Belonging Quotes

“How do you know who you are, if you don't understand where you come from?”
― Nora Krug, Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home

“No matter how hard I look, a nagging sense of unease won't disappear. Perhaps the only way to find the HEIMAT that I've lost is to look back; to move beyond the abstract shame and ask those questions that are really difficult to ask - about my own hometown, about my father's and mother's families. To make my way back to the towns where each of them is from. To return to my childhood, go back to the beginning, follow the breadcrumbs, and hope they'll lead the way home.”
― Nora Krug, Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home

“We learned that Vergangenheitsbewältigung means ''coming to terms with one's political past,'' but felt that it really defined ''the process of struggling to come to terms'' with it.”
― Nora Krug, Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home

“Heimat - That term which defines the concept of an imaginarily developed, or actual landscape or location, with which a person associates an immediate sense of familiarity.”
― Nora Krug, Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home

“We struggled to understand the meaning of Heimat.”
― Nora Krug, Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home

“As I listed to Walter, I slowly begin to accept that my knowledge will have limits, that I'll never know exactly what Willi thought, what he saw or heard, what he decided to do or not to do, what he could have done and failed to do, and why whether actively involved or not, by joining the Nazi Party, Willi had inevitably contributed to furthering the cause of a murderous regime. Would it make a difference in my life if I had found proof that Willi had never worn his uniform, that his wife had, in fact, been dispossessed of her milk business by the Nazis, that he hid his Jewish employer in a shed, or that he himself was half or quarter Jewish? Or would it be easier to navigate my shame if I had been able to prove his guilt, if I had learned that he had been a Nazi through and through, without the shadow of a doubt?”
― Nora Krug, Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home

“Throughout my childhood, the war was present but unacknowledged, like the heirloom lion's-head tureen stored behind our usual dishware. I understood that THE WAR was a loud and deadly event and that it happened before my parents were born. I knew that my country refused the idea of engaging in war ever since THE WAR. I thought that there was nothing heroic or meaningful about being a soldier, and that preserving peace was paramount. The notion that other countries could still be at war seemed to me like madness.”
― Nora Krug, Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home

“In my mind, a family began with one's parents and ended with oneself.”
― Nora Krug, Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home

“We associated the word Jude strictly with the Holocaust and we understood that it could be uttered only in a whisper.”
― Nora Krug, Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home

“We resorted to the expression ''That's so typically German'' to describe someone's unfriendly or narrow-minded behavior.”
― Nora Krug, Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home

“We analyzed Hitler's speeches alliteration by alliteration, tautology by tautology, neologism by neologism. We learned that our language was once poetic, but now potentially dangerous. We read Schiller but didn't learn to love him as we loved Shakespeare. We struck the German words for hero, victory, battle and pride from our vocabularies. We used the word Zusammengehörigkeitsgefühl, the sense of identifying with a group and believing in an idea larger than oneself, when defining American cultural identity, but not our own.”
― Nora Krug, Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home

“Here was the evidence of our collective guilt.”
― Nora Krug, Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home

“Whenever I traveled abroad as a teenager, my guilt traveled with me.”
― Nora Krug, Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home

“I learned about the Holocaust in school around the same time that my mother ceremoniously announced to the family over dinner that I had my first period. She wanted to do me a favor by acting less prudish than her own parents had, but for me, the idea of being a woman seemed to be as shameful as being a German.”
― Nora Krug, Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home

“When Hans started to interview the people in town in the 1980s, no one seemed to remember anything. Everyone was 'working in the fields,' 'out of town,' or otherwise busy when someone switched off the town's main fuse one night and the Jews' windows were smashed with stones under cover of darkness; when the Jews were forced to submerge in the water; when the short circuit ripped through the synagogue; and when 'the people were loaded onto a lorry and brought to an unknown place.' Over time, fragmentary stories, photographs, and documents rose back to the surface like bloated corpses. Memories turned into legends, and sometimes, legends turned into memories.”
― Nora Krug, Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home

“Was the story my grandfather told her about the Jewish linen salesman really true? Or was it just a postwar family fantasy, like the one about Willi's having hidden his Jewish employer in the shed in his mother-in-law's backyard? Or like the one about Willi's supposed Jewish roots, 'because of the way he looked,' and because his mother, the woman on the cuff links, had had red hair? Even though nobody had ever found, or even looked for, the slightest evidence of Jewish ancestry in our family, the conjecture promised comfort to my guilt-ridden teenage mind. As a young woman traveling abroad, I would mention the possibility with ill-founded confidence when asked where I was from.”
― Nora Krug, Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home

“I don't remember when I first heard the word Konzentrationslager, but I became aware of it long before I learned about the Holocaust. I sensed that concentration camps were sinister places, and I imagined that the people who lived there were forced to concentrate to the point of physical anguish. But I was too afraid to ask, feeling that this was something embarrassing to talk about, something that grown-ups discussed in whispers, something evoking the same unsettling feeling as the man who sometimes gave candy and balloons to my brother and me when we were playing alone in the front yard.”
― Nora Krug, Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home

“Our backyard in Karlsruhe, in the south of Germany, faced a US military air base, where planes regularly took off and landed. I heard them hissing and roaring above our house like dangerous animals that had - unbelievably - decided to spare our lives. I understood that something had once gone terribly wrong, and that they were watching us to assure we didn't do again whatever it was that we had done before.”
― Nora Krug, Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home