Her actual aim is heimat, a sense of identity and home. But this professed goal is only her story’s MacGuffin. Krug professes the aim of her narrative is to uncover the truth of her father, uncle, and grandfather’s potential involvement with the Nazi party, and her ensuing investigation resembles the suspenseful winding of a noir detective narrative as she interviews relatives and historians, crosses the Atlantic, and scours archives for the truth of her ancestor’s participation, however active or passive, in Nazism. Near the book’s beginning, she devotes a whole page towards providing unfamiliar readers with a dictionary definition of the term. She sprinkles the word throughout, and when not visibly present, this uniquely German concept remains an undergirding topos.

Heimat is central to Nora Krug’s Belonging. As with many wonders of German culture, the Nazi party appropriated heimat during World War II to further a nationalist agenda. A whole genre of quasi-pastoral German literature known as Heimatroman (English: Home novel) is devoted to this one-word idea. The German adjectives heimlich and unheimlich (respectively, familiar and unfamiliar) share the same root as heimat. Other German writers refer to the German language as their heimat. Nineteenth-century German writers used heimat to speak of those good ‘ol agricultural days before the Industrial Revolution. Heimat is a place of belonging-whether physical, temporal, or cognitive-from which one derives meaning. In heimat, everything is in order one exists in right orientation to self and others. Though typically translated as “home” or “homeland,” the original German possesses emotional nuances these words never fully replicate. There is no exact English equivalent for the German word heimat. Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home

Krug belonging