“We don't feel guilty, but we feel responsible”

Last week we were privileged to be joined by Nora Krug, the illustrator behind On Tyranny: Graphic Edition, October’s pick for Curious Reading Club. Over the course of an hour, Nora—a German-American author who has written and illustrated extensively about extremism, conflict, and the past—talked to us about the process of making the book and the ideas it unravels. 

We discussed the role of history, guilt, and honesty; we talked about patriotism; we dug into the difficulty of telling complex stories that force people to confront hard truths.

What follows are edited highlights of our conversation; the full video is available for members to watch back via our YouTube archive.

And if you’re interested in signing up for Curious Reading Club, then today’s a great day to do it: we’ll be making the announcement of November’s pick tomorrow.

The On Tyranny illustration project came about because of a close relation to another one of Krug’s books, both conceptually and practically.

I had previously written a book called Belonging about my German family history and the Second World War, and I had asked Timothy Snyder to see whether he might write a blurb for it, which he kindly did. And, as he was familiarized with my work, he reached out to me to ask if I would be interested in illustrating his already-existing book On Tyranny, which came out in 2017, one year after Trump had won the election. 

So it felt like a very natural continuation for me, even though the book is very different in nature. Obviously, there's no narrative arc [in On Tyranny]: it's more a book about ideas, ideologies, rules, concepts… but the goal seemed to be the same as had been with my previous book: how can we learn from history? What can we do as individuals in our societies to keep history alive and make sure that whatever happened doesn't happen again?

Bringing the book to life through images was very different, though.

I would actually say that I don't have one particular way of working or style per se. For me, the visuals, the imagery, is always driven by the concept, the emotions, the stories I want to tell. And each book has a different goal when it comes to that, so the form basically follows the content.

There are very short biographical narratives in there, but it's mostly a guidebook to what we can do to resist tyranny. And so I felt like I had the liberty to work more conceptually from a visual point of view, which is something that I think would have distracted the reader in my previous more narrative-based work, because it would have distracted from the emotional component and the narrative flow. But here, every chapter basically presented a new problem to solve. And so I felt like every spread was completely fresh, and I could do whatever I wanted. I could use a completely different style on each new spread.

Putting the images—a mixture of words, illustrations, collage and more—was a challenge in more ways than one. Covid had its part to play.

It was during the lockdown, so I was just working away in my little office. I remember… the deadline was quite tight: I had three days per page… Sometimes there were chapters where I found it hard to come up with an idea, in particular the chapters about the Soviet Union and contemporary Russia, because at the time, I didn't know as much about that history as I do about the history of the Second World War. So if I needed a day longer, and it took me four days instead of three, I would have one day less for the next spread. So it was a very, very quick race for me to try to get this done for the deadline.

I do have to say I like to work in isolation. I've never been somebody who likes to work in a studio with other people, not because I don't like the exchange, but because I think I would just find myself getting too distracted. So I like being in my own room, putting on the BBC—I listen a lot to BBC Sounds—I love just working and listening to the radio. But it was a challenging time because I also have a small daughter, and she was, I think, five or six during the lockdown, and so she was at home, which meant I had only half days to work because I split the childcare with my husband. 

We also moved house during that time, so I remember working first in the old house and then between cardboard boxes and then in a small one-bedroom apartment that we rented while we waited for the new house to be ready. Everything happened on one table: the dinners, homework, teaching online (because I also teach full-time) and creating the pages for this book. But somehow with this intensity, sometimes I can really focus under these circumstances. 

And other events cast their shadow, too.

While I was working on it, several of the things that Timothy Snyder wrote in the book seemed to materialize themselves in America, like the paramilitary concerns that he raises in one in one chapter. And it happened that when I illustrated it, it was around January 6, and it was just so eerie to see some of these things become true in real time that it felt almost like I was creating a visual diary, which felt like a document of the time I was living through as I drew the book. So there's also very personal relevance to that experience.

History is a big feature in all of Nora’s work. She sees her stories as ways to challenge our assumptions about the past and really learn from it to make things better. There are many people who want to ignore or forget the past, though.

Often we often feel helpless. We often feel like, “what can I do to change things? Nothing will change anyway.” And I think that's a very paralyzing feeling. And what I appreciate about Timothy Snyder's work—and I see similarity in my work—is that it kind of ruthlessly confronts the truths of the past and the present and the dangers for the future. But at the same time, there's always a sense of hopefulness, and a call for engagement. I get angry a lot at things that happen, obviously. I think my work is a response to that: It's a way of dealing with that sense of anger and helplessness. 

I agree that some people have this viewpoint that we should move beyond the past. That's something you hear a lot from the extreme right in Germany as well [as the USA]. And I got some criticism from those kinds of people after I published Belonging. I fully agree with you that it's very naive to think that anything that's happening now is not related and connected to the past. I mean: the present is what it is because of what was there before, and we are who we are as a people with our perspectives and hopefully democratic worldview because of what we experienced in the past. These are values we fought for, that people died for… to just take that for granted is very dangerous, and to question it is also very dangerous. As long as anti semitism, racism, all these things continue to exist, we have to look at the past. I don't see how we couldn't. We're not beyond this. We're not beyond the hate. And I don't think we'll ever be. 

But really reckoning with history is not unpatriotic or weak—perhaps the opposite, in fact.

I think one of the key components is that a lot of people, both in Germany but also in the United States, I think, are simply afraid that if they look at their country's past from an open, confrontational, critical angle that they can't love their country. That somehow it taints their sense of patriotism. And I don't see that at all as a conflict, but I think most people do. I wish there was more of an understanding that loving one's country actually means to embrace it with all of its parts of history—including the dark parts—with all of its people, not just a particular kind of people. 

She sees generational differences in the way guilt and history get treated, in Germany as well as elsewhere.

I'm always asked in America: how do Germans, young Germans feel about this now? And I don't really have an answer, because I don't live there any more. But I did a talk at my old high school, and when I asked the audience this question I was very impressed by their reply. They said: We don't feel guilty, but we feel responsible. 

I like that approach, because I do think that guilt can have the negative effect of just making you feel paralyzed. I mean, that was my experience growing up, probably due to the specific kind of Holocaust education we got. It was a very important education… but I think what was missed out on was the opportunity to take what we learned from our terrible history and apply it to the present in a more constructive way. What can we do now? All we felt was guilt and shame.

But responsibility does mean something personal, too. 

At the same time there was this unspoken taboo about what happened in our personal, family, you know, lives. So on the one hand, we learned a huge amount institutionally, educationally, about that time… but we learned nothing about what happened in our towns and our streets and our families, and that was also a huge oversight, because the personal responsibility is as important as the collective responsibility in this.

This comes to light in her other work, too—including her most recent book on the invasion of Ukraine, Diaries of War: Two Visual Accounts From Ukraine and Russia.

I have a history in documentary film: I studied that and I made a few documentary films which were all about present topics. So it's something that's very familiar to me, I just hadn't done it in illustrated book form before. It was very satisfying. Even though this is just a snapshot of two people who I happened to know, two people's perspectives—so it's not trying to get a generalized perspective on the conflict, it's extremely individual—but I think it is part of a greater narrative on the reality of this war. 

That's why I think these narratives should exist, because war is experienced by individuals in specific moments in time, and I think it's very valuable to document those feelings and fears and thoughts at that time in order for us to understand what war does to us. 

We also talked about the way that an illustrator has to be careful about everything they do in political settings: from images and word choices to colors and symbols.

When you look at the history of illustration, you see what a political medium it has always been and continues to be… but there's not really so much understanding of how much we are impacted in our thinking by images. And when you look at the history of illustration, it used to always be the tool with which people communicated the politics of the day or religious doctrine, or tried to revolt against the restraints of a particular time and overthrow societies. In the worst case scenario it was abused as propaganda like in medieval times, there were recurring motifs of Jewish people in relationship with a pig that then the Nazis actually picked up later on. 

I think it's very important as an author and illustrator to be aware of that history and that responsibility, and to think about how your images communicate. I'm always finding that challenging on many different levels. One simple example is that at some point I did think should I ever draw the swastika in my books? I mean, I'd never drawn it in my life before. And then in the book where I depict past scenes, I had this choice. I finally did decide to draw the swastika, but it was a very uncomfortable experience. 

And, lastly, what books would Nora recommend to us?

Surprisingly, I don't look at graphic novels that much. There are certainly people whose work I admire, but I don't aspire to that particular way of working. I do love non-fiction. I like Alexandra Fuller's books, for instance, about her experience of growing up in Zimbabwe as the daughter of a white British couple who moved there. I also love documentary film, so I admire the work of Joshua Oppenheimer, who did The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence about Indonesia and the killings of alleged communists there: the sensitivity with which he portrayed the subject, but also in a ruthless way, very confrontational in a way but very sensitive at the same time. 

Another documentary film I really like is called Darwin's Nightmare about Tanzania and the fish industry here and how we're all implicated in a chain that results in people living in utter poverty. It's a very beautifully-done film. I think the films that achieve to address these difficult subjects, but with a sense of poetry and sensitivity and artistry, are something I really admire.

But books? One that's not new, but that I really appreciate is The Boys of My Youth by Jo Ann Beard, just for the way it's written. It's a collection of short stories that I think are autobiographical. And again, she writes with a lot of restraint about very difficult subjects. I don't like works that are overwritten: I feel like so many books and also films are overwritten, and I feel like we should trust the reader and viewer more—that they intuitively understand the meaning of what we're trying to convey, not hitting them over the head. So that's kind of literature I usually look for. 

⌘

Thanks to Nora Krug for such a great discussion, really fascinating and extremely relevant. Oh, and please vote.

In the meantime, look out for tomorrow’s announcement of the November book of the month.

Onward!

Bobbie