve seen some wonderful chanterelles, but what good are they, if you don’t get a chance to cook them?” Edwin writes.

“Slowly, berries and mushrooms are coming to an end, because nature is beginning to show its cold face. Everything dies, or better, returns to its inner calm. Even humans long for that, but unfortunately it isn’t possible in these eventful times.” The next document is a letter from Edwin’s company leader, informing his wife that he went missing in combat on the Sõrve peninsula in Estonia on 18 November 1944.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nora Krug provides some context for her uncle’s school essay in Heimat. Illustration: Nora Krug

Each of Edwin’s letters is illustrated with a portrait of their author, each one sketchier and paler than the last, until Krug’s great-uncle has been literally rubbed out of history.

Of her two German relatives, one sounds as if he had the potential to become culpable in one of the most monstrous crimes in human history. The other ended up as a victim of conflict. Was Edwin a better German than Franz-Karl? Does one uncle’s suffering offset another’s hatred? And should their guilt be carried forward to a 41-year-old relative living in Brooklyn today?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Heimat: A German Family Album by Nora Krug Illustration: Nora Krug

Krug’s memoir Heimat: A German Family Album seeks to wade through this moral quagmire, what she calls the “grey zone of war”, full of “people you can neither classify as resistance fighters or as victims, nor as war criminals”. It is a surprising mission for a writer born in 1977. The task of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, of coming to terms with the National Socialist era, is in Germany mainly associated with the literature and films of Krug’s parents’ generation.

“If I had stayed in Germany, I would have never thought of writing this book,” she says over a coffee in a beer garden in central Berlin. “There’s that Hannah Arendt line: ‘If all are guilty, no one is.’ As a German in Germany you have already learned so much about the second world war, thought so much about it and talked so much about it, that I would have thought: what’s left to be said?”

Krug’s perspective changed when she left her hometown of Karlsruhe behind aged 19 and headed abroad – first to Liverpool, where she studied at Paul McCartney’s Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, and then to New York, where she now teaches illustration at the Parsons School of Design and lives in Brooklyn with her husband and daughter.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Toxic folklore … The fly agaric in Heimat. Illustration: Nora Krug

Being a German living abroad, she says, makes it harder to extricate yourself from your home country’s history: “As soon as you answer someone who asks you where you are from, the association with the Nazi period is there. You are constantly being confronted with it.” She adds: “I have been to parties in New York where complete strangers told me that Germany was a country they could never visit. I was ashamed, but sometimes it would reach a point where I would feel angry – always inwardly, of course, not outwardly – about the lack of admission that Germany has changed.”

After 12 years of living in the US and now married into a Jewish family, she writes: “I feel more German than ever before” – on a page illustrated with a picture of her re-enacting Caspar David Friedrich’s ur-German painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. However, she finds it harder to grasp what being German really means.

That sense of in-betweenness gave birth to a personal research project that came in three stages: over a period of two years, Krug regularly returned to her father’s hometown of Külsheim in Swabia, in the south-west, and combed through village archives, markets and junk shops.

Over the next two years, she wrote up the tales she had discovered: the story of her fervently National Socialist uncle Franz-Karl, who died of a bullet to his chest in Italy aged 18, or that of her grandfather Willi, who worked as a chauffeur for a Jewish salesman and voted for the Social Democrats in 1933, only to then join the Nazi party a few months later.

In hindsight, Krug says, the family history she embarked on was the kind of project she wished she had done when she was much younger: “What I found problematic about the way in which we were taught at school about the Holocaust and the war was that it conveyed a very generalising sense of guilt. You learned about the facts, but you weren’t encouraged to research what happened in your own city, or your own family.

“If that had happened, we would have learned to deal with this guilt in a much more constructive way. You would have been able to say: ‘I am doing something positive now, I am contributing to retelling the story in a new way.’ The sense of paralysis would not have been so strong.”

In recent years, Germany’s new far-right party Alternative für Deutschland has started to agitate against what it calls the country’s Schuldkult – “guilt cult”. Railing against architect Peter Eisenman’s Holocaust memorial next to Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, the AfD delegate Björn Höcke last year said that “we Germans are the only people in the world that have planted a monument of shame in the heart of their capital”. Has German culture exposed itself to attacks from the far right by putting the country’s collective guilt at the heart of its modern identity?

Krug pauses to think. “I think there is now a backlash from people who say they are fed up with having to feel guilty. There’s a defensive attitude that can lead to the exact opposite. In my view, Germans still feel deeply insecure about all this.”

While travelling frequently between the US and Germany, she says, she started a notebook to document behavioural oddities that she had previously been blind to. “For example, Germans apologise a lot less, whether that is for bumping into people in the road, or for graver things. To apologise in German entails an admission that you are guilty. In the English-speaking world, an apology doesn’t necessarily imply that: it can just mean ‘I didn’t intend that to happen’, and not ‘It is my fault’. An apology carries a lot of weight here.”

But Krug rejects the idea that the guilt of Nazi Germany no longer applies to her own generation. “I don’t think we should no longer feel guilty. But there are paralysing ways to feel guilt and there are constructive strategies for coping with guilt, and we didn’t learn enough of the latter at school.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Fragments from history … a page chroncling Krug’s flea-market finds. Illustration: Nora Krug

Heimat, the title of Krug’s book, is one of those terms whose prestige as an ultra-specific, “untranslatable” German word isn’t really deserved. The word, which was co-opted by National Socialist propaganda and only partially rehabilitated by Edgar Reitz’s arthouse soap opera, made in the 80s and 90s, of the same name (of which Krug is a fan), oscillates between referring to a specific geographic location, a “homeland”, and a vaguer, more spiritual sense of “home-ness”.

Germany’s current government announced in March this year that it would establish the first ever Heimat ministry, though appropriately for such a conceptually overloaded word, there has yet to be any announcement on what such a ministry would do. Krug’s approach, by contrast, is refreshingly materialist.

For the final two-year stage of her project, Krug assembled the material she had amassed into a sprawling family album. The biographies of her relatives are told in a series of cartoon panels in the fairytale style of her first graphic novel, Red Riding Hood Redux, a Rashomon-style retelling of the story from the perspective of its five main characters.

Krug’s biographies are interspersed with entries from what she calls “the notebook of a homesick émigré”, listing quintessentially German objects such as Hansaplast bandages, Leitz binders or dark and crusty sourdough bread, and her “scrapbook of a memory archivist”, in which she presents curios unearthed during her flea market treasure trawls.

Sometimes, Krug uses these objects to undercut sarcastically the emotional pull of the individual biographies. Fly agaric toadstools, she notes, having just discovered her uncle’s grim school essay, are in Germany still seen as signs of good luck.

In another chapter, an account of how all memory of Judaism as a living culture has been erased from her father’s hometown is interwoven with evidence of how the country tried to erase memory of the Nazi period after 1945. A stamp bearing Hitler’s portrait is relabelled “Germany’s contaminator” so as not to diminish its value. On a photograph of three young men in uniforms, the swastikas on their armbands have been scratched out.

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The curious appeal of Krug’s graphic memoir is that it never fully loses itself in the act of storytelling but constantly stops to turn over and reassess the means at its disposal. “The research stage took so long because I was very insecure at first: how do you tell a story like this without being misunderstood?” she says. “I didn’t want to make the point that Germans were victims, too. If you made a film about this subject, you would have to be extremely careful what kind of music you used. The same applies to pictures: it can suddenly seem so very sentimental.”

In the end, even a cosmopolitan young German writer living in New York cannot tell the story of Germany as a simple tale with a hero and a villain, a beginning and an end. “My Heimat,” Krug writes, “is an echo, a forgotten word once called into the mountains. An unrecognisable reverberation.”

• Heimat: A German Family Album is published by Particular.