Nora Krug on How Ordinary People Remember and Respond to Political Violence

When Nora Krug visited Robin Kirk’s class at Duke this spring, the conversation began with a question that has followed much of her work: how can art help us think about political responsibility without simplifying the people who live through history?

Krug, a German American author and illustrator and associate professor of illustration at Parsons School of Design, came to Duke as part of the FHI’s Belonging: Artist as Witness event, presented through the Rights and Humanities Annual Lecture series and jointly sponsored by the FHI and the Duke Human Rights Center. 

Kirk, Faculty Director of the Human Rights Certificate Program and Professor of Cultural Anthropology, introduced Krug’s visit as a chance for students to hear an artist talk about how she thinks of art in a political context.

Krug described her work as rooted in documentary practice, illustration, and politically engaged storytelling. Over the past fifteen years, she said she has created short visual biographies of people who experienced war firsthand but did not emerge as “major perpetrators” or “heroes.” Instead, she focuses on those who fall into what she called a gray zone of the majority of people experiencing war.

That gray zone matters because, as Krug explained, most people do not imagine themselves as either villains or resistance fighters. “The main question is always: what would you do?” she poses. “What would you do if a totalitarian regime took a grip of your country?”

That question eventually led Krug to her own family history. After years of making work about war, she realized she had avoided addressing World War II from a German perspective.

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“I come from the country of the perpetrators,” she said. Living in the United States made that avoidance harder to sustain. Outside Germany, she often felt “more German than ever before,” especially when people asked about her family’s past.

For Adam Rosenblatt, Faculty Director of the Duke Human Rights Center and Professor of International Comparative Studies, her visit proved timely and essential.

“Krug’s visit was a welcome chance to sit with the rich questions her work raises about life in the long shadows of authoritarianism and genocide,” he said.  “As well as showcase the contributions illustration and comics are making to human rights scholarship.”

Rosenblatt explained that Krug is deeply humanistic, “asking us to look at how people on every side of a conflict live with their choices constrained and their worlds fragmented in ways not of their choosing.”

Although she had learned extensively about the war and the Holocaust in school, she realized that “we never talked about what happened in our families, in our houses, in our streets.”

Her book Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography, grew out of that search. Krug returned to Germany, visited archives, and spoke with people who remembered her grandparents.

The book follows her investigation into two figures: a paternal uncle drafted into the SS at eighteen, who died in Italy at 19, and a maternal grandfather who owned a driving school during the war and taught German soldiers to drive. The goal, she emphasized, was not to excuse anyone or to “victimize Germans,” but to ask more precise questions about individual responsibility under the Nazi regime. 

Her later projects continue wrestling with that concern.

Krug described illustrating Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny as “the perfect continuation” of her work on war, memory, culpability, and responsibility. She also discussed Diaries of War, her yearlong project interviewing a Ukrainian journalist and an anti-Putin Russian artist after Russia’s renewed invasion of Ukraine. 

Each week, she asked not only what they had experienced, but how war had changed their relationships to their bodies, children, cultural identity, and belonging.

Krug shared that her process depends on trust—both in the people she interviews and in her own “moral compass.” For her, people are often more willing to speak honestly than we assume, if difficult subjects are approached with sensitivity.

Throughout her visit at the FHI, Krug returned to the same underlying concern: memory is never abstract. It lives in families, archives, streets, images, and silences. Her work asks what we choose to remember, what we allow ourselves to forget, and how art can help make those questions visible.