Homeland

In her extraordinarily graphic memoir, Nora addresses the theme of anti-Semitism in family history in particular and dissects Germany's national guilt over the Holocaust – and the country's current slide into far-right rhetoric – more generally.

In an interview with The Guardian, Nora says: “It's hard to distance yourself from the history of your native land when you, a German, live abroad. As soon as you answer the question where you are from, you immediately get an association with the Nazi period. I face this all the time. At parties in New York, complete strangers told me that Germany was a country they would never visit. I was ashamed, sometimes even angry - always internally, of course - because I had no way to show that Germany had changed."

That is why, after twelve years in the United States, Krug realizes that living abroad has only strengthened her need to ask questions that she did not dare to ask as a child. Back in Germany, Nora visits archives, conducts research and interviews family members. This is how she learns the details of the life of her grandfather Willi, who taught driving in Karlsruhe during the Second World War, voted for the Social Democrats in 1933, only to join the Nazi Party in a few months, and her father's brother, the sincere National Socialist Franz Karl, who was an SS soldier and was killed by a bullet in the chest in Italy at the age of 18.