In 2017, just one month after Donald Trump took office as American President, Timothy Snyder's manifesto "On Tyranny" was published in the United States. In it, the East European and Holocaust historian who teaches at Yale University and who was born in 1969 compiled twenty lessons that his research had taught him over the twentieth century - and that his audience should now learn. The narrow book, however, was mainly about the present, because Snyder identified familiar patterns in Donald Trump's demeanor and campaign strategy from his preoccupation with totalitarian systems. In view of the failure of the Weimar Republic, he proclaimed the greatest danger to American democracy. The book was thus also turned towards the future,which the German translation, published that same year, emphasized by choosing instead of “Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century” as the subtitle “Twenty Lessons for the Resistance”.

Andreas Platthaus

Editor in charge of literature and literary life.

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The book became a huge hit among political activists. But Snyder wanted to reach young readers in the spirit of his fifteenth lesson (“Get involved for a good cause”) and therefore got in touch with a narrator living in New York, who had impressed him with her 2018 debut. It was called “Belonging” in the American edition, but it told a German family story. In pictures, because the author Nora Krug, born 1977 in Karlsruhe, is above all an illustrator. The book is called "Heimat" in German (FAZ of August 17, 2018), and it won the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award in the United States and, in German translation, both the Schubart Literature Prize (for fiction) and the Evangelical Book Prize ( as a non-fiction book).

Arrangements in which hardly one side is the other

How did Snyder find it?

Nora Krug sits in the Berlin café “Both and” because she is visiting family in Germany, and remembers that her American publisher asked the historian for a blurb, a praiseworthy assessment, for “Heimat”.

Snyder was happy to provide this, because he saw in Nora Krug's book a new type of connection between text and image, which by assembling a wide variety of illustrative elements - own drawings, historical images, family photos, file facsimiles - creates a narrative platform that creates the pure text, so impressive already is in itself, raises it to another level.

He wanted the same for his book on tyranny.

And so Snyder's publisher asked Nora Krug for a favor.

That was more than a year ago, Trump was still in power.

You might think it's easy to add pictures to a text that is just over a hundred pages long, but not if your name is Nora Krug.

As in “Heimat”, she only wanted such text in the book, which is set in a type based on her own handwriting, so that the personal graphic style is not only visible in the images she has drawn or collaged, but also in the text-image - Interplay.

And the text should remain unabridged.

That required arrangements in which hardly any side looked like the other.