Nora Krug: Belonging 

Nora Krug On Tyranny, 2021 Cover illustration for On Tyranny, by Timothy Snyder © Nora Krug. All Rights Reserved.

Belonging traces the artist’s investigations into the hidden truths of her family’s wartime history in Nazi Germany. Though Krug was born decades after the fall of the Nazi regime, the Second World War cast a shadow over her childhood and youth in the city of Karlsruhe, Germany. Perhaps not surprisingly, she heard little about her family’s experiences at the time; though all four grandparents lived through the war, it was never spoken of. Winner of a 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography, Belonging: A German Reckons With History and Home is also the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and Silver Medal from the Society of Illustrators. It was named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Comics Beat, The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Kirkus Reviews, and Library Journal.

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century is Krug’s striking 2021 graphic novel inspired by renowned historian Timothy Snyder’s 2017 book of the same name. Snyder’s deep knowledge of the history of modern Europe prompted him to identify links between fascism, past and present, and to offer practical advice drawn from these connections for our times. Anchored largely in lessons from the Holocaust and from Russian totalitarianism, the book is a readable and galvanizing volume made even more powerful through the integration of Krug’s innovative mixed-media illustrations. “When On Tyranny was first published…it was about a future that I wanted to prevent,” wrote Snyder. “It’s twenty lessons were meant to describe how American democracy could end, and to prescribe just what Americans could do. Since then it has been harrowing to watch prediction after prediction come true, but it has also been heartening to watch Americans, sometimes with the help of the book, find ways to resist tyranny.” “Ultimately,” said Krug, “my goal was to create a series of images that would add a personal, poetic and emotional dimension to the book and emphasize he urgency of Timothy’s call to action. Images have political power, and they can change the way we think. Illustrating is also an act of witnessing: images compel us to notice and investigate, and at their best, they shed light on and at the same time critically confront the subjects they engage with.”

Both graphic editions utilize a rich and surprising visual assemblage of color, imagery, and design, including collage elements like historical photographs—hand colored by the artist—and other printed materials that appear alongside her own drawings. Text often flows around images, moving the reader through each book’s narrative and calling attention to particular passages and ideas. In Belonging and On Tyranny, Krug’s images deepen the force of both her own and Synder’s text, compelling readers to stop, notice, and reflect upon the ideas and information presented, and to interact with each book as both a historical artifact and a work of art.

“How do you know who you are, if you don’t understand where you come from?”
—Nora Krug

Nora Krug is a German American author and illustrator whose drawings and visual narratives have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Le Monde Diplomatique, and A Public Space, and in anthologies published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Simon and Schuster, and Chronicle Books, among others.

Born in 1977 in Karslruhe, Germany, Krug attended a specialized middle and high school for classical music but chose to pursue a career in art, studying at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, Berlin University of the Arts, and School of Visual Arts, where she received a Master of Fine Arts degree. While studying in New York, Krug said she felt discomfort when discussing her home country because “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.” While encountering negative stereotypes about German cultural identity she simultaneously delved deeply into her family history, of which she had little knowledge. She felt a growing urge to engage with her country’s past in a new way. “I realized that to overcome the collective, abstract shame I had grown into as a German two generations after the war, I needed to go back and ask questions about my family, my hometown,” an exploration that became the impetus for her award-winning visual memoir, Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home. Named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe, The Guardian, National Public Radio, and Kirkus Review, it was also the winner of the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award, Lynd Ward Graphic Novel Prize, Art Directors Club gold cube, Society of Illustrators silver medal, and the British Book Design and Production Award. Krug was named the Moira Gemmill Illustrator of the Year and awarded the 2019 Book Illustration Prize Winner by London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. Krug’s graphic edition of historian Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century was named a Best Graphic Novel of 2021 by The New York Times and a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Her visual biography, Kamikaze, was included in Houghton Mifflin’s Best American Comics and Best Non-Required Reading, and her animations have been shown at the Sundance Film Festival. Krug also inspires the next generation of visual communicators a Professor of Illustration at the Parsons School of Design in New York.

A Fulbright Scholar, Krug has been awarded fellowships by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and Maurice Sendak Foundation, and she served as a National Advisor to Enduring Ideals: Rockwell, Roosevelt, and the Four Freedoms, an international traveling exhibition organized by the Norman Rockwell Museum.

This exhibition is available to be hosted at your venue.  For more information, please contact travelingexhibitions@nrm.org.