Illustration: Nora Krugīeing 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. Toxic folklore … The fly agaric in Heimat. 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. “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?” “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. 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. It is a surprising mission for a writer born in 1977. 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”. Heimat: A German Family Album by Nora Krug Illustration: Nora Krug

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