vor a year ago, the last installment of an unprecedented weekly reporting column appeared in the Los Angeles Times. Immediately after Russia's attack on Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the New York illustrator Nora Krug contacted people she knew from these two countries and asked them for regular descriptions of their respective views on the war that had broken out. Among those contacted, she found two who agreed to send their impressions of the past few days to Nora Krug on the weekend, who then put these reports into written English form on Mondays, had them authorized by her informants and drew them by Thursday the anonymous “illustrated diaries” could appear side by side in the “Los Angeles Times” on Fridays. A full year – a feat for Krug, who teaches at the Parsons School of Design, but a task that was close to her heart. She donated her newspaper fees to aid organizations for Ukraine.
The book “Diaries of War,” which grew out of the 52 articles, was published in the United States last fall, and now the German edition is coming out: “Im Krieg.” That was also a feat of strength, because Krug didn't just illustrate the impressions of her two informants, i.e. provided them with pictures; She also put all the texts into her own graphic form – as she did in the two previous books, the award-winning world bestseller “Heimat” (2018) about her own German family history during the Nazi era and “On Tyranny” (2021), a battle pamphlet by the American historian Timothy Snyder, which she illustrated. Together with her most recent work, Krug sees it as a trilogy on human behavior in the face of state violence (for which the author will receive the Rhineland-Palatinate State Center for Civic Education's literary prize named after Shoah survivor Gerty Spies on March 21) and the togetherness of these Trias, an autobiographical work, an essay and the diaries, is underlined beyond the major theme by their innovative aesthetic design.
However, this time the forty-seven-year-old Krug uses images much more sparingly: “The reports had to be in the foreground,” she said in an interview with the FAZ, and the longer she was in contact with her informants, the more consistently the decision was implemented. From the fourteenth sequel onwards, there was only one individual drawing for the two weekly entries per week, whereas previously there had usually been four pictures, and in the opening episode from the end of February 2022 there were even six. Nora Krug, who immediately recognized the catastrophic significance of the event when the war broke out, continued to rely on the patterns that had proven to her when describing it, until she took the radical step of largely setting aside her own illustrative imagination in favor of the imagery of the reports provided to her .
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