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.' Upon marrying into a Jewish family, she began to properly research and record her family's story during World War II. Krug later recounted that she 'felt a growing urge to tackle my country’s history in a new way. You are constantly being confronted with it.' Although she was confronted with negative stereotypes towards German cultural identity, she was simultaneously asked questions about her family history she had no knowledge of. While studying in New York, Krug said she began to feel ashamed of 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. It would lead to her first professionally-published project, Red Riding Hood Redux in 2009. She graduate dwith her Master's of Fine Arts degree in 2004, and the book series was added to the U.S.

Her thesis was a reinterpretation of ' Little Red Riding Hood', consisting of four mini-books, each of which focuses on a different character from that fairy tale. She returned to Europe briefly to study Visual Communication at Berlin University of the Arts but flew back to North America to studied in the School of Visual Arts's MFA Illustration program, majoring in Illustration as a Visual Essay. Krug attended a specialized middle and high school for classical music but chose to pursue a career in drawing at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts. In her teens, she pursued interests in the violin and classical music, as well as drawing and painting. Seeing these displays when bicycling through Alsace as a child prompted her father to explain their historical signficance to her. Growing up in Karlsruhe provided what she has called 'a political lession learned early', as the city is near France's Alsace region, where some towns keep old World War II tanks on display with their cannons pointed towards Germany.

Krug was born in 1977 in Karlsruhe, Germany. She is also an Associate professor of Illustration at the Parsons School of Design in New York City. Her graphic novel Belonging: A German Reckons With History and Home won the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography, 2019 Schubart-Literaturpreis, and 2019 Evangelischer Buchpreis.

Nora Krug (born 1977) is a German–American author and illustrator. National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography

Belonging: A German Reckons With History and Home

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