Discovering the works of illustrator and author Nora Krug is an enlightening revelation. The German expatriate, a professor at New York’s Parsons School of Design, has written and created art for three books and provided drawings for as many more for other writers.

She is perhaps best known for her autobiographical 288-page innovative, scrapbook-style “Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home.” With her drawings juxtaposed with family photographs, as well as documents and wartime snapshots, the book defines Krug’s search to determine the involvement of her forebears during the Nazi regime.

Now, a new exhibit encompassing three galleries at Stockbridge’s Norman Rockwell Museum capture her illustrations as well as the paperwork, images and artifacts that brought the book to life.

Images

“To me, a drawing means observing, documenting, commenting and reflecting on the world around us,” Krug said to an opening night audience on March 18. “Images help us celebrate our cultural achievement and establish and cement our hierarchy and social norms.”

During a slide lecture, a photograph of a 7,000-year-old cave painting from Spain was shown alongside Native American petroglyphs. These ancient markings often display the heroic glories of the hunt, and other primitive works may depict multiple profiles of the human hand or crude studies of animal life. She referred to these images as early examples of “visual journalism.”

Moving centuries ahead, she mentioned the 19th-century print house of Currier & Ives. It’s been noted that at one time, virtually every household in the country had one of these inexpensive illustrations of Americana in their home. The images ranged from the romantic to the historical; however, a series of images also promoted a racial divide.

“What we tend to forget,” Krug said, “is that during the same period a series of racially charged images … promoted negative stereotypes of African-Americans.”

Under the category of “Darktown Comics,” Black people were depicted as naïve and childish.

“Visual propaganda has been created in many different cultures and has affected many different groups,” she said. She noted that, when approaching a new project, she feels that she has a “political responsibility” as to what images she chooses when telling a story.

Recollections

When Krug was in secondary school, her classes took field trips to concentration camps in Germany, France and Poland. Students spoke with Holocaust survivors and analyzed Adolf Hitler’s speeches word for word. Because of the long shadow cast by the 13 years of Nazism, many Germans feel a “collective guilt” as well as “an emotional paralysis,” she said.

Krug was aware that these studies generalized that dark period. Students were not encouraged to ask the more difficult question as to what their grandparents and their community did during the war.

It was not until she came to America, long after the end of World War II, that she realized that she had subconsciously suppressed learning about her family’s activities during the reign of Nazism.

“As a German in a foreign land I felt more German than ever,” Krug said during an interview. In New York, she was once spat upon.

“Wherever I went I was often confronted with negative stereotypes about Germans and Germany,” she said. “I understood the negative sentiments, but I was taken aback when I was greeted with ‘Heil Hitler!’ in England and Japan in a joking way.”

The awakening realization that her family’s past should be explored spurred two years of research, two years of writing and another two of crafting illustrations to create “Belonging.”

During frequent trips to Germany she pored through bureaucratic mountains of documents, “paper graveyards,” sleuthing through a score of years from the 1930s onward.

Long before the Nazis gained power, there was growing discrimination against Jews. In the 1920s such notables as Sigmund Freud and the composer Arnold Schoenberg expressed alarm at this progressive antisemitism.

As a youngster, Krug found the grade school exercise books of an uncle, Franz-Karl, whom she never knew. At age 13 he wrote poisonously about Jewry, and children’s books of that era frequently displayed military symbols and swastikas.

In the book, Krug excerpts a 1938 speech by der Fuhrer that outlines the career path of males into the military beginning at age 10 with “Junior Hitler Youth.” Nine out of every 10 older German boys later belonged to “Hitler Youth.”

“They shall never be free again for the rest of their lives,” Hitler said.

America was not untouched by the fascist wave. In February 1939, a pro-Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden attracted 20,000 people.

With the war over, as part of “de-Nazification,” Germans ages 18 and older were ordered to complete a lengthy questionnaire to determine their involvement with the regime. A relative of the illustrator, who was coerced into joining the Nazi party, was not alone in having great difficulty finding work.

Krug noted that a severe cultural tragedy was also that the traditional songs, folk stories and accoutrements of Germany’s past were also erased in the de-Nazification process.

In the book she also has created an intriguing, panoramic study of German domestic life, from flea market prewar photos of hiking parties to surreal digressions of “things German.” These range from a description of Gallseife, a popular soap, to the “perfect bread” schwarzbrot.

The threat

The 2018 publication of “Belonging” electrified reviewers, received many awards and was chosen as a Book of the Year by The New York Times, NPR, The Boston Globe and The Los Angeles Times. It has since been published in 16 countries.

“I didn’t think so much about its reception because I wrote it for myself,” Krug said during an interview. She explained that, while writing it for an American audience, her obsession was to unravel her family’s past.

She pondered the question, “How do you know who you are, if you don’t understand where you came from?”

Krug’s artistic triumph spurred Yale University historian Timothy Snyder to ask the illustrator to add her graphic ideas to a reprint of his 2017 book “On Tyranny.” The book, a No. 1 New York Times bestseller, deals with the continuing authoritarian threat to American democracy. Its “Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century” outlines the tenets of good citizenship in deceptively simple prose. Among the chapter headings are “Contribute to Good Causes” and “Listen for Dangerous Words.”

Snyder provides a “CliffsNotes” survey as to previous heroic acts in democracy. The stories range from Prime Minister Winston Churchill refusing to surrender to the Germans to the Polish laborers who in 1980 created a free union, joined by 10 million people. This movement eventually collapsed the Communist system in Poland.

The historian also makes the point that an aspect of Nazi propaganda was “Lugenpresse,” which translates as “lying press” or fake news.

Unusual lives

Krug’s curiosity as to little-known historical incidents has led her to illustrate several short stories for France’s Le Monde. She has detailed the life of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier who remained alone in the Philippines for 29 years, convinced that World War II had not ended. She also chronicled the wasted life of American soldier Robert Jenkins, who defected to North Korea hoping to seek asylum in the Soviet Union. Instead, he was imprisoned by the government of Kim II-sung for 39 years.

As Krug concluded her talk on opening night, she expressed the opinion that Americans have not truly dealt with the injustices meted out to both Native Americans and to African Americans.

“The past doesn’t exist outside of the present,” she said. “We are who we are because of what was before.”

Rockwelliana

In adjacent galleries at the Norman Rockwell Museum, you can undertake your own historical explorations as they are composed of many of the illustrator’s magazine covers as well as collections of his work. You’ll find a restored painting from 1919 found just two years ago, discovered by new homeowners as they renovated a cluttered basement. Those with knowledge of classical painting will discover lighting effects wherein the illustrator copied the style of masters such as the Dutchman Jan Vermeer.

The museum’s central gallery contains perhaps Rockwell’s most famous quartet of illustrations, based upon President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1943 “Four Freedoms” speech.

Before painting the large canvases, the illustrator said that he’d distill the noble rhetoric into something more approachable.

“I’ll express the ideas in simple everyday scenes … and put them in terms everyone can understand,” Rockwell said.

The paintings toured the country and became a rallying symbol for Americans. It raised $132 million in war bonds, the most successful fundraiser of that era.

“Nora Krug: Belonging” continues through June 18. Museum hours: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m; closed Wednesdays. Admission: Adults $20; ages 18 and under free.

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