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ISSN 0010-1338 T h e m e n h eft: G e rm a n Comi c s G a s th e ra u s g e b e r: B rett S te rling a nd Lynn M a rie Kut c h B rett S te rling: I ntrod u c tion M a rin a R a u c h e nb a c h e r: O p po s in g V iewpoint s : Politi c s of G a z in g in th e G ra p hi c N ovel G ift Lynn M a rie Kut c h a nd D a mia no s G ra mm atikopoulo s : I nte rtextu al R efe re n c e s in E i c k m e ye r ’ s I m We s t e n ni c ht s N e u e s : E in e G ra p hi c N ov e l H elg a K raft: K afk a in Co mi c s . U nte r b e s on d e re r B e rü c k s i c htig u n g von M orit z S tette r s D a s U r t e il B rett S te rling: “ G a n z nor m ale D e ut s c h e ” : Confrontin g th e N a tion al S o c iali s t Pa s t in B a r b a ra Yelin ’ s I r m in a E liz a b eth B ridg e s : S c hille r R ea din g Co mi c s : T h e A e s th eti c s of N o s talgia a n d th e We n d e - N a r rative in Conte m pora r y G ra p hi c N ovel s periodicals.narr.de Band 48 Band 48 2015 Heft 4 Harald Höbus ch, Linda K . Worle y (Hr sg.) C O L L O Q U I A G E R M A N I C A I n t e r n a t i o n a l e Z e i t s c h r i f t f ü r G e r m a n i s t i k C O L L O Q U I A G E R M A N I C A I n t e r n a ti o n a l e Z e it s c h r ift f ü r G e r m a n i s ti k COLLOQUIA GERMANICA BAND 48 C O L L O Q U I A G E R M A N I C A Internationale Zeitschrift für Germanistik Herausgegeben von Harald Höbusch und Linda K. Worley Band 48 · 2015 © 2018 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH & Co. KG Alle Rechte vorbehalten / All Rights Reserved Satz: pagina GmbH, Tübingen Druck und Bindung: CPI buchbücher Birkach ISSN 0 010-1338 V INHALT Heft 1/ 2 Themenheft: Berhard Schlinks Der Vorleser Introduction Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader and the Problem of German Victimhood Eva B. Revesz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Schlink’s Vorleser , Süskind’s Parfum, and the Concept of Global Literature Judith Ryan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Germans as Victims in 1995 Robert C. Holub . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Bernhard Schlink and the Legacies of 1968 Bill Niven . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Hanna in Frankfurt? : On Stephen Daldry’s Adaptation of The Reader Brad Prager . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Emotional Detachment in Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser : A Problem for Democracy Gary L. Baker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 Dem Unaussprechlichen begegnen Claudia Rusch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 Der Vorleser and Bernhard Schlink in the Classroom Denise M. Della Rossa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 Immer wieder Schlink? Der Vorleser und seine literaturdidaktischen Chancen und Grenzen im Spiegel schulischer Praxis in Deutschland Sascha Feuchert und Björn Bergmann . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 The Schlink Abides: The Reader Attains the Age of Majority William Collins Donahue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 Bernhard Schlink: Lawyer, Writer, Public Intellectual: A Bio-Bibliography Heidi Madden . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 VI Inhalt Heft 3 Themenheft: A Haunting Past in Austrian and German Literature and Film Introduction: A Haunting Past in Austrian and German Literature and Film Joseph W. Moser, Margarete Landwehr, Laura Detre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 Majubs Reise — From Colony to Concentration Camp. A New Approach at Narrating Germany’s Colonial Past? Joachim Warmbold . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159 You Are the Murderers: German Guilt in Peter Lorre’s Der Verlorene Laura Detre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171 Evolving Memory Narratives: The Transformations of Ruth Kluger’s Autobiographical Writing Dagmar C. G. Lorenz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183 Hauntings of the Traumatic Past in Maas’s Film Two Lives : Individual and Collective Memory Margarete Landwehr . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197 Haunting Policework in Andreas Pittler’s Bronstein Detective Series Joseph W. Moser . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219 Heft 4 Themenheft: German Comics Introduction: The Intersection of Comics Studies and German Studies Brett Sterling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233 Opposing Viewpoints: Politics of Gazing in the Graphic Novel Gift Marina Rauchenbacher . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245 Intertextual References in Eickmeyer’s Im Westen nichts Neues: Eine Graphic Novel Lynn Marie Kutch and Damianos Grammatikopoulos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267 Kafka in Comics. Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von Moritz Stetters Das Urteil Helga Kraft . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293 Inhalt VII “Ganz normale Deutsche”: Confronting the National Socialist Past in Barbara Yelin’s Irmina Brett Sterling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317 Schiller Reading Comics: The Aesthetics of Nostalgia and the Wende -Narrative in Contemporary Graphic Novels Elizabeth Bridges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 343 BAND 48 • Heft 4 Themenheft: German Comics Gastherausgeber: Brett Sterling and Lynn Marie Kutch Inhalt Introduction: The Intersection of Comics Studies and German Studies Brett Sterling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233 Opposing Viewpoints: Politics of Gazing in the Graphic Novel Gift Marina Rauchenbacher . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245 Intertextual References in Eickmeyer’s Im Westen nichts Neues: Eine Graphic Novel Lynn Marie Kutch and Damianos Grammatikopoulos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267 Kafka in Comics. Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von Moritz Stetters Das Urteil Helga Kraft . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293 “Ganz normale Deutsche”: Confronting the National Socialist Past in Barbara Yelin’s Irmina Brett Sterling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317 Schiller Reading Comics: The Aesthetics of Nostalgia and the Wende -Narrative in Contemporary Graphic Novels Elizabeth Bridges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 343 Autorenverzeichnis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 357 Introduction: The Intersection of Comics Studies and German Studies 233 Introduction: The Intersection of Comics Studies and German Studies Brett Sterling University of Arkansas In December 1830, when Goethe first encountered picture stories by Rodolphe Töpffer, a schoolmaster in Geneva, he remarked that if Töpffer’s sparkling talent were applied to the proper scenario, “so würde er Dinge erfinden, die über alle unsere Begriffe gingen” (Soret 489). Today, Töpffer is considered by many to be the first comics artist, revered for his pioneering forays into storytelling with sequential images and integrated text. But it would take well over a century for Goethe’s optimistic evaluation of the picture story—and its descendent, comics—to gain public and critical acceptance. This special issue of Colloquia Germanica is a response to the general skepticism surrounding scholarship on comics, and it aims to further establish the field of Comics Studies within German Studies. The included essays showcase the high level of critical analysis that is possible under the auspices of Comics Studies. The medium of comics in general, and the current production of challenging works in German-speaking Europe present a plethora of opportunities for fruitful study and analysis in a range of areas, including gender studies, media studies, adaptation, and historical representation. Comics Studies as a field of scholarly inquiry is still relatively young; prior to the 1960s, only a handful of individuals addressed the medium, albeit mostly disparagingly. Comics Studies has taken this long to develop due in part to the historic understanding and evaluation of comics as insipid children’s fare (cf. Wertham). Scholars have struggled to legitimize working on texts considered as beneath contempt by the bulk of academia, while fans and practitioners of the medium have argued for the value of comics for decades (cf. “Comic Manifest”). At the same time, the oft-cited hybridity of the medium at the intersection of the visual arts and literature has problematized comics’ inclusion into any one discipline. Charles Hatfield has referred to Comics Studies as “an anti -discipline: a way of slipping between the universes, academically speaking” (xi). Indeed, the sentiment “Comic-Wissenschaft existiert nicht” (Frahm 31) is a common refrain in recent scholarship (Blank 61; Eder et al. 9; Miodrag 250; Schüwer 13; Stein 234 Brett Sterling et al. 7). Yet comics have been explored and analyzed within many disparate fields, without a centralizing impulse to subsume them under a clearly demarcated “Comics Studies” discipline. The largely isolated development of distinct artistic and scholarly traditions divided along national and linguistic lines has also hindered the creation of a unified international Comics Studies: aesthetics, formal concerns, and cultural significance vary widely between discourses on Anglo-American comics, Franco-Belgian bandes dessinées , Italian fumetti , and Japanese manga. To better understand how German-language comics fit within international Comics Studies, and within German Studies in the United States, it will be useful to look briefly at the historical development of the medium and the critical scholarship it has inspired in German-speaking Europe. Picture stories enjoyed great success in German-speaking Europe throughout the nineteenth century. Illustrated broadsheets ( Bilderbogen ) and satirical journals 1 served as showcases for the work of pioneering artists like Wilhelm Busch, Moritz von Schwind, and Franz Pocci. In contrast to American newspaper comic strips, which emerged in the 1890s, German picture stories operated with a strict separation of text and image (Dolle-Weinkauff 21). Comic books as we know them today were first introduced to Germany by American servicemen after World War II . These American-style comics proved extremely popular with readers in Germany, sparking a wave of importation and translation of series from the U. S. The traditional forms of visual storytelling developed and refined by German artists during the 1800s were unable to compete with the vibrant booklets from abroad, and quickly fell out of favor with readers. As comic books entered the German market, so too did the controversy over their content. In 1954, the German-American psychiatrist Fredric Wertham published a damning condemnation of comic books as destroyers of the youth in his now infamous book Seduction of the Innocent ; his subsequent testimony before the U. S. Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency blamed comics for an increase in juvenile crime and (homo)sexuality and resulted in the self-censorship of the American comics industry in the form of the Comics Code Authority. Wertham’s crusade against comics crossed the Atlantic almost simultaneously with the comics themselves, sparking book exchange programs, the passage of legislation for the protection of minors from dangerous materials in both East and West Germany, and even public book burnings (Dolle-Weinkauff 96—115; Lettkemann and Scholz 13—14). The combined impact of negative public opinion and a glut of imported material on the market restricted the development of domestic German-language comics: with few exceptions, no German artists rose to the prominence of their competitors abroad. The beginning of Comics Studies in Germany coincided with the moral panic coming out of the United States during the mid-1950s. In what has come to be Introduction: The Intersection of Comics Studies and German Studies 235 referred to as the “Schmutz- und Schundkampagne” (Dolle-Weinkauff 18), innumerable articles were published in the German-language press condemning comics for a litany of alleged sins, among them the degradation of German culture through Americanization, the incitement of the youth to violence and sexual deviance, and the promotion of illiteracy among children, so-called “Bildidiotismus” (Baumgärtner 91). The first noteworthy work on comics in German, Alfred C. Baumgärtner’s Die Welt der Comics (1965), entered into the debate as anti-comics fervor was beginning to wane. Baumgärtner devoted significant effort to analyzing comics’ typical tropes and plot devices, but his assessment was ultimately a modified condemnation of the medium as a crass financial gimmick that promoted a dehumanized and chaotic worldview to readers. 2 In 1971, Wolfgang J. Fuchs and Reinhold C. Reitberger, two students at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich created one of the first positive treatments of comics in German: Comics: Anatomie eines Massenmediums . In their thematic history of the medium, Fuchs and Reitberger presented a thorough exploration of comics’ key themes (humor, satire, melodrama, adventure, sex, etc.), while arguing against the earlier demonization of comics by Wertham and others. Throughout the rest of the 1970s, several German scholars published explorations of comics through a semiotic lens (cf. Hünig, Krafft, and Wienhöfer). Though these works have largely faded from the scholarly discourse, their impulse to study how comics create meaning and the repertoire of signs comics employ are echoed in later work by Stephan Packard, Janina Wildfeuer, and John Bateman. Originating in the field of art pedagogy, Dietrich Grünewald created several important works on comics ( Comic - Kitsch oder Kunst? [1982]; Wie Kinder Comics lesen [1984]; Vom Umgang mit Comics [1991]) that focused on how comics are read and how they might be employed effectively in the classroom. The scholarship of this period provided important insights into the ways comics function. It was not until the mid-1980s, however, that scholars began to look beyond comics as a medium generally to German-language comics in particular. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, three scholars presented the first extensive histories of German comics’ development after 1945. Andreas Knigge’s Fortsetzung folgt: Comic Kultur in Deutschland (1986), written for a popular audience, provided a wealth of information about the import market in Germany and the numerous German-language artists working in its shadow. Bernd Dolle-Weinkauff, the director of the comics archive at the Goethe Universität Frankfurt, expanded on Knigge’s work with a detailed exploration of the medium’s evolution in Germany: Comics: Geschichte einer populären Literaturform in Deutschland seit 1945 (1990). While Knigge and Dolle-Weinkauff focused on comics in West Germany, Gerd Lettkemann and Michael F. Scholz’s “Schuldig ist schließlich jeder …” Comics 236 Brett Sterling in der DDR - Die Geschichte eines ungeliebten Mediums ( 1945 / 49 — 1990 ) (1994) traced the complicated, politically entangled history of comics in the East. Despite the thoroughness of these histories, at the time they were written, Germany was still basically terra incognita on the comics landscape. With a few exceptions—e. g., Gerhard Seyfried, Matthias Schultheiss, and Ralf König—German-language artists were all but absent among the legions of Anglo-American and Franco-Belgian imports. The situation changed when two groups of artists in East Berlin emerged to form the beginnings of a comics avant-garde on the eve of the Wende . The artists of the collective PGH Glühende Zukunft, including Anke Feuchtenberger, Henning Wagenbreth, Holger Fickelscherer, and Detlef Beck used their background in graphic design and practical art to create experimental comics and poster art, while the Renate collective around Hans Georg Barber (alias ATAK), Christian (CX) Huth, and Peter Bauer followed a punk aesthetic inspired by 1980s zine culture. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, these stylistically daring artists found a home with venturesome independent publishers 3 who had filled gaps left by major publishers when the comics market cratered in the mid-1990s. 4 Along with West German counterparts Hendrik Dorgathen and Martin tom Dieck, and the Swiss Thomas Ott and Anna Sommer, the pioneering artists of the ’90s avant-garde made it possible for an independent comics scene to develop within German-speaking Europe. But beyond their groundbreaking work in comics, many of these same artists took up teaching positions at art schools across Germany, 5 where they have educated a generation of new comics creators. From a virtual no-man’s-land into the late 1980s, German-speaking Europe has developed into a vibrant site of comics production. As a new generation of artists trained by the ’90s avant-garde began to graduate throughout the 2000s, a surge of new talent emerged. The success of artists like Flix, Reinhard Kleist, Ulli Lust, Mawil, and Barbara Yelin has also been driven by the international popularity of the graphic novel. 6 The publication of Art Spiegelman’s Holocaust family narrative, Maus (1986, 1991; Ger. 1989, 1992)—considered a textbook example of the graphic novel—and Spiegelman’s subsequent acceptance of the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 were critical to the legitimization of comics not just in the United States, but in Germany as well. Maus helped make comics culturally acceptable by demonstrating that comics were capable of addressing grave topics as well as creating humor. While Maus opened the door to comics’ broader appreciation, Iranian-French artist Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical comic Persepolis (2000—03; Ger. 2004) has been credited as the catalyst for Germany’s graphic novel obsession, in both imports and domestic production (Brake n. pag.). As comics and graphic novels became common sights in bookshops and online, and frequent subjects of feuilleton columns in the German-speaking Introduction: The Intersection of Comics Studies and German Studies 237 press, German Comics Studies seemed to awaken “aus dem Dornröschenschlaf ” with a flurry of activity in the mid-2000s (Roidner n. pag.). In 2004, comics scholar Eckart Sackmann founded Germany’s first academic periodical dedicated to comics research, Deutsche Comicforschung . The annual journal was created to address the near-complete absence of scholarly engagement with German-language comics at the time, with a particular focus on German-speaking cultures’ influence on the development of the medium during the nineteenth century and in the years prior to 1945. A year later, Dietrich Grünewald and other comics experts established the Gesellschaft für Comicforschung , the leading scholarly organization for Comics Studies in German-speaking Europe. During the same period, the first German-language publications on comics theory began to lay the groundwork for a body of theoretical work in the German context. Stephan Packard’s Anatomie des Comics: Psychosemiotische Medienanalyse (2006), Martin Schüwer’s Wie Comics erzählen: Grundriss einer intermedialen Erzähltheorie der grafischen Literatur (2008), and Jakob F. Dittmar’s Comic-Analyse (2008)—all revised dissertations—are largely unique in the current field of German Comics Studies in their attempts to present systematic theories of comics, rather than to focus on individual aspects of form, genre, or content. Packard approached the medium from a psychosemiotic perspective, drawing on the work of Jacques Lacan and C. S. Peirce to understand how comics create meaning and how the human consciousness experiences comics’ meaning making. Using media and narrative theory as his lenses, Schüwer meticulously explored both the visual and textual strategies employed by comics in an attempt to provide the basis for a theory of comics narrative. Dittmar presented an analysis of comics’ constituent elements and the ways in which those elements combine to create a cohesive, functional whole. Despite the rapid growth of work on comics in German-speaking Europe, Packard’s, Schüwer’s, and Dittmar’s monographs remain standouts for their treatment of comics in its entirety. Beginning with Hein, Hüners, and Michaelsen’s Ästhetik des Comic in 2002, the thematic essay anthology has come to be the standard publication format for new comics scholarship in German-speaking Europe. Over the past decade, volumes have been published on the history and development of comics (Ditschke, Kroucheva, and Stein 2009; Eder, Klar, and Reichert 2011; Grünewald 2010), intermediality in comics (Becker 2011; Bachmann, Sina, and Banhold 2012), narrativity (Brunken and Giesa 2013; Hochreiter and Klingenböck 2014), comics and politics (Packard 2015), comics and science (Leinfelder et al. 2017; Heydenreich, forthcoming), racism and anti-Semitism in comics (Palandt 2011), nonfiction and informational comics (Hangartner, Keller, and Oechslin 2013), documentary comics (Grünewald 238 Brett Sterling 2013), and literary adaptations (Schmitz-Emans 2012; Blank 2015; Hohlbaum 2015; Trabert, Stuhlfauth-Trabert, and Waßmer 2015; Aust 2016). We invite readers to peruse and explore the works included in the bibliography for a better understanding of the current vibrancy of German Comics Studies. Comics scholarship has been slow to establish itself in German-speaking Europe, and in the work produced thus far, the focus by scholars in Germany has largely been on works from outside German-speaking Europe in the broader context of international Comics Studies. Interest in analyzing German-language comics has grown along with the increasing number and quality of those comics over the past decade, but such publications are still in the minority. In North America, Comics Studies has a longer presence, but German-language comics have mostly been ignored in the field’s leading journals and major publications. The few existing articles on German-language comics in English have come from scholars in German Studies, who have viewed comics in the context of foreign language pedagogy and literary and textual studies. In 2009, Elizabeth Bridges published the first essay in English on the use of comics specifically in the German language classroom. Under the title “Bridging the Gap: A Literacy-Oriented Approach to Teaching the Graphic Novel Der erste Frühling ,” Bridges argued that comics can be useful for opening students to canonical texts by creating “visual and personal reference points” to better understand the cultural context of those works (159). Lynn Kutch built on Bridges’ work in her essay “From Visual Literacy to Literary Proficiency: An Instructional and Assessment Model for the Graphic Novel Version of Kafka’s Die Verwandlung ,” while laying out a detailed curriculum for introducing students to comics and simultaneously developing visual and textual literacy. In her essay “Coming to Terms with the Past: Teaching German History with the Graphic Novel,” Elizabeth Nijdam argued for the inclusion of comics not only in language curricula, but also in history and culture courses, where they can engage students in the active understanding of history. Alongside works of pedagogical scholarship, there is a growing interest in comics as objects of literary and textual analysis. In Canada, Paul Malone has written widely on German-language manga, while in the United States Joshua Kavaloski has published on Peer Meter and Isabel Kreitz’s Haarmann (2010) within the context of a reimagination of Weimar Germany—the first analysis of comics in a major German Studies journal—and Elizabeth Nijdam has established herself as a leading scholar on the work of Anke Feuchtenberger. While scholarship on German-language Comics Studies in North America has been sparse and isolated, beginning in 2014, an annual series of panels at the German Studies Association and Northeast Modern Language Association conferences created points of accretion for a small but growing group of Introduction: The Intersection of Comics Studies and German Studies 239 scholars interested in exploring comics from a variety of perspectives within German Studies. A crucial outgrowth of these collaborative experiences was the publication of the volume Novel Perspectives on German-Language Comics Studies: History, Pedagogy, Theory (ed. Lynn Kutch) in 2016. Kutch’s anthology stands as the first and as yet only volume on German-language Comics Studies published in English, and it demonstrates the breadth of academic engagement with comics in the variety of its contributions. The present issue of Colloquia Germanica —born out of a panel series at the German Studies Association conference in 2015—builds on Kutch’s work, and the contributors’ essays demonstrate the rigor with which comics can be productively analyzed from within the field of German Studies. Marina Rauchenbacher’s essay uses Peer Meter and Barbara Yelin’s Gift to demonstrate how graphic novels provide possibilities to analyze the interrelation of looking and being looked at, to examine the discourse-historical setting of inherent power relations, and to scrutinize gender roles. Lynn Kutch and Damianos Grammatikopoulos consider the ways in which Peter Eickmeyer’s adaptation of Remarque’s classic novel Im Westen nichts Neues amalgamates artistic representations of the First World War beyond the source text, resulting in a work that defies easy characterization as comic or graphic novel. Helga Kraft takes Moritz Stetter’s Das Urteil as a case study in the difficulty and productivity of adapting Kafka’s polyvalent works into visual form. Brett Sterling examines the figure of the bystander in Barbara Yelin’s Irmina , with a focus on the visual and narrative strategies Yelin uses to enact the protagonist’s complicity in the genocide progressing around her. Finally, Elizabeth Bridges employs Schiller’s conception of therapeutic nostalgia to interrogate a range of recent Wende comics, focusing on how each participates in or resists so-called Ostalgie . This special issue links the American and German-speaking traditions of Comics Studies by bringing together researchers who build upon the scholarly progress made on both continents. Notes 1 E.g., Fliegende Blätter (1844—1944), Kladderadatsch (1848—1944), and Simplicissimus (1896—1944). 2 It is worth noting that Baumgärtner later revised this book and became a comics advocate. 3 E.g., Edition Moderne, Jochen Enterprises, and Reprodukt. 4 Success in the book trade (in contrast to the traditional distribution of comics through magazine kiosks) during the mid-1980s drove the Carlsen Verlag to greatly expand the number of titles offered in its program through 240 Brett Sterling the early 1990s. Competing publishers followed suit and flooded the market with works of diminishing quality, while falling sales resulted in massive price increases and a collapse of the market by the end of the decade (Sackmann 65—67; Gasser 9). 5 E.g., Anke Feuchtenberger (Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften Hamburg), Henning Wagenbreth (Universität der Künste Berlin), Martin tom Dieck (Folkwang Universität der Künste Essen), ATAK (Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule Halle), and Markus Huber (Muthesius Kunsthochschule Kiel). 6 The graphic novel is generally understood as a non-serial, long-form comic, and held by many to include serious content for an adult readership. The term “graphic novel” is somewhat contentious among scholars, where some consider it to be a movement (Gravett 9), a distinct genre (Hescher 4), a form of comics storytelling (Meyer 273), or even a medium in itself (Baetens and Frey 7) and others have criticized it as little more than a marketing label intended to legitimize comics as high culture, and thus to sell comics to a broader readership (Blank, Graphic Novel ; Hausmanninger 17; Wolk 63—64). Works Cited Aust, Robin-M. “Es ist ja auch eine Methode, alles zur Karikatur zu machen.”: Nicolas Mahlers Literatur-Comics Alte Meister und Alice in Sussex nach Thomas Bernhard und H. C. Artmann . Würzburg: Ergon, 2016. Bachmann, Christian A. Metamedialität und Materialität im Comic: Zeitungscomic - Comicheft - Comicbuch . Berlin: Christian A. Bachmann, 2016. Bachmann, Christian A., Véronique Sina, and Lars Banhold, eds. Comics intermedial. Beiträge zu einem interdisziplinären Forschungsfeld . Essen: Christian A. Bachmann, 2012. 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Opposing Viewpoints: Politics of Gazing in the Graphic Novel Gift Marina Rauchenbacher University of Vienna Abstract: This essay examines the graphic novel Gift (2010) by the German comics artist Barbara Yelin and the author Peer Meter, which refers to an historical incident in 19 th -century Germany. The Bremen citizen Gesche Margarethe Gottfried was accused of having fatally poisoned fifteen people, including her children and several family members, and injuring another nineteen neighbors. The graphic novel highlights discrepancies in narratives about Gottfried’s motives and, in doing so, contemplates and critiques the disparate power relations both between men and women as well as between the anonymous crowd ( Masse ) and the individual. The essay argues that due to their hybrid form and the combination of different narrative layers, comics provide abundant possibilities to analyze the interrelation of looking and being looked at, to examine the discourse-historical setting of inherent power relations, and to scrutinize gender roles. Using the example of Gift , the essay discusses the ways that the interrelation of text and images, narrative structure, and specific textual passages illustrate and question a range of hierarchical power structures. Keywords: points of view, gazing, power politics, observation, gender politics, comics, graphic novels, graphic narratives, voyeurism, text and image The graphic novel Gift (2010) by the German comic book artist Barbara Yelin and the German writer Peer Meter refers to an historical incident in nineteenth-century Germany. The Bremen citizen Gesche Margarethe Gottfried was accused of having killed fifteen people by poisoning them with arsenic, including her two husbands, her fiancé, her children, her parents, and her brother, and of having poisoned at least nineteen others over a period of fourteen years. 1 There have been almost an equal number of speculations about Gottfried’s motives as those about her trial. She was sentenced to death and beheaded in 1831, but her 246 Marina Rauchenbacher attorney, Friedrich Leopold Voget, had already conjectured that she might have had a mental illness. 2 Voget and further authors who have explored this case underline Gottfried’s high societal esteem and consistently draw attention to the devotional care of her victims. 3 As a result of all these unresolved issues and inconsistencies, Gottfried became quite a mysterious figure, a stylized femme fatale , and her life and death have been scrutinized in numerous literary 4 as well as biographical and (criminal) psychological works 5 up to the present day. Gift adopts the perspective of a young woman writer who comes to Bremen right before Gottfried’s execution, actually to write a travelogue. She becomes more and more involved in the circumstances concerning the trial and execution. The case attracts her attention, but additionally an increasing number of Bremen citizens fear that she—a stranger—will damage the reputation of the city by writing about the execution. The graphic novel highlights the discrepancies in the story by combining opposing viewpoints and questions why—over such a long period of time—nobody became suspicious of the huge amounts of poison Gottfried bought and the deaths of those close to her. In doing so, Gift contemplates disparate power relations both between men and women as well as between the anonymous crowd ( Masse ) and the individual. Even though these reflections sometimes reveal themselves to be didactic and superficial, as the subsequent discussion will underscore, the comic criticizes oppressive hierarchies and power politics. In a self-reflective way, the viewpoints of the characters as well as the perspectives of the drawings and the graphic novel’s structure constantly reference Gift ’s own power in creating this story, and therefore in creating specific perspectives on the historical incident and its protagonist(s). Due to their hybrid form and the combination of different narrative layers, graphic narratives 6 provide abundant possibilities to analyze the interrelation of looking and being looked at, to examine the discourse-historical setting of the inherent power relations, and to scrutinize gender roles. 7 The first section of this article elaborates on the narrative structure of Gift , and identifies fundamental modes of the interrelation between the typeface/ language and the drawings. The second section provides detailed analyses of text examples, which illustrate in particular the hierarchical structures between men and women, the society ( Masse ) and the individual, as well as between narrative perspectives and the historical subject. Yelin’s monochromatic pencil drawings with their black-and-white contrasts create an oppressive atmosphere and therefore correspond to the historical subject: faces stand out from blurred, dark backgrounds, while bodies seem to melt into them; dark rooms leave only minimal space for the movement of the figures; and the young writer seems to become lost in huge, dark, and blurred urban canyons. These canyons represent the power of the city of Bremen, which is Opposing Viewpoints: Politics of Gazing in the Graphic Novel Gift 247 a metonym for a sophisticated network of politics and repression. 8 These power politics are highlighted by different points of view—such as those concerning the opposition between the protagonist and the powerful Bremen men. While Yelin’s drawings illustrate the loneliness of the individual in a shadowy society and are quite self-reflective, Meter’s text takes a very didactic approach. 9 As will be shown in more detail below, the text tends to create mere contrasts: between the protagonist ( good and brave ), the men passing judgment ( bad and powerful ), Gesche Gottfried ( victim ) 10 , and the Bremen citizens ( nameless crowd ). Jens Essmann even alleges that the “Mischung aus Dokumentation, Erzählung und Comic” proves to be unsuccessful and that the drawings are forced to compensate for Meter’s narrative style “unter der Bürde des Dokumentarischen” (Essmann n. pag.). 11 Initially, this seems a persuasive argument, but in point of fact the interaction between text and image is far more sophisticated, not to mention that the distinction between text and image itself only functions as a kind of analytical subsidiary tool. Comics have the advantage of providing the visual dimensions of texts and the narrative dimensions of images. Martin Schüwer analyzes four fields of this interaction: the graphic dimension ( grafische Dimension ) relates to typeface and drawing style; the dimension of narrative structure ( erzählstrukturelle Dimension ) refers to verbal narration and focalization as well as to graphic focalization; the diegetic dimension of meaning ( diegetische Bedeutungsdimension ) relates to verbal and graphic messages, which converge in the narrated world; the staged dimension of meaning ( inszenatorische Bedeutungsdimension ) refers to the verbal and graphic messages, which interrelate through staging (336—38). These heterogeneous interactions, which all question a mere distinction between text and image, introduce manifold means of interpretation for the analysis of Gift : Are there possibilities of productive irritation inherent in the form of comics? Are there indications for a rethinking of historical interpretations and gender roles? Gift mostly employs two different modes of integrating typeface/ language into the visual depiction: speech balloons and captions. Speech balloons create a staged dimension of meaning and therefore imply immediacy. Captions, by contrast, create a diegetic dimension of meaning and point to the narrative structure itself. The graphic novel starts with a frame story: fifty years after Gottfried’s execution, the writer thinks back to what had happened in Bremen at the time (11). She recounts to another woman her own version of events: from her arrival in Bremen the day before the execution to her departure immediately after the execution. Within this narrated world, staged and diegetic sequences alternate. Captions mark not only the sequences in which the principal narrator is speaking, but also metadiegetic narrations by Bremen citizens and narrations by Gottfried. The latter only functions in a subsidiary way, since Gottfried— 248 Marina Rauchenbacher in contrast to the other narrators—never appears in the staged dialogues. Her point of view is referred to by means of quotations from the interrogation transcripts. 12 It is striking that this text is absolutely unemotional, as if Gottfried herself were not actually involved, but rather merely concisely logging someone else’s experiences. This text interacts perfectly with Yelin’s drawings in two ways. First, the contradiction between content and diction finds its ideal counterpart in the drawings. For example, Gottfried’s murder of her daughter Johanna is told within the scope of six panels. The first shows a kitchen and a woman viewed from the back, with a toddler sitting on the floor by a wall. The caption says: “Meinem jüngsten Kind, der Johanna …” (55). The following—textless—panel presents the woman from the front, with a cake on the countertop in front of her; one slice is on a plate. The child in the background crawls towards the woman, who is looking back over her shoulder. The next panel shows a detailed view: the woman’s hands, buttering the cake, accompanied by the text, “… gab ich zuerst Mäusebutter” (56). 13 Then the woman crouches in front of the toddler, one hand on the child’s head, offering her a piece of this cake. The child has her mouth open and her hands outstretched towards the woman: “Ich gab ihr mittags davon auf Kuchen, der von der Beerdigung meiner Mutter übrig geblieben war” (56). After this, the woman is shown from the back, against a white background. She is holding the child, only part of her face is visible—her mouth wide open—and her right arm and leg stretched away: “Sie erbrach sich sehr bald” (56). Subsequently the woman holds the huddled toddler, with both figures shown in profile against a white background. Again this panel has no text. The last image shows the woman in the same position, but alone: “Anderntags war sie tot” (56). This brief and unemotional text provides a striking contrast to the subject of the drawings, which show a dying/ dead child. Second, the panels have exact frames and gutter sizes. The captions fit perfectly into this system: they are separated by a straight line and have a white background, which contrasts with the dark drawings. Moreover, this creation of a diegetic dimension of meaning seems to be of utmost importance for a cautious and self-reflective engagement with this historical—and mythologized—subject. Other than its role in staging the narrative, it forges distance and points to the fact that Gift itself only creates another narration, and does not—cannot—deliver any incontrovertible evidence. Therefore, these panels illustrate an insightful hybridization—a pivotal attribute of graphic novels. 14 The structure of the graphic novel is conventional: Each chapter starts with a splash page, which shows the new scene and acts as an introduction to the current chapter. The panels are framed in an almost perfect geometrical manner: there are only a few (nevertheless important) exceptions. 15 This corresponds Opposing Viewpoints: Politics of Gazing in the Graphic Novel Gift 249 with the narrative structure, which consists of different layers and is framed by the narration of the now elderly writer. The visual framing therefore captures the reader’s attention. Martin Schüwer emphasizes the distinction between geometrical and physical framing for graphic novels (189—93), which in turn draws on Gilles Deleuze’s cinematographic studies. Deleuze outlines that “the frame has always been geometrical or physical, depending on whether it constitutes the closed system in relation to chosen coordinates or in relation to selected variables” (13). Therefore, the process of limitation by the frame results from two different concepts: “mathematically or dynamically: either as preliminary to the existence of the bodies whose essence they fix, or going as far as the power of existing bodies goes” (13). Gift mostly uses geometrical framing, which illustrates both the aforementioned “Bürde des Dokumentarischen” and a narrative style showing/ telling a self-contained interpretation of the historical subject. Precisely at this point, the graphic novel again reveals a (self-)reflective mode and points to its own construction. The drawings consistently concentrate on faces and gazes and thus raise the questions: Who is observed? Who is the observer? The clearly restricted panels highlight individual moments of observation, showing them as framed and limited, and employ this formal aspect to draw attention to one of the work’s most important issues, namely its concentration on seeing and being seen. As Hillary L. Chute emphasizes, “in the hybrid, visual-verbal form of graphic narrative […] the work of (self-) interpretation is literally visualized; the authors show us interpretation as a process of visualization” (4). This is relevant—and productive—to a greater extent in so far as hierarchies of gazes are analyzed and feminist critique on historical points of view is explored. Chute focuses on autobiographic examples by female authors dealing with traumatic experiences and states: They return to events to literally re-view them, and in so doing, they productively point to the female subject as both an object of looking and a creator of looking and sight. Further, through the form their work takes, they provoke us to think about how women, as both looking and looked-at subjects, are situated in particular times, spaces, and histories. The graphic narratives I analyze are not only about events but also, explicitly, about how we frame them. (2) As Chute points out, this description applies to other examples of graphic narratives, too. However, Gift re-views an historical incident and investigates the relationship between looking and being looked at, between narrating and being narrated, between observing and being observed. Gift investigates (historical) gender roles, prejudices, and oppressions and analyzes emancipatory struggles at the beginning of the nineteenth century. 250 Marina Rauchenbacher The pastor, Heinrich Wilhelm Rotermund, as well as Gottfried’s attorney, Friedrich Leopold Voget, and the senator, Franz Friedrich Droste, suspect the young writer of writing not only a travelogue (which is the reason for her journey to Bremen), but also a story about Gesche Gottfried. They seem to be afraid of an outside perspective and especially of a woman’s perspective. The more the writer becomes involved in the case, the more she becomes convinced that Gottfried has never received a fair trial and that one of the main reasons for her acts was an imbalance of power between Gottfried—to be understood as metonymic for women —and the pastor, the attorney, and the senator—who symbolize men . The name Gesche Margarethe Gottfried is conspicuously absent in the narrator’s account. As already mentioned, the graphic novel’s depiction of Gottfried is above all created through metadiegetic narrations by other Bremen citizens and by the quoted interrogation transcripts. In the intradiegetic world, she only appears at the execution, but is mute there. This narrative shift of the graphic novel’s main figure creates a narrative distance and underlines the imbalance of power. Everything the writer hears from Gottfried and reads about her has already been interpreted—and censored—by someone else. Through this shift, the graphic novel constantly undermines the writer’s diegetic power and questions her reliability. By contrast, some powerful men obtain a kind of sovereignty over Gottfried, or rather over the knowledge of her case and how it is remembered. Shortly after arriving in Bremen, the writer witnesses a dialogue between the pastor and a man named Mr. Dreyer—presumably Friedrich Adolf Dreyer, a Bremen publisher who had the exclusive printing rights for Rudolph Suhrlandt’s famous portrait of Gottfried. 16 This dialogue in particular illustrates the struggle for power and knowledge: Dreyer complains about a publication on Gottfried by Voget and the pastor retorts, “Haben Sie nicht den Druckauftrag zugeschlagen bekommen für das Bildnis der Giftmörderin? ” (25). Subsequently, the pastor reprimands a man whom he accuses of having rented a room in his house “zur Ansicht der Hinrichtung” (26). These men want to create a specific interpretation about Gottfried and her acts and this point of view only allows specific gazes on her, while all other points of view are judged to be secret and dangerous. Among the people who do tell the writer about Gottfried is the female warden of the prison. When strolling around in Bremen, the writer by chance goes to the prison and has a secret conversation with this warden (98—101). The latter has a different perspective on the trial and tells the writer about dubious interrogation methods and inconsistencies: “Über diese beiden Herren [Rotermund and Voget] kann ich Ihnen Sachen erzählen, da würden Sie Augen machen …” (98). The secret nature of this conversation not only finds expression within the dialogue—“Pssst … nicht so laut …” (98)—but within the drawings as well. The Opposing Viewpoints: Politics of Gazing in the Graphic Novel Gift 251 warden talks to the writer through a half-opened window and is obviously in need of a safe space, which becomes clear ultimately when a guard interrupts them and the warden closes the window abruptly (101—02). This is a situation of utmost danger for both women. The guard commands the writer to leave and he undeniably has the authority to ban this conversation. Again, this not only becomes clear as a result of the ensuing dialogue between the guard and the writer, but also as a result of the drawings. Three panels show the guard in full figure, positioned in the very center. In the first two panels, he nearly fills the space, his height almost matching that of the panels. In the third one, he fills the entire panel. By contrast, the writer is positioned off-center and is notably smaller: she is visually less significant than the guard (102—03). After he threatens to arrest her if she does not leave immediately, she answers in what is obviously military jargon—“Jawohl! ” (103)—and leaves running. One of the men who tells the writer about Gottfried is the attorney Mr. Voget, and this sequence is an instructive example to substantiate a disciplinary gaze (Foucault), a gaze which belongs to the powerful who have—due to a specific hierarchical system—the right to exert their power and to sanction infringements. They meet at Voget’s request. He thinks that she wants to write about Gottfried and tries to convince her not to do so: “In meinem soeben erschienenen Buch ist alles gesagt über diese Frau” (51). Initially, the dialogic situation corresponds with the graphic presentation of the two figures: they are shown talking and seated, in a medium close-up (shoulder length portrait). The writer asks for Gottfried’s reasons and identifies “eine unheimliche Aura des Sinnlosen” (51). After this statement, the drawings focus exclusively on the attorney, who responds: “Eine solche Aura hat es nie gegeben! ” (52) His posture signals indignation, with his arms spread and his mouth wide open. In the following panels—introducing the attorney’s narration of his meeting with Gottfried—he condemns the latter as: nichts anderes als eine kalt berechnende, gefühllose Egoistin … … die aus reiner Geld- und Besitzgier gemordet hat. Und nicht ohne ein gewisses Grauen vor einem Wesen, welches beispiellos Entsetzliches vollbracht, ja, die menschliche Natur abgelegt hat … … trat ich in Begleitung des Untersuchungsrichters Senator Droste … … meinen Weg zu ihr in die Zelle an. (52) The drawings gradually zoom in, until the last panel only shows a small part of his face—one of his eyes at the center (52). 252 Marina Rauchenbacher During this zoom, the size of the panels remains constant. It is not the figure that forms the frame, but the frame that limits the figure and points self-reflectively to its own mode of narrating. Voget is one of only a few who have the legal and societal power to establish a point of view on Gottfried—and to look at her face-to-face. At the same time, the graphic novel highlights both the fact that it is only Voget’s point of view—ultimately embodied by the represented eye—and the graphic novel’s own diegetic power. The following metadiegetic level starts with a darkly shaded panel, showing a detail of the cell door with the keyhole. Then one sees a hand, unlocking the door. The subsequent middle tier of this page significantly points to the interlacing of the narrative layers and the construction of the diegetic world: The first panel shows a woman in the background, looking out of the window. She is positioned in the very center of the drawing, only in a small section, though, since the predominant part of this panel is covered by two black areas in the right and left foreground. This implies that the gaze of the beholder/ reader is guided straight towards the figure and that the panel reflects this view. Surprisingly, it is not Voget’s perspective that is adopted here, since the following Opposing Viewpoints: Politics of Gazing in the Graphic Novel Gift 253 panel zooms out and makes it clear that the black areas are details of Voget’s and Droste’s backs. Thus, they block the beholder’s/ reader’s gaze and prevent them from gaining an overview of the situation. This visually draws one’s attention to the work’s own (narrative) perspective. Another man who tells the writer about Gottfried is the pastor, Mr. Rotermund. In contrast to the introduction of the attorney’s narration, the drawings zoom out this time. While the pastor is first shown in a medium close-up (his hat even exceeding the limits of the frame), he subsequently not only retreats into the distance, but even slides out of the image: the panels simulate an upward camera movement until only a cloudy sky (toying with the idea of God’s judgment) remains (30). On the next page the metadiegetic narration starts. Similar to the attorney, he condemns Gottfried as a cruel murderer: Während ich zum ersten Mal mit ein paar vorbereiteten Bibelstellen zu der Mörderin ins Detentionshaus ging … … war ich gequält von der Frage, ob auf das Herz einer so tief versunkenen Sünderin nicht eher … … mit der vorherrschenden Strenge des Gesetzes gewirkt werden sollte als mit dem sanften Trost des Evangeliums. (31) Starting with this text passage, the drawings show him on his way to Gottfried’s cell. He walks upstairs; the panels are darkly shaded and the only light source is the guard’s small lantern (31). The two men walk through a dark corridor; only their feet are visible. Then they are shown from the back while walking further through the corridor (32). Finally, the guard unlocks the spyhole of Gottfried’s cell door. This approach and the process of unlocking are staged through three panels. The third panel is textless and shows the half-opened spyhole; light floods out of Gottfried’s 254 Marina Rauchenbacher cell and therefore into the dark corridor. This panel is of utmost importance in several aspects for both the criminological topic of the graphic novel and a subversive reflection of power relations. Firstly, it is striking that the light—so to speak the light of knowledge —flows out of the cell and onto the floor. Therefore, this panel undermines the criticized, oppressive system and emphasizes that insight cannot come from the outside. But secondly—and contrarily—the spyhole symbolizes the idea of a secret gaze on a secret and refers to voyeurism and thus to the relationship—intensely examined in feminist studies—between the man as beholder and the woman as staged object of his gaze. 17 At this particular point, the gaze is—thirdly—a disciplinary gaze as well, referring to the power of the sovereign (Foucault): Gottfried is incarcerated; only someone outside the cell door has the power to open the spyhole. Fourthly, at the same time this gaze is limited: only a detail is visible (maybe the detail the reader/ beholder wants to see), which leads back to the first point concerning the source of knowledge. The interplay between those contradictory aspects embodied in this panel is intensified during the subsequent six panels shown on one page. The drawings zoom in, from a long shot to a close-up. The last image shows Gottfried head-on, returning the gaze of the beholder/ reader (33). Opposing Viewpoints: Politics of Gazing in the Graphic Novel Gift 255 At the end of this long approach (the pastor’s walk upstairs and along the corridor, the process of unlocking the spyhole and gradually zooming in) the beholder/ reader is confronted with their object of desire —and remains unenlightened. There is no remarkable emotional expression, no word, and Gottfried’s eyes do not respond to the beholder’s/ reader’s observation, since her gaze is directed to the right, slightly past the beholder/ reader. This paradoxical confrontation in particular is reminiscent of George Didi- Huberman’s investigations into the interrelation of beholder and image. He states that the image looks back and blinds the beholder. What remains is the knowledge that there is something left over, which is not penetrable. With regard to Franz Kafka’s parable of the doorkeeper ( Before the Law ), Didi-Huberman uses the metaphor of the door and the threshold : “Und vor dem Bild—wenn wir hier als Bild das Objekt des Sehens und des Blicks bezeichnen—stehen alle wie vor einer offenen Tür, in deren Rahmen man nicht gelangen, nicht eintreten kann” (234). Gift is reminiscent of these paradoxes of perception: It is striking that the pastor’s verbal narration ends while he is approaching Gottfried and that this approach is finished by the extradiegetic narrator without text. The latter seems to give the reader/ beholder freedom of interpretation, promises individual exclusiveness in consequence of the approach to the incarcerated figure, and then breaks this promise. This last panel, showing Gottfried headon, interrupts the narrations about her and marks a moment of subversion. It is aware of the distance between the visual (and historical) object and its observer, who needs to create closeness in order to satisfy their curiosity. Gift repeatedly works with head-on views of Gottfried, starting with the cover, which—due to the staring gaze, focused on the beholder—most likely supports the cliché “einer kalt berechnenden Mörderin” (65). Another, though more sophisticated example, is related to the interrogation transcripts, and contrasts head-on views with profile views. A stranger who assumes that the young woman is writing about Gottfried hands her a copy of the transcripts (127—31). When she starts to read, the narration switches to a metadiegetic level: the agenda is quoted in captions and is accompanied by drawings of Gottfried. It is striking that twelve panels—some of them textless—show Gottfried in profile and twice even from the back, her bonnet pulled deep into her face. The art historian Reimar F. Lacher emphasizes that the profile view stresses the two significant facial elements of nose and forehead, while eyes and mouth—as decisive elements for facial expression—are missing (“Daniel Berger” 127). Gottfried seems to be unapproachable and silenced. As already highlighted, the interrogation transcripts appear to be quite laconic: 256 Marina Rauchenbacher Wenn ich des Morgens aufstand … … konnte ich es so kriegen … … dass ich Mäusebutter geben musste. Manchmal war ich monatelang frei davon. Dann kam wieder eine Periode … … wo ich mit dem Gedanken aufwachte: “Wenn die oder die Person kommen sollte, sollst du ihr etwas geben.” Oft habe ich beschlossen, es nicht mehr zu tun. Einmal habe ich sogar eine Kruke weggeworfen … … um es nicht mehr tun zu müssen. Aber sobald ich ohne Mäusebutter war … … bemächtigte sich meiner eine solche Unruhe … … und Unzufriedenheit. Sobald ich eine neue Kruke hatte holen lassen, ließ ich sie mehrere Wochen unberührt stehen. (136—38) This text creates distance and therefore corresponds with the profile views. Again the reader/ beholder retraces a long approach to Gottfried. With the line “… bemächtigte sich meiner eine solche Unruhe …” the drawings start to show Gottfried head-on and therefore toy once again with the idea of immediate eye contact between the figure and the reader/ beholder. The last page of this scene has just three panels and depicts a transformation from distance to immediacy (139). The first panel shows Gottfried head-on within a closed frame and accompanied by a caption saying “Denn allein der Gedanke, wieder Gift zu haben …” (139). This sentence continues in the second panel, though not as a caption, but in a speech balloon, thus constructing immediacy through a staged interrelation of verbal and graphic message: “… machte mich so besonders zufrieden …” (139), while Gottfried’s face extends beyond the frame. Finally, the center of her face is shown in an unframed detail view: “… was ich mir selbst nicht erklären kann …” (139). Again, the “Topos vom Auge als Tür, Fenster, Spiegel oder gar Sitz der Seele” (Lacher, “Bild der Seele” 32) is stressed. This example in particular is reminiscent of the source of recognition and insight—namely Gottfried herself—and therefore corresponds with the aforementioned functionalization of the spyhole and the keyhole. Furthermore, the transition from captions to speech balloons highlights the idea of closeness and authenticity. She now no longer seems to be the narrated, but the narrating figure. Nevertheless, the reader/ beholder is kept at an artistic distance and is confronted with their limits concerning both the reconstruction of historical incidents, which are inevitably mediated and interpreted, and the recognition of another individual per se. Opposing Viewpoints: Politics of Gazing in the Graphic Novel Gift 257 During the approximately twenty-four hours of her stay in Bremen, the writer increasingly becomes convinced that not only was the illness of Gottfried or an oppressive hierarchy between men and women responsible for this tragedy— fifteen dead people and at least nineteen poisoned—but moreover the societal system to some greater extent: 258 Marina Rauchenbacher Je tiefer sie mich hineinzogen in ihre Kriminalaffäre, desto deutlicher trat das Versagen einer Gesellschaft zutage. Niemals durften sie auch nur in Erwägung ziehen, eine an Seele und Geist kranke Frau vor sich zu haben. Es wäre das Eingeständnis gewesen, über Jahre … … einem erschreckend offenkundigen Mordwüten … … gleichgültig gegenübergestanden zu haben. Darum blieb ihnen nichts anderes … … als in Gesche Gottfried eine kalt berechnende … … und aus egoistischem Antrieb mordende Frau zu sehen … … die voller Arglist über Jahre ihre Mitwelt getäuscht hatte. Und was auch immer dieses Bild zu beschädigen drohte … … suchten sie im Keime zu ersticken. (106—09) 18 At the same time, this failure is juxtaposed with extensive observation: the pastor, the attorney, and the senator try to regulate the viewpoints on the accused, which is why the young writer immediately becomes a suspect. She is observed by these three men as well as by other Bremen citizens and even by the police. Hence, Gift turns the reader’s/ beholder’s attention to the phenomenon of the crowd ( Masse ). During the public sentencing and the execution, the drawings frequently show the staring crowd (160—75). With only a few exceptions, the figures are drawn in a schematic and vague way, presenting hardly any individual facial expressions, but rather merging into a uniform and powerful bulk. Foucault highlights in his study Discipline and Punish that in “the ceremonies of the public execution, the main character was the people, whose real and immediate presence was required for the performance” (57). The crowd occupies plenty of space and surrounds the scaffold; the drawings focus on the mass of spectators from different perspectives and fluctuate between long shots and close-ups. These different approaches to the crowd reflect both its function as witness and its instrumentalization through the sovereign: they are simultaneously allowed to see and forced to see (57—58). Repeatedly the drawings focus on the contrast between this mass of people and the elevated scaffold with only a few figures on it, “where the body of the tortured criminal had been exposed to the ritually manifested force of the sovereign, the punitive theatre in which the representation of punishment was permanently available to the social body” (115). The graphical structure of repetition draws the beholder’s/ reader’s attention to the contrast between looking and being looked at, between the power of the crowd and the powerlessness of the observed. Opposing Viewpoints: Politics of Gazing in the Graphic Novel Gift 259 In particular, this interrelation and the awareness of these hierarchies of viewpoints, which Gift creates by its techniques, are exhibited on a—textless— splash page, which depicts the beheading (173). The drawing is divided into two parts, approximately in the middle of the vertical line. While the upper half and therefore the background is shaded in fluctuating nuances of gray, the bottom half shows the crowd and the scaffold. The 260 Marina Rauchenbacher transition between the crowd and the shaded area is in large parts diffuse, as if the crowd could become lost in this gray area at the back. The scaffold is positioned in the vertical center of the panel, however not in the horizontal center, but in the right half. In relation to the crowd it is small, the figures on it are only schematic, but it is more distinct than the crowd and therefore contrastive. The large black area on the left is part of a building and extends into the lighter drawn crowd and the background. Thus, the drawing arranges this very scene of punishment and its protagonists—the judge, the executioner, the condemned, the public place, the scaffold and the crowd 19 —in a strikingly subversive way. In front of this building, oriented towards the scaffold, there is a kind of terrace with a figure standing on it. As can be deduced from the preceding panels, this terrace is the “Richtertisch” (165) and the figure is the senator, Mr. Droste, who pronounced the death sentence and—literally— brach den Stab as a visual sign for the sentence: “Der Stab ist gebrochen … / / … das Urteil ist gesprochen … / / … Mensch, du musst sterben” (164). In his biography of Gottfried, Voget describes the scene as follows: An dem einen Ende des Domhofes, dem Stadthaus gegenüber, im Angesicht des Marktplatzes, der Sandstraße und zum Teil des Liebfrauen-Kirchhofs, erhob sich, etwa elf Fuß hoch, das schwarze Blutgerüst. Ihm gegenüber, über dem Portal des Stadthauses, war zur Hegung des hochnotpeinlichen Halsgerichts eine etwa sechs Fuß hohe Tribüne errichtet, ebenfalls schwarz bekleidet, wie die darauf befindlichen Stühle und der Tisch. (365) It is striking that not only the scaffold but also the “Richtertisch” ( Gift 165) and the senator tower as distinct elements above the crowd and horizontally cross or even interrupt the vanishing lines. The vanishing point is neither the senator nor the scaffold, but a dark area in the center background. 20 An overview is ensured by the beholder’s position being at an elevated perspective, which corresponds with the elevation of the scaffold and the senator. They not only see the execution, but also the whole scene and therefore the interrelation of all elements. This viewpoint increases the reader’s awareness of hierarchies and sociopolitical implications such as the utilization of an execution to satisfy the thirst for sensationalism among the masses. Nevertheless, the beholder is forced to watch the execution too and in so doing cannot avoid embodying precisely that which the graphic novel criticizes. Earlier the writer expresses her indignation about Gottfried’s execution, taking place “vor aller Augen” (29). Virtually as a response to this paradoxical role of the beholder, the vanishing lines lead their gaze to this darker area in the background, not promising insight or knowledge but rather diffusion and obscurity. Opposing Viewpoints: Politics of Gazing in the Graphic Novel Gift 261 Gift makes clear that the hybrid form of comics provides fruitful possibilities for both engagement with historical subjects and their gender-political aspects as well as the ongoing and pivotal reflection on narrative modes and therefore on the interpretation of historical events as well as the creation of new narrations of these events. This graphic novel not only illustrates hierarchies—between men and women as well as between the society and the individual—by combining different narrative layers and focusing on the interrelation between seeing and being seen, but furthermore consistently points to its narrative strategies: The young writer never meets Gottfried, the latter is only created—obviously in a censored way—through narrations by other Bremen citizens; the transitions between different narrative layers are highlighted (e.g., by focusing on the particular narrator’s eye); the targeted use of captions and speech balloons underlines the graphic novel’s own power in creating distance and closeness; and lastly, Yelin’s drawings frequently point to the paradoxes of perception. Although the reader/ beholder sees head-on views of Gottfried, she remains in the distance, thereby illustrating how remote the reader/ beholder is from obtaining a reliable, first-hand account of events. Therefore, the novel establishes a sophisticated and self-reflective level of criticism, benefiting from the hybrid form of comics as well as from their elaborate narrative layering. This is of utmost interest for the analysis of historical understanding and the way perspectives on historical incidents are constructed. The interlacing of viewpoints (the frame story, the narrations by some Bremen citizens, the quoted interrogation transcript) as well as the reflections on seeing and being seen are reminiscent of the unreliability of human recollection, of the problematic construction of history itself, and of the necessity for a critical reading of such constructions. Notes 1 For more detailed information on Gottfried’s biography and the case see, e.g., Oehlenschläger as well as Meter, Gesche Gottfried . 2 In 1831, Voget published Lebensgeschichte der Giftmörderin Gesche Margarethe Gottfried , where he elaborates on biographical facts as well as the trial. Voget’s detailed behavioral observations illustrate his hovering between explanation and condemnation. Gift , however, interprets the figure of Voget far more unambiguously, e.g., he calls Gottfried a “kalt berechnende[.] Mörderin” (65). 3 See, e.g., Heuser 294: “Mit großer Hingebung und Liebe pflegte sie ihren Vater bis zu seinem Tode. Gesche wich nicht von seinem Krankenbett. Kein 262 Marina Rauchenbacher Weg war ihr zuviel.” Kesper-Biermann emphasizes that Gottfried satisfies “gesellschaftliche[.] Verhaltensnormen” (162). 4 See, e.g., Chamisso; Fassbinder; Meter, Die Verhöre . 5 See, e.g., Scholz. In 1842 the case was discussed in a Pitaval for the first time (see Hitzig et al. 256—395). Henceforth, plenty of criminal psychological studies elaborated on this case (see, e.g., Oehlenschläger). The term Pitaval derives from the French lawyer François Gayot de Pitaval and designates a collection of criminal cases. 6 Hillary L. Chute explains that the term graphic narrative “designates a booklength work composed in the medium of comics. While the much more common term graphic novel has been gaining momentum as a publishing label since the 1980s.” She further explains that “even as they [graphic narratives] deliberately place stress on official histories and traditional modes of transmitting history, they are deeply invested in their own accuracy and historicity” (3). For further critical investigations of the term graphic novel see, e.g., Frahm. 7 See, e.g., Kupczyńska; Nieberle and Strowick. 8 In a review for the Frankfurter Rundschau , Christian Schlüter even compares Yelin’s drawings with Piranesi’s Carceri d’invenzione (“Mörderin ohne Grund” n. pag.). Brigitte Preissler states in a review for Die Welt that there is an “Atmosphäre universalen Grusels” (“Das schleichende Gift des Feminismus” n. pag.). 9 See, e.g., Steinaecker. 10 Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s play Bremer Freiheit (1971) interprets Gottfried’s deeds as a kind of liberation from suppression and violence. Gift is reminiscent of this interpretation too. The young writer is repeatedly confronted with rigid gender roles and misogyny: “Da wundert es mich nicht … / / … wenn in dieser Stadt Frauen dahin kommen … / / … ihre Männer zu vergiften! ” (71). See Kesper-Biermann (163-64). 11 Thomas Kögel even adjudicates on the text: “Die moralische Beurteilung des Geschehens bleibt dem Leser nicht selbst überlassen, sondern wird ihm von der Erzählerin (oder, besser gesagt: vom Autor) aufgezwungen” (n. pag.). 12 The imprint explains that all text passages of Gottfried are quoted from the original record of interrogation. 13 “Mäusebutter” ( mouse butter ) denotes a mixture of arsenic and lard. Commonly it has been used for killing vermin. 14 In an interview with Ute Friedrich, Barbara Yelin outlines that the specific interrelation of image and text leads to a “neue Art von Stofflichkeit, und deshalb ist der Comic auch ein eigenständiges Medium” (29). Opposing Viewpoints: Politics of Gazing in the Graphic Novel Gift 263 15 This composition seems closely related to the subject. For instance, Yelin’s graphic novel Irmina , which deals with the Second World War, has a more variable structure altogether. See Brett Sterling’s essay in this issue. 16 See http: / / www.portraitindex.de/ documents/ obj/ 34008640. 17 See, e.g., the pivotal studies of Mulvey as well as Jones (in particular 63—75). 18 Gift repeatedly stresses this interpretation (see, e.g., 39—43; 68—69; 98—101). 19 For the ritual of the execution see Foucault, in particular 32—69. 20 For elaborations on the functionalization of perspective and spatial arrangements in comics see Schüwer 87—207. Works Cited Chamisso, Adelbert von. “Die Giftmischerin.” Sämtliche Werke in zwei Bänden. Vol. 1. Ed. Werner Feudel and Christel Laufer. Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1980. 191—93. Chute, Hillary L. Graphic Women. Life Narrative & Contemporary Comics . New York: Columbia UP , 2010. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1. The Movement-Image . Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. Didi-Huberman, Georges. Was wir sehen blickt uns an. Zur Metapsychologie des Bildes. Trans. Markus Sedlaczek. Munich: Fink, 1999. Essmann, Jens. “Zwischenstopp Bremen.” titel. kulturmagazin 10 June 2010. Web. 26 Jan. 2016. Fassbinder, Rainer Werner. “Bremer Freiheit. Frau Gesche Gottfried. Ein bürgerliches Trauerspiel.” Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Antitheater 2: Das Kaffeehaus (nach Goldoni) / Bremer Freiheit / Blut am Hals der Katze. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972. 63—95. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. Frahm, Ole. “Die Fiktion des Graphischen Romans.” Bild ist Text ist Bild. Narration und Ästhetik in der Graphic Novel . Ed. Susanne Hochreiter and Ursula Klingenböck. Bielefeld: transcript, 2014. 53—77. Friedrich, Ute, and Barbara Yelin. “Eine neue Art von Stofflichkeit. Ein Gespräch mit der Comic-Zeichnerin Barbara Yelin über Unmittelbarkeit und Leerstellen.” Prinzip Synthese: Der Comic. Ed. Mathis Bicker, Ute Friedrich, and Joachim Trinkwitz. Bonn: Weidle, 2011. 29—32. Heuser, Edith. “Die ehrsame Mörderin. Der Fall Gesche Margarethe Gottfried.” Der neue Pitaval. Justizirrtum. Der Fall Kölling-Haas und fünf weitere internationale Kriminalfälle. Ed. Robert A. Stemmle. Munich: Kurt Desch, 1965. 273—322. Hitzig, Julius, Willibald Alexis, and Anton Vollert, eds. Der neue Pitaval. Eine Sammlung der interessantesten Criminalgeschichten aller Länder aus älterer und neuerer Zeit. Vol 2. Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1842. 264 Marina Rauchenbacher Jones, Amelia. Seeing Differently. A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts . London and New York: Routledge, 2012. Kesper-Biermann, Sylvia: “Ein kompromissloser Blick aus der weiblichen Perspektive? Geschlechterkonstruktionen im Geschichtscomic am Beispiel von Gift .” Geschlecht und Geschichte in populären Medien. Ed. Elisabeth Cheauré, Sylvia Paletschek, and Nina Reusch, Bielefeld: transcript, 2013. 153-71. Kögel, Thomas. “Gift.” Comicgate.de 26 July 2010. Web. 28 Jan. 2016. Kupczyńska, Kalina. “ Gendern Comics, wenn sie erzählen? Über einige Aspekte der Gender -Narratologie und ihre Anwendung in der Comic-Analyse.” Bild ist Text ist Bild. Narration und Ästhetik in der Graphic Novel . Ed. Susanne Hochreiter and Ursula Klingenböck. Bielefeld: transcript, 2014. 213—32. Lacher, Reimar F. “‘das Bild der Seele, oder die Seele selbst, sichtbar gemacht’. Das Gesicht als Membran.” Von Mensch zu Mensch. Porträtkunst und Porträtkultur der Aufklärung . Ed. Reimar F. Lacher. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2010. 29—39. -. “Daniel Berger (nach Friedrich Reclam): Heinrich Prinz von Preußen (1774)”. Von Mensch zu Mensch. Porträtkunst und Porträtkultur der Aufklärung . Ed. Reimar F. Lacher. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2010. 126—27. Meter, Peer. Gesche Gottfried. Eine Bremer Tragödie . Bremen: Edition Temmen, 2010. -. Die Verhöre der Gesche Gottfried [1988]. Worpswede: Gosia, 1996. Meter, Peer, and Barbara Yelin. Gift . Berlin: Reprodukt, 2010. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader . Ed. Amelia Jones. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge, 2010. 57—65. Nieberle, Sigrid, and Elisabeth Strowick. “Narrating Gender. Eine Einleitung.” Narration und Geschlecht. Texte - Medien - Episteme. Ed. Sigrid Nieberle and Elisabeth Strowick. Cologne / Weimar / Vienna: Böhlau, 2006. 7—19. Oehlenschläger, Eckart. “Nachwort.” Friedrich Leopold Voget. Lebensgeschichte der Giftmörderin Gesche Margarethe Gottfried . Abridged version. Ed. Eckart Oehlenschläger. Bremen: Friedrich Röver, 1976. 376—85. Preissler, Brigitte. “Das schleichende Gift des Feminismus.” Die Welt 6 Apr. 2010. Web. 28 Jan. 2016. Schlüter, Christian. “Mörderin ohne Grund.” Frankfurter Rundschau 12 Mar. 2010. Web. 27 Jan. 2016. Scholz, Ludwig. Die Gesche Gottfried. Eine kriminalpsychologische Studie . Berlin: S. Karger, 1913. Schüwer, Martin. Wie Comics erzählen. Grundriss einer intermedialen Erzähltheorie der grafischen Literatur . Trier: WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2008. Steinaecker, Thomas von. “Arsen und Sahnetorte.” Süddeutsche Zeitung 30 Mar. 2010. Web. 27 Jan. 2016. Voget, Friedrich Leopold. Lebensgeschichte der Giftmörderin Gesche Margarethe Gottfried [1831]. Abridged version. Ed. Eckart Oehlenschläger. Bremen: Friedrich Röver, 1976. Yelin, Barbara. Irmina . Berlin: Reprodukt, 2014. Opposing Viewpoints: Politics of Gazing in the Graphic Novel Gift 265 Images Fig. 1. Meter and Yelin, Gift 52. © Reprodukt/ Peer Meter, Barbara Yelin and Reprodukt. Fig. 2. Meter and Yelin, Gift 32. © Reprodukt/ Peer Meter, Barbara Yelin and Reprodukt. Fig. 3. Meter and Yelin, Gift 33. © Reprodukt/ Peer Meter, Barbara Yelin and Reprodukt. Fig. 4. Meter and Yelin, Gift 139. © Reprodukt/ Peer Meter, Barbara Yelin and Reprodukt. Fig. 5. Meter and Yelin, Gift 173. © Reprodukt/ Peer Meter, Barbara Yelin and Reprodukt. Intertextual References in Eickmeyer’s Im Westen nichts Neues: Eine Graphic Novel 267 Intertextual References in Eickmeyer’s Im Westen nichts Neues: Eine Graphic Novel Lynn Marie Kutch and Damianos Grammatikopoulos Kutztown University and Rutgers University Abstract: This essay considers Peter Eickmeyer’s adaptation of Remarque’s classic text Im Westen Nichts Neues . Although Eickmeyer’s version does modify and recast traditional properties of comics, it also amalgamates artistic impulses from other eras and formats to create a comic art character not so easily described with conventional comics criteria. Im Westen draws on both verbal and pictorial modes of narration in order to produce a largely unchanged, if somewhat abbreviated, but highly intertextual version of Remarque’s original novel. Through detailed comparisons between Remarque’s original text, visual art traditions, and film, the essay demonstrates that instead of merely imbuing the original novel with illustrations as some critics have claimed, Im Westen responds to and assimilates other adaptations of the source text and works of art that have shaped a public understanding of World War I. The essay argues that Im Westen reveals that Eickmeyer indeed gained more artistic inspiration from other adaptations of Remarque’s text than the source text itself. Keywords: All Quiet on the Western Front, Im Westen nichts Neues, World War I, comics, graphic novels, adaptation studies, intermediality, intertextuality, film studies In his remarks published as an appendix to Peter Eickmeyer’s Im Westen nichts Neues: Eine Graphic Novel (henceforth Im Westen ), Thomas Schneider, director of the Erich Maria Remarque-Friedenszentrum in Osnabrück, writes about the odd publication circumstances of the Classics Illustrated version of Remarque’s original, despite the fact that the Illustrierte Klassiker series began appearing in Germany in the 1960s: 268 Lynn Marie Kutch and Damianos Grammatikopoulos Allerdings wurde eine deutsche Übersetzung und Ausgabe der Adaption von Delbourgo nie publiziert, obwohl nahezu alle anderen Hefte von Classics Illustrated auf Deutsch erschienen. Hier zeigten sich die in der Bundesrepublik immer noch vorherrschenden Ressentiments gegen Remarque als ‘Nestbeschmutzer’ und ‘Vaterlandsverräter’, die seit der Hetze durch die Nationalsozialisten und andere Kriegsbefürworter bereits in den 1920er und 1930er Jahren in der Weimarer Republik in die Welt gesetzt worden waren und auch im Nachkriegsdeutschland eine ungebrochene Kontinuität erlebten. (n. pag.) Presumably, many Germans would not consider the comic book format of Classics Illustrated , whose aesthetic did not differ so much from their contemporary Superman comics, an appropriate medium to convey Germany’s military experience during World War I. Reasons for this hesitation become clearer when one regards the reception history of Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel Im Westen nichts Neues , which had received mixed reviews, not surprisingly divided along national lines. Historically, American critiques were largely positive and lauded the novel as a powerful testament against war, but the novel’s themes proved too controversial for a German audience (Wagener 33—34). In a more striking contrast, readers in countries on the winning side classified the book as high literature while readers in defeated countries viewed it as a political manifesto with a potential negative impact on individuals and political factions (Barker and Last 35—36). This observation underscores the enduring critical commentary surrounding Remarque’s text and confirms the potential for controversy and debate about a German adaptation. Eickmeyer’s Im Westen joins this cultural dialogue at a pivotal time, as the German-language Illustrierte Klassiker series, known for its adaptations of celebrated literary classics, lists an upcoming publication date of 2020. Although Im Westen does modify and recast comics properties, it also amalgamates artistic impulses from other eras and formats to create a comic art not so easily described with conventional criteria. The ongoing hesitation in Germany to publish Im Westen nichts Neues as an Illustrierte Klassiker lends a certain timeliness to the discussion of the aesthetic means with which Im Westen conveys Remarque’s story. This connection to the book series has particular relevance because part of Im Westen ’s aesthetic is grounded in the tradition of abridged books and in particular the format that can be found in the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books and The Classics Illustrated book series. In these collections, considerable chunks of the original novels were omitted, but the selected passages chosen for the respective editions remained for the most part unaltered. Classics Illustrated offered modified, shortened, and easy-to-read accounts of the original texts in large print featuring illustrations on almost every other Intertextual References in Eickmeyer’s Im Westen nichts Neues: Eine Graphic Novel 269 page. As a point of comparison to Im Westen , an adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front was published in the United States through the series of Classics Illustrated in 1952. Unlike Eickmeyer’s text, however, the Classics Illustrated version is highly sequential in nature, featuring elements distinctive to the comic book medium such as speech-balloons, conventional panels and captions. In surveying the particular look and style of the cartoon-like overlays that consistently appear throughout Im Westen , it would also seem that Eickmeyer’s text reflects some aesthetic characteristics of the 1952 Classics Illustrated version of All Quiet on the Western Front , offering initial evidence for our argument that Eickmeyer took more artistic inspiration from adaptations of Remarque’s text than the source text itself. Eickmeyer departs from the uniformly sized panels and comic colors in favor of a hybrid creation that fuses more than a century of artistic impulses and examples of artistic reception of war. Very similar to the above-mentioned published formats that blend elements of a source text and original pictorial complement by individual artists, Im Westen draws on both verbal and pictorial modes of narration in order to produce a largely unchanged, if somewhat abbreviated, but highly intertextual version of Remarque’s original novel. When a comic or graphic novel adaptation of a classic work of literature appears, critics often maintain that the artists provide a very clear visual rendition of the work and thus deliver an unambiguous, pre-interpreted version of the source text that essentially prevents readers from developing their own interpretation and personal association with the literary work. Corresponding to this form of analysis, some of Eickmeyer’s critics have given Im Westen the perfunctory label “illustrierter Roman” (Witte n. pag.). For other critics, the designation “graphic novel” as part of Eickmeyer’s title has sparked a discussion—all too familiar to comic book theorists—about what constitutes a comic or graphic novel, which leads us to a note about terminology. Over the past few decades, scholars have come to use these words interchangeably: we have decided to use the term comics. In this essay, we respond in part to a challenge of sorts issued by one of Germany’s leading comics scholars, Ole Frahm: “Es müsste vielmehr untersucht werden, wie Krieg im Comic überhaupt darstellbar ist” (266). Frahm’s general statement takes on particular significance in Germany and when speaking about World War I, because rendering the war theme itself has proven problematic in the past. Especially with regard to Im Westen nichts Neues , some historians have divided accounts of wartime experiences into the historical front, which explains by means of fact, and the “Western front of literature and pop culture,” which, like comics, stylizes those facts to produce a certain message (Badsey 51). Im Westen , published exactly one-hundred years after the start of World War I, underscores intertextual characteristics that gesture to an equally long 270 Lynn Marie Kutch and Damianos Grammatikopoulos history of portraying the Great War in art. We argue in this essay that instead of merely imbuing the original novel with illustrations, Im Westen responds to and assimilates other adaptations of the source text and works of art that have shaped a public understanding of World War I. Incorporating “Reminiszenzen an andere Visualisierungen dieses Romans” (Comickunst n. pag.), Im Westen ’s intertextuality is built on a system of graphic quotations and visual citations from across media and time periods, including visual art and film. At this point, a brief outline of standard comics characteristics is necessary as these criteria still tend to inform readers’ expectations when reading comics and did in fact form the basis for much of Im Westen ’s criticism. Will Eisner, whose A Contract with God (1978) has often been credited with being the first graphic novel, uses the term “sequential art” to describe the storytelling method of comics. Eisner calls sequential art “a means of creative expression, a distinct discipline, an art and literary form that deals with the arrangement of pictures or images and words to narrate a story or dramatize an idea” (5). Eisner also adds the very significant distinction that sequential art is an “‘art of communication’ more than simply an application of art” (6). In other words, sequential art has distinctive and powerful storytelling qualities. Scott McCloud, whose Understanding Comics (1993) has become the standard theoretical text for comics studies, offers the following definition of sequential art: “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in a deliberate sequence” (9). Although this definition may sound heavily simplified, Understanding Comics meticulously dissects the medium of comics into smaller identifiable components, such as panels, speech, and thought balloons, which have come to represent a vocabulary, grammar, and syntax of comics art. Similar to McCloud and Eisner, Thierry Groensteen has elaborated the notion of sequentiality, arguing that a single image does not have the same storytelling potential as a series or sequence of images that work together. If we adhere to standard definitions of comics, and specifically sequentiality, then Im Westen ’s critics are correct in saying that it does not conform. But, as Charles Hatfield has argued in Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature : “[R]eaders are guided by expectations born of habit, and artists by ‘rules’ born of long usage, but the makeup of the page need not follow any set pattern. […] [W]ithin the larger field of word/ image study, comics are a wandering variable” (xiv). Likewise Michael Levine, in his reading of Art Spiegelman’s Maus , discusses the potential of alternative patterns and page layouts that build upon the basic comic element of the panel. Levine defines the panel as a “picture window,” or “a kind of window with a picture on it […]. For not only can each window be broken down into individual panes, but these subwindows can in their turn be reworked into a mise-èn-abime structure of panes within panes” (Levine Intertextual References in Eickmeyer’s Im Westen nichts Neues: Eine Graphic Novel 271 25). Whether talking about a panel, a splash page, or any other form of framed picture, static or not, the possibility of “panes within panes” always exists. As Levine formulates it when discussing Spiegelman: Through this comixing of words and images Spiegelman prompts one to see the panel as a picture and a window, as an oxymoronic “picture window” that must at once be looked at and looked through: looked at because its signifying surface does not simply efface itself, does not merely yield before the authority of a signifying reality or become a transparent means to an end outside itself: looked through because such “picture windows” do open onto other windows, onto the abyssal depths of panes within panes. (Levine 25) Levine’s implication of intertextuality plays a central role in the present analysis because each panel of a comic book, or in this case pages from Im Westen can include references that point readers to other sources and invite them to read the graphic text, with its immense intertextual depth and complexity, in relation to and in dialogue with other works. Despite the absence of traditional panels in Im Westen , the multiple references and allusions on the pages of the book reveal a mise-en-abîme structure (or representation of a work embedded in a work) that opens up windows within windows, panes within panes, panels within panels. This kind of broadly defined intertextuality can of course be applied to every work of art exhibiting such qualities. As Graham Allen remarks in his work Intertextuality : “Intertextuality is one of the most commonly used and misused terms in contemporary critical vocabulary. […] Such a term is in danger of meaning nothing more than whatever each particular critic wishes it to mean” (2). Our study of Eickmeyer’s graphic novel employs the same term equally as broadly and chiefly as a means to foreground the multiple references that the work’s pages exhibit. Those references, as we shall highlight throughout our study, urge readers and critics alike to read them in conjunction with the source text and its cinematic and graphic adaptations. Throughout Im Westen every page is marked by visual quotations from a plethora of works and art forms. The same sources and references, embedded in Eickmeyer’s full-page images, function as panels within the pages that provide additional information to Remarque’s unaltered albeit abridged text, thus complicating the already highly complex source text. While it can be argued that Im Westen does not contain many conventional comics features, or enough to move it beyond the category of illustrated novel, it does, however, make the full-page splash panels and double splash pages into Hatfield’s “wandering variable.” In conventional terms, comics artists usually employ splash pages, also sometimes called bleeds, sparingly in order to emphasize a certain scene, theme, or motif. McCloud articulates the aesthetic 272 Lynn Marie Kutch and Damianos Grammatikopoulos affect of these types of panels or pages and the technique’s ability to convey timelessness: “[t]ime is no longer constrained by the familiar icon of the closed panel, but instead hemorrhages and escapes into timeless space. Such images can set the mood or a sense of place for whole scenes through their lingering timeless presence” (103). In his discussion of Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde , Charles Acheson describes how the graphic artist “destabilizes the normative sequential flow by incorporating a bleed panel,” which functions as a moment of pause “often employing complex backgrounds that amplify the timeless sensation found in such panels” (302). Comics artists also often deploy these panels or pages as a means of surprise, creating a sort of shock effect when readers turn the page and are confronted with a full-page panel. As Alan Moore remarks in his reflections on the comic book medium: “Since I’m aware that pages 2 and 3 are on left-hand and right-hand pages respectively, it would seem advantageous to save any big visual surprise until page 4, so that the reader doesn’t see it until he turns over. Thus, page 3 ends with a teaser” (36). The act of turning the page acts in this instance as a “cut,” analogous to the term and function used in film, because readers can only assume what will follow. The full-page splash panel or double splash page should ideally catch readers by surprise when they actually get to see the next page. With its use of splash pages Im Westen , however, does not merely interrupt or “destabilize” a “normative sequential flow,” or employ them as an element of surprise. Instead, the majority of Im Westen consists of mostly double-splash pages. Im Westen ’s version of the destabilization technique occurs when it interrupts, to the annoyance of some of the critics, Eickmeyer’s strikingly crafted paintings with the large text boxes or with the slightly cartoonish-looking characters that appear in smaller panels on top of the larger panels. A closer examination of one of these pages, the poppy field scene (n. pag.), whose layout is representative of many pages in Im Westen , demonstrates the author’s consistent and systematic implementation of splash pages, which taken together mirror the “cumulative effect” of the original, “held together, not by the traditional glue of a developing action […] but rather by broader thematic links” (Barker and Last 48). The double splash page depicting the poppy field offers much symbolic potential and reflects the original text’s interspersing of action and rest, combat and contentment (Wagener 18). As Eickmeyer explained in a 2014 interview with a Bielefeld television station, despite the page’s cheerful colors, poppies are traditionally viewed as symbols that commemorate war dead; and each one in this painting, according to Eickmeyer, represents someone lost in war (“Im Profil”). The final layout printed in the graphic novel, however, reveals additional layers of meaning. Upon viewing this page, perhaps readers can relate to critics’ frustration of not being able to take in the entire background picture Intertextual References in Eickmeyer’s Im Westen nichts Neues: Eine Graphic Novel 273 without the interference of the smaller illustrated blocks and overlaid text. Most readers accustomed to comics would also probably agree that a sequential set of panels and related text is notably missing. Although the page’s superimposed elements do in fact hinder a clear view of the landscape painting, they perform an important narrative task. The verbal component provides the narrator’s description of one particular day and the conditions under which the soldiers live. The text is largely positive, with commentary on receiving mail and enjoying the blue sky and poppies, which the double page allows the author to show in great abundance. The smaller overlaid panels zoom in on individual soldiers reading their mail or contemplating other aspects of their living conditions. Another smaller panel offsets the larger blocks of text to create the effect of a sidebar, with the specially selected quotation: “Kropp holt einen Brief hervor. ‘Ich soll euch grüßen von Kantorek.’ Wir lachen. Müller wirft seine Zigarette weg und sagt: ‘Ich wollte, der wäre hier’” (n. pag.). The last sentence on the page reads “Wir beschließen, ihn nachmittags zu besuchen,” following a dialogue about a comrade, Kemmerich, who “liegt in St. Joseph—er habe einen Oberschenkeldurchschuß.” Conveying a much different impression than the original painting alone, the layered details suggest that these fleeting idyllic moments are interrupted by the day-to-day reality of war, the desire to see a long-lost friend or to visit one who has sustained injury in battle. 274 Lynn Marie Kutch and Damianos Grammatikopoulos In the remainder of this essay, we will explain why it is more important to concentrate on Eickmeyer’s departure from common comics standards and delineate how that divergence draws specific and sustained attention to his system of visual citation. Eickmeyer adapts recognizable icons of other anti-war artists to create “windows” similar to those described above and, in the words of one of Im Westen ’s reviewers, “einen neuen Zugang […] zum Erinnerungsschatz aller Europäer” (Lüddemann n. pag.). Especially important about the concept of visual citation is that the shared cultural archive from which Eickmeyer draws does not only consist of the recognizable images from other artists and from other time periods but also the corresponding history of criticism for each of the works. As such, they allow a sort of rhetorical shorthand or automatic indexing of themes and motifs for Eickmeyer’s readers. The process of citing elements of a recognized work of art inside another work of art, as opposed to simply duplicating or providing a print of the same, emphasizes the aspect of adaptation that requires entering into dialogue with the artists, their artwork, and their interpretations of the war phenomenon. As mentioned in the introductory paragraphs, in addition to focusing on Im Westen ’s non-compliance with conventional criteria of comics and graphic novels, critics have also withheld the term “graphic novel” when writing about the book, instead labeling it an “illustrated novel.” If we regard the book as an adaptation especially notable for its visual quotations and references to other media, then we might agree with the critic who called Im Westen “bildgewaltig,” containing: “Seiten, die man aufgrund ihrer Ausdruckskraft immer wieder ansehen kann.” 1 Similar to war-themed films, and especially Lewis Milestone’s 1930 film adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front , Im Westen exhibits a keen “eye for mass movement, as in battle painting” (Williams 172). In fact, some of Im Westen ’s landscapes and full-page splash panels share noticeable characteristics with battle painting and in particular British battle painting, which does not have an equivalent in German visual art trends of that time. According to Paul Fox, these battle paintings often served as a type of cultural response to war, and “as a component of ‛a culture of war’” from the early twentieth century (812). Eickmeyer’s text cites aspects of these works of art, mimicking select characteristics of the pastoral paintings, but also reinterpreting individual portraits by imbuing them with cartoon-like or at least non-realistically sketched attributes. Although there are many to compare, we have chosen to discuss in particular James Clark’s oil painting The Great Sacrifice (1914), which bears aesthetic similarities to some of Im Westen ’s splash pages, especially the brush strokes of oil painting. The Great Sacrifice depicts a young soldier who has been killed in battle beneath a vision of Christ on the cross. The bluish colors and ordered composition convey a mood of peacefulness for the fallen but also for the paint- Intertextual References in Eickmeyer’s Im Westen nichts Neues: Eine Graphic Novel 275 ing’s viewers, who should ideally understand the purpose of battle and war as a necessary sacrifice. The most prevalent visual citation, and one that draws an immediate connection to Eickmeyer’s creations, is the washed-out oil paint look that the background of Clark’s painting and several of Eickmeyer’s paintings exhibit. The works do not only share this aesthetic similarity, but also thematic overtones as well: other pages in Im Westen feature the dying or deceased soldier as well as religious iconography. In contrast to the largely propagandistic British wartime paintings, however, Im Westen undercuts the plaintive, even positive, message with its use of dark foreboding colors, grotesquely drawn figures, and misshapen crosses. According to Fox, the intention behind the Great War paintings, to which The Great Sacrifice belongs, was to “memorialize and mythologize the war’s events for future generations” (811). Additionally, this sub-genre of paintings presents “nothing more than simply visual narratives lacking any complex message beyond an allusion to mankind’s faithful devotion in time of crisis.” They portray with their images the theme of sacrifice, “the universal watchword of the moment” (Harrington 147). Although Im Westen superficially simulates aesthetic aspects of these war paintings, it also calls this devotion and admirable sacrifice into question. This examination aligns more with the following assessment of the Great War itself as the anti-pastoral art “without heroes, without a tradition, and without Nature, in which men were martyrs and the earth was a devastated anti-landscape” (Hynes n. pag.). Im Westen invites an interrogation of the battle paintings with their propagated straightforward meanings by adding the blocks of text and modifying the depiction of the soldiers into cartoon-like renditions, more aesthetically aligned with the comic style of the Classics Illustrated renditions. In this way, Eickmeyer’s message conflicts with the romantic notions and religiously guided illustrations of self-sacrifice depicted in much of the battle painting. Similar to the 1930 film version by Lewis Milestone, the graphic novel shows through its layering technique a celebration of the anti-war sensibility and a critique of the “inadequate myopic representation of the trenches” (Westwell 22). The visual “interruptions,” as well as the visual citations of artwork that much more resemble Otto Dix’s grotesque anti-war series Der Krieg , essentially unsettle the larger idealized landscape of propagated feelings, as seen with artists like Clark, toward the war and present the anti-war sentiment of the Western front. Because of its multi-layered intertextuality, some stylistic similarities do in fact thread through Im Westen , but the work is also marked by stylistic variations, which correspond to the wide spectrum of “graphic quotations” that Eickmeyer employs. Further examples of intertextual visual arts references from the early twentieth century include prints by Otto Dix (1891—1969). As opposed to 276 Lynn Marie Kutch and Damianos Grammatikopoulos a mural or landscape format, which could correspond to a splash or bleed panel in comics terms, Dix’s canvases (all taken from his series 1924 Der Krieg ) more readily find their comics equivalents in the single panel. One very recognizable example is a cited version of Otto Dix’s Sturmtruppe geht unter Gas vor (1924). In the original painting, the oversized eyeholes of the gas masks make direct contact with the viewer, the comics art equivalent of direct address (Cumming 38). The soldiers hold weapons aloft and their posture suggests their forward motion. Dix’s soldiers look belligerent and ready to fight while Eickmeyer’s are at rest, waiting. Eickmeyer juxtaposes the following text over the image, words that could also provide a fitting caption for the reinterpreted Dix painting: Die Tage gehen hin, und jede Stunde ist unbegreiflich und selbstverständlich. Die Angriffe wechseln mit Gegenangriffen, und langsam häufen sich auf dem Trichterfeld zwischen den Gräben die Toten. Die Verwundeten, die nicht sehr weit liegen, können wir meistens holen. Manche aber müssen lange liegen, und wir hören sie sterben. (n. pag.) As mentioned above, visually cited art carries many of the associations and interpretations of the original source texts, in this case those of Dix, who during Intertextual References in Eickmeyer’s Im Westen nichts Neues: Eine Graphic Novel 277 the time of the Weimar Republic expressed his vehement reaction to World War I through his paintings. Relevant for the present discussion of an adaptation of Im Westen nichts Neues , Fox asserts that Dix’s artwork has much in common thematically with German war literature “that takes as its subject personal experience at the front” (250). With his art, Dix, a veteran, invites “his spectators to gaze at a self-portrait” (254). The careful combination of visually cited art, with all of its previous associations, Eickmeyer’s version, and the original line from the novel cooperate to intensify the “messages” of, to use Eickmeyer’s term, the Antikriegsklassiker Remarque and Dix. In addition to the highly identifiable Sturmtruppe , Eickmeyer’s text also visually cites throughout the book prominent motifs found in Dix’s Der Krieg , revealing overlapping themes between the original novel, Dix’s work, and Im Westen ’s visual quotations or citations. One such motif can be seen on Eickmeyer’s cover page, which shows black, white, and grey barren trees in a devastated and ravaged landscape. Similarly, Dix’s Verlassene Stellung bei Neuville features the same coloration and a dry, broken tree that displays striking similarities to Im Westen ’s cover art. Dix’s print goes further to depict the ravaged bodies and dismembered body parts that complete the World War I landscape. Although not on the cover, Im Westen also includes these motifs of mutilated bodies and severely damaged natural landscapes throughout the book. Incidentally, the resemblance between Eickmeyer’s cover and a still from Milestone’s film, a scene towards the end of the film (2: 05: 23), is even more striking. With Der Krieg , Dix thematized the nauseating reality of war and the human manifestations of endurance as well as depravity, for example by explicitly sketching military hospital amputees and soldiers vomiting from a face as opposed to a mouth, as the fronts of their heads have been shattered. By juxtaposing and recasting cited or quoted examples of traditions in visual art, Im Westen affords a new look into these realities and paradoxes for a new generation of readers. In another example of a striking visual quotation, Eickmeyer’s cover image can also be seen as a direct reference to a photograph by Ernst Friedrich. It is significant to note here that Friedrich’s Krieg dem Kriege (1924) , from which the cited photo was taken, captured the horror of the Great War through the photographic medium, which has traditionally been seen as a technical and accurate means to capture reality. This notion has been heavily disputed, with opponents arguing that photographs do not necessarily act as a mirror of reality, but Friedrich’s work achieved its goal by becoming one of the most influential and powerful anti-war books of its time. In areas of media specificity, some might argue that photographic coverage influences the viewer more immediately and convincingly than strictly verbal or even graphic texts that contain stylized pages and panels. This distinction between painting and photography or film is fitting 278 Lynn Marie Kutch and Damianos Grammatikopoulos for Im Westen because many of its pages are prints of large paintings that Eickmeyer completed and subsequently merged with excerpts from the original text. Contrasting the notion that media such as photography and film create a more immediate experience, Acheson argues that graphic novels do not eliminate the “like being there” effect: instead they “engage readers to understand the event through exploring their responses when completing closure” (306). The definition of closure in the context of reading graphic texts has to do with readers taking visual and linguistic cues in order to build a “unified reality” that bridges any gaps between panels or pages (McCloud 67). The graphic novel alternately shows life and death throughout the book, which corresponds to Dix’s and Friedrich’s motifs depicting the overall thematic of the drive for survival alongside those depicting inevitable and unpreventable death. Philipp Gutbrod writes about Dix’s acceptance of war as a natural phenomenon that must be experienced to be believed and appreciated: “Dix had absorbed the human impact of war and its visual and acoustic materialization with all his senses” (34). Eickmeyer did not experience war in the trenches as both Remarque and Dix had; but his work displays clear parallels to other artworks. The striking similarities between Im Westen and its visual citations suggest the definitive and direct aesthetic and thematic influences of these previous works on Eickmeyer’s text; and the embedded citations convey to readers the impact of war as depicted by significant examples from a history of war-themed art and literature. Another very prominent and recognizable intertextual reference is Picasso’s well-known anti-war-themed mural Guernica (1937). Like other artists of warthemed works of art, Eickmeyer seems to have reached decisions on how to represent the catastrophe without trivializing it, as Picasso also had to in his composition of Guernica . Eickmeyer’s choice of this source painting is particularly intriguing as Picasso himself also drew inspiration from other artworks during the creation of Guernica . One source that he used is Peter Paul Rubens’ 1638 The Horrors of War . Although the aesthetics are clearly very different, the compositions of the two paintings correspond to one another and convey a similar sense of hectic chaos. A second inspiration for Picasso was Jacob Jordaens’s Diogenes Searching for an Honest Man from 1642, from which Picasso takes the motif of the light bearer (seen in Picasso’s own Minotauromachy from 1935), which also conveys a sense of uncontrollable turmoil and disorder as people, creatures, and objects frame a crazed-looking Diogenes in the center. In analyzing Guernica, Richard Rhodes comments that “every image has its double or triple”; and that Picasso performs his version of graphic citations in order “to anchor and extend Guernica into history, to deepen it with the visual equivalent of allusion and metaphor” (22). These instances of influence and their purposes also hold true for Im Westen . Intertextual References in Eickmeyer’s Im Westen nichts Neues: Eine Graphic Novel 279 Eickmeyer’s original painting, as opposed to the one that appears in the graphic novel with the overlaid panels, comes across as a disjointed hybrid, featuring an enlargement of the horse’s head central to Picasso’s painting and a more realistic rendering of soldiers and their horses, some still alive, some injured and dying. While the graphic novel version also, like Picasso’s, provides a non-realistic, stylized version of the horse and other objects in the painting, the graphic novel page achieves a different composition than the original painting with its added blocks of text. A smaller panel to the right seems to refer to the horse seen in Picasso’s Minotauromachy . The text that appears in the box on the same page as the crying and grotesquely disfigured horses reads as follows: “Es wird stiller, doch das Schreien hört nicht auf” (n. pag.). The scene primarily concerns the “allergrößte Gemeinheit, daß Tiere im Kriege sind,” describing “der Jammer der Welt” that occurs when horses are shot and injured. Undoubtedly readers’ familiarity with the Picasso painting instantly provides additional layers of meaning. Even those not familiar with the visually cited work, however, can view Eickmeyer’s layout of image and words on their own merit and experience how the comics medium “possess[es] unique elements that expand the role of the traumatic witness” (Acheson 305). By remediating the central horse motif from Guernica , Im Westen seems to be answering the same question that Picasso had while composing Guernica: how can one express abhorrence via visual means? Eickmeyer’s adaptation answers this question in its own intertextual way by merging elements of other works of art whose creators also used art in an attempt at an answer to that question. 280 Lynn Marie Kutch and Damianos Grammatikopoulos Since its inception in the 1950s and up to the late 1980s, the notion of fidelity, and especially fidelity of film adaptations to literary source texts, has dominated the scholarly field of adaptation studies. The fidelity argument privileges the source text as a self-contained and original work and views the adaptation as merely a condensed, visual alternative to celebrated literature. Despite George Bluestone’s seminal work Novel into Film (1968) and his media-specific approach that broke new ground within the field in the late 1950s, the theoretical debate about film adaptations continued to center on fidelity until the early 1980s. The last two decades of adaptation studies, however, have begun to emphasize more and more the intertextual dimension of adaptations. 2 In his article Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation , for instance, Robert Stam reflects on the way that film adaptations operate on a tense intertextual level that seems to be an integral part of the adaptation process: “Film adaptations, then, are caught up in the ongoing whirl of intertextual reference and transformation, of texts generating other texts in an endless process of recycling, transformation, and transmutation, with no clear point of origin” (66). Stam challenges the supremacy of source texts by emphasizing the intertext in which texts are rooted: Adaptations, then, can take an activist stance toward their source novels, inserting them into a much broader intertextual dialogism. An adaptation, in this sense, is less an attempted resuscitation of an originary word than a turn in an ongoing dialogical process. The concept of intertextual dialogism suggests that every text forms an intersection of textual surfaces. All texts are tissues of anonymous formulae, variations on those formulae, conscious and unconscious quotations, and conflations and inversions or other texts. (64) Following Stam’s reasoning, the novel on which an adaptation of any kind is based becomes only one reference out of many to the original text. In the case of Im Westen, prior film adaptations of Remarque’s novel have become to some degree more significant in terms of their narrative style and choice of imagery than the novel itself. The same can be said about many works of art cited visually in the graphic novel. In addition, text and images do not necessarily have to work together in generating the narrative because the unaltered text from the novel does not require any supplementary images to tell its story. By visualizing key elements of the text and referring to other works of art, however, the images do expand the possibilities of how the text is read. The close reading of the film that follows in this section begins with a thematic approach; that is, how Im Westen follows similar thematic patterns as the 1930 film. The analysis continues with a side-by-side comparison of the same scene in each medium in order to emphasize the visual citations that occur in Intertextual References in Eickmeyer’s Im Westen nichts Neues: Eine Graphic Novel 281 Im Westen . Eickmeyer’s referencing adaptations of Remarque’s novel facilitates a transfer of associations of those works onto Im Westen , while stacking existing media allows the graphic text to reintroduce and reinterpret those associations. For example, Im Westen mirrors certain aspects of Lewis Milestone’s filmic interpretation, which in turn closely correspond to the original novel’s structure. Marzena Sokolowska-Paryż describes this structure: “emotionally appealing scenes alternating with gruesome depictions of the front line and disillusioning experiences” (117). Although the original novel is often associated with strictly gruesome scenes of trench warfare, it does in fact also portray times of contentment, “alternating themes quickly to show a wide range of experiences” (Murdoch 37). Im Westen presents these moments of alternating moods and themes with its vacillation between brightly colored and dark pages. In addition to remediating artwork and pairing those citations with excerpts from the book, Eickmeyer incorporates themes from the novel that are also expressed in filmic versions of Remarque’s novel. Robert Eberwein identifies these conventional scenes of anti-war films: “oppressive scenes of killing,” the “large meal” where men “sit around in a pleasantly lazy manner, simply enjoying being alive,” “the poster of a young girl,” “a hospital” and a “ghostly parade” of “dead soldiers superimposed over a shot of a cemetery” (69). According to Charles Urban, one of the first promoters of cinema as an educational medium: “a series of living pictures imparts more knowledge, in a far more interesting and effective manner, in five minutes, than does an oral lesson of an hour’s duration,” by “stimulating the imagination, especially of the visualizing eye” (qtd. in Orgeron 79). As in a film, the view that the artist provides in his panel when depicting these themes or motifs corresponds to the “camera restricted to confined space” which the viewer cannot escape, emphasizing the “immediacy of the medium” (Williams 187). This is another factor that can intensify the comics reading experience. If the film medium conveys this sense of no escape and immediacy, then the graphic novel medium intensifies these reactions even more, as readers are free to take their time on the page, discovering icons, symbols, and the significance of spatial composition at a much slower pace than viewing a film would allow. Scenes of soldiers “simply enjoying being alive” are predictably sparse throughout the novel, but composition and coloration of these scenes establish a distinct contrast to the battle scenes, which will be discussed in more detail below. The poppy field scene, discussed above, counts as a central episode that fits into the thematic category of more positive or tolerable wartime experience. For those instances, bright blues and a brighter red express feelings of comfort and happiness. A bright blue splash of color toward the center of the page also conveys this sense of contentment, even if fleeting. The soldiers recline in the grass and their faces look peaceful, if thoughtful: “Wir sitzen rund herum, die Hemden 282 Lynn Marie Kutch and Damianos Grammatikopoulos auf den Knien, den Oberkörper nackt in der warmen Luft, die Hände bei der Arbeit” (n. pag). The figures appear cartoon-like against the oil-paint-style background that features broad strokes of the brush. A subsequent scene exhibits the same brush technique to create a darkened sky, but still with obvious hints of the blue that links it to the previous scene. Here, once again content-looking soldiers enjoy engaging in something other than battle: “Tjaden begrüßt und krähend. Dann spielen wir bis in die Nacht Skat” (n. pag.). From that point on, the scenes alternate between hospitals, damaged bodies, and battlefields, with the focus never returning to these contented and relatively peaceful scenes. The depictions of the “oppressive scenes of killing” do not take one form or exhibit one identifiable style in Eickmeyer’s text. Early in the novel, Paul Bäumer describes Behm’s death. His comrades thought he had been killed but he had only been unconscious: “weil er nichts sah und wild vor Schmerzen war, nutzte er keine Deckung aus, so daß er von drüben abgeschossen wurde” (n. pag.). A panel overlaying a watercolor and the box with the text depicts Behm in a trench, his body grotesquely contorted. Unlike a film depiction, his face and physical characteristics cannot be detected: thick black lines outline his body but also distort his features, leaving the reader with the task of interpreting the wounded body, similar to what Bäumer and the other survivors must do: “und wir mußten allein damit fertig werden” (n. pag.). In a later scene, Bäumer and his group arrive to a battlefield strewn with dead bodies. Eickmeyer has chosen once again to present the aftermath of the killing in a more abstract style; again with thick and jagged black lines. Nonetheless, the reader can certainly distinguish the presence of numerous symbols and iconography. Remarque wrote about “[verstreute] Särge und Leichen: Sie sind noch einmal getötet worden” (n. pag.). The torn-up train tracks and bodies are shown among other bodies in a smaller snapshot size panel. Below that panel, the reader can see an abstractly drawn figure with arms outstretched as if crucified. This motif complements the black crosses that adorn the page. Creating another striking image, the narrator describes the utility of a sharpened spade. Across the top of the page with the typical yellow, black, and brown coloration of other battle scenes, soldiers are seen in hand-to-hand combat, using whatever weapons they have at their disposal. Eickmeyer conveys the intimacy of this combat style in a panel that overlays the splash page battle scene. The view is from behind the enemy soldier: the German soldier’s eyes look directly into those of the enemy: “Der geschärfte Spaten ist eine leichtere und vielseitigere Waffe […]; besonders wenn man schräg zwischen Schulter und Brust trifft, spaltet man leicht bis zur Brust durch” (n. pag.). The accompanying image shows the described procedure exactly; and the reader is left to linger on the striking stream of red that contrasts the otherwise subdued colors. Later in the graphic novel, Eickmeyer provides Intertextual References in Eickmeyer’s Im Westen nichts Neues: Eine Graphic Novel 283 visual accompaniment for this part of Remarque’s novel: “Unsere Artillerie ist ausgeschossen—sie hat zu wenig Munition. […] Die Tanks sind vom Gespött zu einer schweren Waffe geworden” (n. pag.). The graphic novel once again deploys bright red, used otherwise sparingly throughout the novel, not to show the crushed bodies, but instead to show blood dripping down the page. We have briefly discussed some of the ways that the graphic novel visualizes scenes from the original novel. We now turn to a discussion of Im Westen ’s intertextuality by engaging in a close reading of a scene from the graphic novel and the same scene in the film adaptations. The very beginning of the graphic novel, a double splash page depicting soldiers waiting in line to get their food rations, displays anew rich intertextual layers. The soldiers in line appear at the bottom of the double splash page along with a building bearing a heavily damaged roof that can be seen at the lower side of the left page. At the bottom of that same page, the front part of a vehicle completes the imagery. A disproportionately large block containing Remarque’s original text occupies the upper left side of the page. Of central importance here, especially with regard to Delbert Mann’s 1979 film adaptation, are a series of panels and captions, eight in total, that fill the double splash page’s main surface. Each individual panel portrays one of the main protagonists: Paul Bäumer’s comrades and friends. The accompanying captions introduce the characters with descriptions taken from Remarque’s original novel, as is the case throughout Im Westen . The page that precedes the aforementioned double splash page, however, contains no images whatsoever, but rather the following passage from the novel: “Dieses Buch soll weder eine Anklage noch ein Bekenntnis sein. Es soll nur den Versuch machen, über eine Generation zu berichten, die vom Krieg zerstört wurde - auch wenn sie seinen Granaten entkam” (Remarque 6). Mann’s film adaptation begins with the same epigraph, translated into English, that precedes Remarque’s novel. 3 In the opening scene of the film and before the opening credits, the viewer sees the same passage at the bottom of the screen before its gradual move upward and off the screen. The voice-over narrator provides an acoustic dimension to the epigraph by reading aloud the text the viewer sees on screen. This gesture might seem superfluous and repetitive at first, but it is, as we shall see, anything but redundant. The opening credits follow, running against the backdrop of a clear sky. Explosions in the shape of clouds appear and disappear in the background. The camera tilts downward, eventually framing the heavily damaged roof of a building, seemingly a church, that is very similar in appearance to the building in the graphic novel. A sudden explosion shatters the building and, after a cut, the viewer has the feeling of being dropped in the trenches. The following shot cuts to one of the main protagonists, Kat Katczinsky, as he walks through one of the trenches. The 284 Lynn Marie Kutch and Damianos Grammatikopoulos voice-over, which appears here for the second time, introduces Kat and viewers recognize the voice as that of Paul Bäumer. The film introduces the characters in a series of close-ups with no cuts in between (tracking shot). While moving through the narrow passages of the trench, the camera pauses and lingers on each of the frightened soldiers before moving on to the next one. Every time that one of the characters is framed, the voice-over introduces him by name and provides additional information about his background. This calls to mind the original novel and the way the same characters are presented there: An der Spitze die Hungrigsten: der kleine Albert Kropp, der von uns am klarsten denkt und deshalb erst Gefreiter ist; - Müller V, der noch Schulbücher mit sich herumschleppt und vom Notenexamen träumt; […] Leer, der einen Vollbart trägt und große Vorliebe für Mädchen aus den Offizierspuffs hat; […] als vierter ich, Paul Bäumer. Alle vier neunzehn Jahre alt, alle vier aus derselben Klasse in den Krieg gegangen. (Remarque 8) The techniques are very different, but they nonetheless share an affinity in terms of narrative effect. Of special significance, the voice-over in this scene acts as an intermediary between the novel and the film. As Sarah Kozloff notes: “Adding voice-over narration to a film creates a fascinating dance between pose and actuality, word and images, narration and drama, voice and ‘voice’” (1). Just as in the epigram scene at the beginning of the film, the voice-over “reads” Intertextual References in Eickmeyer’s Im Westen nichts Neues: Eine Graphic Novel 285 the text from the novel; 4 only this time the viewer does not see any text on the screen and no unnecessary repetition of written and spoken words occurs. The text has been replaced by images, in this case by the faces of the soldiers. The voice-over, the images of the soldiers, and the seamless movement of the camera tracking forward and gliding from one character to another all work together in emulating the means through which the same characters are being introduced in Remarque’s novel. It should also be noted that the voice-over narration as a narrative film technique has its origins in literature. 5 As a cinematic tool, however, it fails to produce any narrative effect (just like the epigraph scene discussed above) if it does not work side by side with other filmic techniques, such as the mise-èn-scene and the camera movement among other things. Returning to the beginning of the graphic novel and the image discussed above (see image 4), we can readily conclude that the eight panels portraying some of the main and minor characters of the story occupy the major portion of the double splash page. Yet despite the multiple panels, there is no sequential storytelling in the traditional sense of the word since no “closure,” the “phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving the whole” (McCloud 63), is required on the part of the reader to fill in gaps relating to movement or action between them. In other words, in spite of the “gutters,” the space between the panels, there are no traditional “cuts” between the panels that will force readers to “take two separate images and transform them into a single idea” (McCloud 66). We should also note that each panel depicting one of the soldiers has a caption beneath it that contains fragments of Remarque’s original text. The text itself introduces the characters (see image 4). Thus, the entire panel-sequence aligns much more closely to Mann’s film adaptation in terms of narration and less with Remarque’s source text. The spoken words performed by the voice-over in the film are replaced by written words in the graphic novel. Juxtaposing the two, the differences appear minimal. Just like the movement of the camera that leads the viewer’s eye from one face to the other while the voice-over provides additional information, so does the reader’s eye glide from one panel to the other on the surface of the page while reading the text beneath the panels. Consequently, the impact that Mann’s film adaptation seems to have had on Eickmeyer’s mode of storytelling in this particular scene is considerable. This reading illuminates a key example of one medium (comics) emulating and adapting narrative modes from another medium (film). Examining more closely the techniques found in Lewis Milestone’s film adaptation from 1930 for introducing the leading characters to the audience and the techniques Mann’s film utilizes to do the same leads to the realization that Mann’s adaptation is as equally affected by Milestone’s film adaption as is Eickmeyer’s graphic novel by Mann’s film. Unlike Remarque’s and Mann’s utilization of multiple time shifts and flashbacks, Milestone’s storyline appears 286 Lynn Marie Kutch and Damianos Grammatikopoulos very linear and straightforward, which is incidentally a typical trait of films of that era. A military parade is the focal point of Milestone’s opening scene that viewers only get to see after the opening of a door by an elderly man who discusses with a maid the very positive, albeit falsely interpreted, outcome of the war. The gesture of the door being opened and the movement of the camera tracking forward and through the door resemble the opening of a book pointing to the novel from which the work springs. Just like the reader who dives into a fictive world by opening a book and reading the written words on its pages, so does the door in the film grant the viewer access to a realm that only exists within the confines of the screen. The door stands here as a metaphor for the perimeter, dimensions, and confines of the page on the one hand and the screen on the other within which the story unfolds. After a series of shots of the ongoing military parade, the camera slowly retreats from the exterior space of the parade to the interior space of a classroom, passing in the interim through the threshold of a window: a further visual representation of the screen’s outlines. The camera then cuts to and slowly zooms in on the teacher, Kantorek (played by Arnold Lucy), capturing his attempts to convince his young students to drop out of school and enlist in the German army. The mise-en-scène foregrounds Kantorek’s stature, the globe standing in front of him, and a quote from Homer’s Iliad that can be seen on the blackboard behind him. After a shot-reverse-shot between Kantorek and his classroom, Paul Bäumer (played by Lew Ayres), his classmates, and soon to be comrades are introduced to the audience through a series of close-ups. The sequence bears a striking similarity to Mann’s scene discussed in the previous paragraphs. No voice-over names the characters and reflects on their background here as was the case in Mann’s work. The close-ups themselves in Milestone’s film, however, serve the same purpose of introducing the characters to the audience through audiovisual means. In that regard, Milestone’s sequence relies more on visual clues and less on verbal elements when conveying information about the characters. The two dissolves that follow the first two close-ups of the pupils are a case in point. The close-ups on individual figures act as flashbacks, a cinematic technique not quite developed at that time and as such extremely rare in feature-length motion pictures. From a design standpoint, viewers should see them as fantasies on the part of the pupils. In the first close-up, the dissolve facilitates the smooth and gradual transition from one shot (the close-up of the pupil) to the other (the scene of his fantasy) supporting the assumption that the scene under consideration is in fact either a flashback or a fantasy. The door once again figures prominently. The fantasy scene itself 6 is completely silent; it conveys information solely through visual means and mainly through the mise-en-scène and the facial expressions and gesticulation of the actors; two characteristics among Intertextual References in Eickmeyer’s Im Westen nichts Neues: Eine Graphic Novel 287 the most distinctive qualities of the silent film era. Furthermore, the viewer can hear Kantorek’s voice in both scenes, where it acts less as a voice-over device and more as a bridge between the two scenes, thus enabling the viewer to make a connection between them. The second fantasy sequence is very similar to the one described above, revealing to the viewers familiar with the novel the identity of the character in question (Leer, der “große Vorliebe für Mädchen aus den Offizierspufffs hat”). We also recognize Joseph Behm when we see him silently break out into tears in the classroom. While the setting during the introduction of Paul Bäumer and his classmates and comrades is different in all three works, they all share an affinity in terms of how they introduce the characters to their respective audiences or readers. As Martin Tropp remarks in his study of film adaptations based on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein novel, previous adaptations of source texts can, at times, affect subsequent adaptations to a much higher degree than source texts: Can Mary Shelley’s vision be both faithfully and effectively rendered on film? Perhaps not. Perhaps the myth that has supplanted it and that will continue to infuse popular culture is the only way it can be rendered in a visual medium. […] Transformed by theater and film, Frankenstein has become so much a part of our culture that, paradoxically, her original story may not translate to film without losing its power. (74-75) The Frankenstein trope, a common and somewhat popular theme among adaptation studies critics (Garcia 223—42), is also relevant for the study of Eickmeyer’s Im Westen . Just like the body of Frankenstein’s “creature” that is assembled from various body parts belonging to more than one individual, so is Im Westen 288 Lynn Marie Kutch and Damianos Grammatikopoulos an assemblage of fragments taken from a wide and varied range of other works including, as we saw, previous adaptations of the source text. Each one of those fragments that constitutes its body acts as a hidden panel within the surface of the page or as a window that enables us to regard other artworks and read them in conjunction with each other. While this might not be enough to justify the classification of “graphic novel,” the significant amount of graphic and filmic quotations that can be found on almost every page of the book do function as panels. The “gutter” is of course not visible, but we are, as readers, forced to build connections between the book and the works that Im Westen references. What began as Remarque’s “therapeutic attempt to cure depression” has become a standard text for not only understanding World War I, but also its impact on readers with various national histories (Barker and Last 33). Our close examination of Peter Eickmeyer’s Im Westen nichts Neues reveals both the aesthetic and historical influence of this long tradition of artistic responses to World War I in literature, painting, and film. The fact that shots from Lewis Milestone’s well-known 1930 film All Quiet on the Western Front were used in World War I documentary films because of their realistic presentation of war not only blurs the line between authenticity and creative license, but also speaks to the high likelihood that these images affect readers of Remarque’s Im Westen nichts Neues as much as the original text itself (Chambers). In fact, chief historians have characterized artistic reactions to World War I, which have been pivotal in establishing and steering perceptions of World War I and war in general in the United States and abroad, as “not a falsification of reality, but rather an imaginative version of it” (Hynes xi). As we have argued, Im Westen ’s intertextual narrative capability asserts itself in the fact that it reinterprets and subsequently incorporates representations of war in other media, such as visual art, photography, and film. Im Westen incorporates or visually cites examples from other media that contribute to the comics quality of Eickmeyer’s text, which consists of verbal and pictorial levels. Douglass Wolk aptly explains the medial differences between comics, film, and literature: “Comics are not prose. Comics are not movies. They are not a text-driven medium with added pictures; they’re not the visual equivalent of prose narrative or a static version of a film” (14). Austrian graphic artist Gerald Hartwig underscores the “betweenness” of graphic literature when he describes it as a Mittelding , or a medium that combines characteristics and the expressive potential of other media. The present reading opens a new line of critical discussion and one that expands upon the current reviews that focus on the lack of speech bubbles or sequential art. Eickmeyer himself admits that his graphic novel does not adhere to a “typische Bildfolge,” and he is aware of the criticism that he or his publisher has mislabeled Im Westen a graphic novel. When readers consider that the carefully selected Intertextual References in Eickmeyer’s Im Westen nichts Neues: Eine Graphic Novel 289 visual citations in this graphic literary work serve to articulate broader, more universal themes, such as the “lost generation’s” experience of being at war, and physical or mental survival (Wagener 12, 19), then Eickmeyer’s response to debates about his and his wife’s compliance with comics standards seems quite understandable: “Die Diskussion ist uns mittlerweile egal.” It is precisely this discussion, however, that has helped produce this first and only study of its kind that closely examines the graphic aesthetics of this graphic adaptation. Notes 1 Peter Hetzler in Hessische Lehrerzeitung . Quoted on the Splitter Verlag website for Eickmeyer’s Im Westen. 2 The anthologies Books in Motion , edited by Mireia Aragay, and Film Adaptation , edited by James Naremore, are a case in point. 3 Lewis Milestone’s film adaptation (1930) starts off with the same epigraph shortly after the opening credits. 4 There are of course some minor differences between Remarque’s text and what the voice-over narrates in the above discussed scene, but the adaptation remains very close to the source text while introducing the characters. There is also a shift in location and time. As opposed to both the novel and the comic book that start off after the fighting, the main characters are in the trenches at the beginning of the film awaiting anxiously the ensuing battle. 5 In her work Invisible Storytellers: Voice-Over Narration in American Fiction Film , Sarah Kozloff challenges the assumption that the voice-over in films is a technique taken directly from the medium of literature. 6 The boy faces the dilemma to please his father but sadden his mother by enlisting in the army. Works Cited Acheson, Charles. “Expanding the Role of the Gutter in Nonfiction Comics: Forged Memories in Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde .” Studies in the Novel 47.3 (2015): 291—307. All Quiet on the Western Front . Dir. Lewis Milestone. Universal Pictures, 1930. All Quiet on the Western Front . Dir. Delbert Mann. Norman Rosemont Productions, 1979. Allen, Graham. Intertextuality . London and New York: Routledge. 2000. Bachmann, Christian A. “Nichts Neues, nirgends.” literaturundfeuilleton: Literaturkritik von Komparatisten 29 Jan. 2015. Web. 11 Aug. 2017. 290 Lynn Marie Kutch and Damianos Grammatikopoulos Badsey, Stephen. The British Army in Battle and Its Image 1914-18. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2009. Barker, Christine R., and R. W. Last. Erich Maria Remarque . London: Oswald Wolff, 1979. Bluestone, George. Novels into Film . Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1968. Chambers II , John Whiteclay. “‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ (1930): The Antiwar Film and the Image of the First World War.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio & Television 14.4 (1994): 377—411. Cumming, Laura. A Face to the World: On Self Portraits . London: Harper Press, 2009. Eberwein, Robert. The Hollywood War Film . Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Eickmeyer, Peter. Im Westen nichts Neues : Eine Graphic Novel . Bielefeld: Splitter Verlag, 2014. Eisner, Will. Comics & Sequential Art . Tamarac, FL : Poorhouse Press, 1985. -. A Contract with God . New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978. Fox, Paul. “Confronting Postwar Shame in Weimar Germany: Trauma, Heroism and the War Art of Otto Dix.” Oxford Art Journal (2006): 247—67. Frahm, Ole. “Zwischen den Linien: Zur Kriegsdarstellung in Comics von George Herriman, Harvey Kurtzman und Jacques Tardi.” Krieg in den Medien . Ed. Heinz-Peter Preusser. Amsterdam: Brill Academic Publishers, 2005. 265—79. Friederich, Ute. “Kein Comic. Eine Diskussion von Peter Eickmeyer’s Im Westen nichts Neues .” Kritische Ausgabe 14 July 2014. Web. 11 Aug. 2017. Friedrich, Ernst. Krieg dem Kriege . Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag GmbH, 2015. Garcia, Pedro Javier Pardo. “Beyond Adaptation: Frankenstein’s Postmodern Progeny.” Books in Motion. Adaptation, Intertextuality, Authorship . Ed. Mireia Aragay. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 2005. Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics . Trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2007. Gutbrod, Philipp. Otto Dix: The Art of Life . Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2010. Harrington, Peter. “Religious and Spiritual Themes in British Academic Art during the Great War.” First World War Studies 2.2 (2011): 145—64. Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2005. Hynes, Samuel. A War Imagined. The First World War and English Culture . New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1991. “Im Profil: Peter Eickmeyer, Grafik-Designer”. nrwision 2014. Web. 11 Aug. 2017. “ Im Westen nichts Neues .” Comickunst - Rezensionen von Autorencomics und Graphic Novels 26 May 2014. Web. 11 Aug. 2017. Kozloff, Sarah. Invisible Storyteller: Voice-Over Narration in American Fiction Film . Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1988. Levine, Michael G. The Belated Witness: Literature, Testimony, and the Question of Holocaust Survival . Stanford, CA : Stanford UP , 2006. Lüddemann, Stefan. “Peter Eickmeyer zeigt Graphic Novel.” Osnabrücker Zeitung 23 April 2014. Web. 11 Aug. 2017. Intertextual References in Eickmeyer’s Im Westen nichts Neues: Eine Graphic Novel 291 McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993. Moore, Allen. Alan Moore’s Writing for Comics. Rantoul, IL : Avatar Press, 2008. Murdoch, Brian. The Novels of Erich Maria Remarque: Sparks of Life . Rochester, NY : Camden House, 2006. Orgeron, Devin, Marsha Orgeron, and Dan Streible, eds. Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States . New York: Oxford UP , 2012. Remarque, Erich Maria. Im Westen nichts Neues. Berlin: Propyläen-Verlag, 1929. Rhodes, Richard. “Guernica: Horror and Inspiration.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 69.6 (2013): 19—25. Sokołowska-Paryż, Marzena, and Martin Löschnigg. The Great War in Post-Memory Literature and Film . Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014. Stam, Robert. “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation.” Film Adaptation . Ed. James Naremore. New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers UP . 2000. 54—76. Tropp, Martin. “Re-Creating the Monster: Frankenstein and Film.” Nineteenth-Century Women at the Movies: Adapting Fiction to Film . Ed. Barbara Tepa Lupack. Bowling Green, OH : Bowling Green State U Popular P. 1999. Wagener, Hans. Understanding Erich Maria Remarque . Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1991. Westwell, Guy. War Cinema: Hollywood on the Front Line . London: Wallflower Press, 2006. Williams, David. “Film and the Mechanization of Time in the Myth of the Great War Canon.” English Studies in Canada 41.2-3 (2015): 165—90. Witte, Tobias. “‘Im Westen nichts Neues’: Ist das noch ein Comic? Eickmeyers mutige Adaption des Klassikers.” texteundbilder 31 May 2014. Web. 11 Aug. 2017. Wolk, Douglas. Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean . Cambridge, MA : Da Capo Press, 2007. Images Fig. 1. Eickmeyer n. pag. © Splitter Verlag GmbH & Co. KG and Peter Eickmeyer. Fig. 2. Eickmeyer n. pag. © Splitter Verlag GmbH & Co. KG and Peter Eickmeyer. Fig. 3. Eickmeyer n. pag. © Splitter Verlag GmbH & Co. KG and Peter Eickmeyer. Fig. 4. Eickmeyer n. pag. © Splitter Verlag GmbH & Co. KG and Peter Eickmeyer. Fig. 5. Still from Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). © Universal Pictures. Kafka in Comics. Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von Moritz Stetters Das Urteil 293 Kafka in Comics. Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von Moritz Stetters Das Urteil Helga Kraft University of Illinois at Chicago Abstract: Kafka’s literary expression of the comic side of life as a protection from existential threats attracted world-wide a great number of comic artists to his texts. Kafka himself resorted to visualization by drawing caricatures in simple lines when language failed. The relationship between literature and comics is addressed by Nicolas Mahler in his Franz Kafkas nonstop Lachmaschine . In this comic book, people’s vague knowledge of Kafka as well as academic approaches to his works are satirized. A brief survey of a number of Kafka comics—such as the biography Kafka , Der Process and Das Schloss — exemplify the different styles of adaptation. A detailed analysis of Moritz Stetter’s comic adaptation Das Urteil nach Franz Kafka follows. A focus on the central tree metaphor in this book illustrates that comic art has opened new artistic dimensions, which may lead to a better understanding of Kafka and bring his texts closer to a new generation. Keywords: Franz Kafka, kafkaesk, Adaption, Comics, Komik, Ironie Der Ausdruck „kafkaesk“ ist im Laufe der Zeit weltweit zum Ausdruck eines Lebensgefühls avanciert, das über Kafkas Werk hinaus verweist. Man bezeichnet damit eine Situation, in der die Grenzen zwischen Realität und Fiktion verschwimmen, Menschen in ihrer Wahrnehmung verunsichert werden und sich von anonymen Mächten so sehr bedroht fühlen, dass sie unfähig werden, ihr Leben selbstbestimmt zu führen. Auch wenn sich die Bedeutung „kafkaesk“ längst von ihrem Namensgeber abgelöst hat, so ruft sie doch immer wieder die Erinnerung an den Autor wach: „Kafka fungiert mittlerweile als popkulturelles Icon, dessen Bild (sowohl in medialer als auch in symbolischer Hinsicht) in vielfältigster Weise reproduziert wurde: Sein Leben wurde ebenso behandelt und stilisiert wie sein Werk“ (Wintersteiger n. pag.). 294 Helga Kraft Wenn der Begriff „kafkaesk“ als Schlüssel zur Interpretation von Kafkas Werk benutzt wird, erfasst er immer nur Teile des Werkes und verdeckt, dass es in Kafkas Texten über die Thematisierung von Angst und Bedrohung hinaus auch eine ungewöhnliche Art von Ironie und Komik gibt. Es ist überliefert, dass Kafka in der Runde von Freunden oft heiter und witzig war. Sein Freund Janouch hat erzählt, dass Kafka sich vor Lachen kaum halten konnte, als er aus seinem Text In der Strafkolonie vorgelesen hat, in dem es in hohem Maße gewalttätig und ungerecht zugeht (Rehberg 116). In einem Gespräch mit Janouch soll Kafka über einen Schriftsteller, den die beiden Freunde gerade gelesen hatten, gesagt haben: „Er ist so lustig, dass man fast glauben könnte, er habe Gott gefunden“ ( Janouch 111). Auf die Nachfrage von Janouch: „Das Lachen ist für Sie also ein Zeichen von Religosität? “ habe Kafka geantwortet: „Nicht immer. In einer so gottlosen Zeit muß man aber lustig sein. Das ist Pflicht. Die Schiffskapelle spielte auf der untergehenden Titanic bis zum Ende. Man entzieht damit der Verzweiflung den Boden“ ( Janouch 111). Ein anderes Mal soll Kafka geäußert haben, dass sein Lachen eine Betonmauer sei, was die Deutung nahelegt, dass das Lachen ihm Schutz vor der Ausweglosigkeit im Leben bot, die er oft spürte. Ironische und komische Schreibweisen ermöglichten es ihm, die bedrohlichen Aspekte und die Paradoxien der menschlichen Existenz in grotesken und absurden Szenarien auszuphantasieren und abzuwehren. Wahrscheinlich ist es die abgründige Komik in vielen Kafka-Texten, die gerade auf Comic-Künstler einen unwiderstehlichen Reiz ausgeübt hat, seine Werke zu adaptieren. In der germanistischen Forschung ist die Frage von Komik bzw. Ironie bei Kafka nicht neu. So weist Erica Weitzman in ihrer Studie Irony’s Antics. Walser, Kafka, Roth, and the German Comic Tradition darauf hin, dass Kafkas Werke von einer „comic irony“ durchdrungen seien (Weitzman 187) und stellt fest, dass der Autor das Komische in „the very order of things and the history of humankind itself “ (143) lokalisiert habe. Sie entdeckt in Kafkas Stil das Performative: „If comic is play with non-sense in the strict meaning of the term, then the history of humankind is nothing more or less than the playing-out of its own original non-sense in an eternally varying parade of forms“ (Weitzman 143). Kafka bestätigt diese Ansicht gewissermaßen, wenn er die rhetorische Frage stellt, „wie könnten Narren müde werden? “ (Kafka 1994, 120). Inzwischen sind weltweit mehr als zwei Dutzend Comic-Adaptionen von Kafka-Texten auf dem Markt, die bei dem Schriftsteller und Kritiker Thomas von Steinaecker jedoch auf prinzipielle Ablehnung stoßen: „Es scheint schwierig, Kafkas Texte in Bildgeschichten zu verwandeln. Zu fantasielos, zu flach, zu eindimensional - Comics und Graphic Novels konnten Kafkas labyrinthische Sprache bisher nicht adäquat übersetzen“ (Steinaecker n. pag.). Meines Erachtens gibt es jedoch durchaus eine Reihe von Komik-Künstlern, denen es ge- Kafka in Comics. Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von Moritz Stetters Das Urteil 295 lungen ist, die Ambivalenzen der Kafkaschen Texte zu visualisieren und auf Momente hinzuweisen, die der Rezeption der Texte neue Dimensionen eröffnen können. Sie bauen eine delikate geografische und zeitliche Brücke zwischen den absurden Zuständen und Zusammenhängen in den Texten von Kafka und der damaligen und heutigen Gegenwart. Die Comics entdecken - wie Wintersteiger in Hinsicht auf die Adaption des Amerika -Romans von Casanave und Cara bemerkt hat - dass „die Inszenierung des Kafka’schen Stoffes eindeutige Züge des frühen Slapstickkinos“ (n. pag.) aufweist. Als weiteres Merkmal der besonderen Eignung des Comics für die Umsetzung Kafka’scher Texte gilt, dass er das gestische Potential der Schriftzeichen betont und diese sozusagen als einen „Protagonisten auftreten lässt“ (Wintersteiger n. pag.). Die sprachliche Bildlichkeit der Texte Kafkas kann durch die Comic-Adaptionen eine Aktualität erhalten, die durch ihre Verbindung von Wort und Bild eine neue Generation anzusprechen vermag. Das Komische bei Kafka ist seit längerem Gegenstand der Forschung. In seiner Interpretation der Romane Das Schloß und Der Proceß befasst sich Friedrich detailliert mit dem Aspekt des Komischen (Friedrich 2009, 19-44). In den letzten Jahren wird auch die Comic Novel zunehmend als ein interessantes Genre erkannt, das zwischen Text und Bild vermittelt. Es gibt mehrere umfangreiche Studien zum Comic-Roman, und der Comic gilt inzwischen als ernst zu nehmender Forschungsgegenstand in der Germanistik (Hohlbaum 434-35). In einer umfangreichen Studie Kafka im Comic (2015) beschäftigt sich Christopher Hohlbaum ausführlich mit fast allen bis dahin veröffentlichten Kafka-Adaptionen. Neben der intensiven Analyse des Comics Die Verwandlung von Crumb und Mairowitz (Hohlbaum 92-301) geht er auch kurz auf rund ein Dutzend anderer Comics von Kafka-Texten ein und untersucht sie in Hinsicht auf Kategorien wie Rahmenstrategie, Raum, Zeit, Bewegung, Stil/ Farben, Blickführung und Narration. Von besonderem Interesse ist dabei ein Buch mit Comics des österreichischen Comiczeichners Nicolas Mahler. Es trägt den kryptischen Titel Franz Kafkas nonstop Lachmaschine (2014). Dem Comic getreu ist der Titel als Gag bewusst irreführend, da weder Kafkas Leben noch dessen Texte visualisiert werden. Der Bezug zu Kafka wird durch Spaßfiguren hergestellt: Im gezeichneten Prolog - in dem der Autor sich selbst als dünnes Strichmännchen mit langer Nase darstellt - trifft dieser seine Nachbarin, eine biedere, rundlich gemalte Hausfrau, die auf den Titel seines neuen Buches, Franz Kafkas nonstop Lachmaschine , eingeht - in dem sie ja selbst vorkommt - wenn sie sagt: „Bei Comics fällt mir als erstes immer Kafka ein. Der hat recht liebe Figuren erfunden“ (9). Liebe Figuren? Augenzwinkernd zeigt Mahler hiermit, dass die Idee der ‚Hochliteratur‘, zu der Kafka ja zählt, bei ihr nicht angekommen ist. Noch übler: Sie verwechselt Kafka 296 Helga Kraft mit Kauka, d. h. mit Rolf Kauka (1917-2000), dem bekannten deutschen Comic- Designer der populären Fix und Foxi -Heftchen und vieler anderer für Kinder im Disney-Stil verfasster Comics, die in Deutschland Bestseller geworden sind. Im ganzen Buch glänzt Kafka durch Abwesenheit, außer im Anhang, wo Mahler Kafka-Figuren in Kauka-Stil nachahmt (Mahler 111), darunter Gregor Samsa als Käfer aus Kafkas Die Verwandlung , der als trügerischer Blickfang auch auf die Titelseite gesetzt ist. Auf diese Weise deutet Mahler kritisch und witzelnd auf Qualitätsunterschiede hin, die innerhalb des Comics-Geschäfts bestehen, und zeigt, wie die Aufmerksamkeit potentieller Leser zu erhaschen ist. Sowohl Mahler als auch die anderen Comic-Künstler nehmen in ihren Remakes auf Kafkas Wünsche keine Rücksicht. Dieser untersagte bekanntlich seinem ersten Verleger von Die Verwandlung , mit dem Bild eines Käfers auf dem Umschlag des Buches zu werben. Mahler geht es in seinem Buch u. a. um die Frage, wie Literaturcomics in der Kritik aufgenommen werden und bei wem die Deutungshoheit liegt. Er mokiert sich z. B. über wissenschaftliche Studien, indem er das Buch wie einen Forschungsbericht seriös in Kapitel einteilt sowie Fußnoten und einen Anhang hinzufügt. Mit dem Namen Kafka im Titel evoziert und relativiert Mahler medienwirksam die sogenannte hohe Literatur, deren Bewertung und Kanonisierung von Experten bestimmt wird. Er macht sich in betont schnoddriger Weise über die akademischen Interpreten und deren enge Maßstäbe für Kunst lustig. Die Germanisten siedelt er sogar in der Hölle an, wie ein Cartoon auf Seite 49 (Kapitel 8) des Buches zeigt: Was da aus dem sogenannten Höllen-Gulli herausragt und wie ein Wurm aussieht, ist ein Germanist, der als Merkmal seiner kränkelnden Zunft einen langen Schal mehrfach um den Hals geschlungen trägt. Den Vertreter der bildenden Künste hingegen malt er klein und dick und gibt ihm das Aussehen eines Gartenzwergs, der als Symbol des Spießbürgers gilt. Kafka in Comics. Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von Moritz Stetters Das Urteil 297 298 Helga Kraft Die Vertreter beider Forschungsrichtungen geben sich arrogant. Der Kunstexperte fragt zweifelnd in Bezug auf den Comic, „[…] ist es Kunst? “ (Mahler 51) und der Germanist fragt, „[…] ist es Literatur? “ (55). Kafka in Comics. Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von Moritz Stetters Das Urteil 299 Die Strichfigur von Mahlers eigenem Ich im Buch weist zunächst auf die Produktionsbedingungen seines Metiers hin und sagt dann: „Das Entscheidende am Comic ist die Erzählung, der Rhythmus, die Leerstellen, die Lesbarkeit bzw. Unlesbarkeit […] und die Gags“ (Mahler 52). Das klingt wie eine ernst zu nehmende Aussage, die von dem Kunstexperten jedoch sogleich ins Komische gezogen wird, wenn dieser antwortet, „Da muss ich zu Haus nachschaun, was Baudrillard dazu meint“ (52). Den Gag noch auf die Spitze treibend heißt es in einer Fußnote, „[…] hier könnte auch stehen: Foucault / Barthes / Deleuze“ (52). Die Ironie des Comic-Künstlers in Bezug auf Interpretationen richtet sich offensichtlich gegen die selbstbezogenen Experten. Mahler hingegen hat gute Gründe selbstbewusst zu sein, denn er hat bedeutende Auszeichnungen für sein Werk erhalten, z. B. den ‚Preis der Literaturhäuser‘ 2015 für Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Graphic Novel nach Musil . Ein Kritiker weist 2013 darauf hin, dass „[…] Mahler in seinen eigenwilligen Comics die Vorlagen nie einfach bebildert, sondern durch seine Darstellung neu interpretiert. Keine Literaturadaption also, eher eine Literaturaddition - mit dem zusätzlichen Summanden Comic“ (Platthaus n. pag.). Das Besondere an Mahlers Kreuzung von klassischer Literatur und Comic liegt darin, dass seine Zeichnungen dem elementaren Strichmännchen-Gekritzel von Kafka selbst ähnlich sind. Friederike Fellner hat den Zeichnungen aus Kafkas eigener Hand eine umfassende Studie gewidmet und auf den engen Zusammenhang zwischen Schreiben und Zeichnen bei Kafka hingewiesen, wenn sie die These vertritt: „Dass das Schreiben des Prager Schriftstellers von seiner Rahmung - dem Zusammenspiel von Instrumentalität, bzw. Technologie, Gestik und der Semantik des Schreibens - abhängig ist, reflektieren auch seine Zeichnungen“ (Fellner 121). Es kommt also nicht darauf an, wie kunstfertig im traditionellen Sinne gezeichnet wird, sondern wie das Ganze zusammenwirkt. Auch die Komparatistin Monika Schmitz-Emans sieht die simplen Zeichnungen von Kafka als Grundzeichen, die wie Worte oder Buchstaben in der Schrift variiert werden und gewissermaßen als Bildertext zu lesen sind (Schmitz-Emans 175). Wie in jeder Kunstrichtung muss bei einer Comic-Veröffentlichung nicht nur die Qualität, sondern auch die Attraktivität für den Kunst- und Literaturmarkt berücksichtigt werden. Natürlich besteht kein Zweifel daran, dass unendlich viel mehr Fix und Foxi -Hefte von Kauka verkauft wurden, als z. B. die Kafka-Adaptionen, auch wenn diese unter Kennern durchaus Kultstatus genießen. Zu nennen sind hier insbesondere die Koautoren Mairowitz/ Crumb, Mairowitz/ Jaromír 99, Mairowitz/ Montellier, Corbeyran/ Horne und Ricard/ Maël, wobei der eine für den Text und die/ der andere für die Zeichnungen verantwortlich ist. Mehr oder weniger sind alle Comics in Schwarz-Weiß gezeichnet, wohl um das 300 Helga Kraft Kafka in Comics. Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von Moritz Stetters Das Urteil 301 Dunkle des Schriftstellers zu betonen. Eine viel gepriesene Werkbiographie von Mairowitz und Crumb erschien ursprünglich bereits 1993 auf Englisch als Kafka for Beginners. Die Qualität und Popularität des Buches haben sich durch viele Neuveröffentlichungen bestätigt, 2013 ist es auf Deutsch unter dem Titel Kafka erschienen. Hier erhalten die Protagonisten in den Texten das Aussehen von Kafka selbst, und das Buch wurde von der Kritik als eine gelungene Mischung von Leben und Werk gelobt: Wir finden auch den ‚Prozess‘, ‚Der Bau‘, ‚Ein Hungerkünstler‘, ‚Das Urteil‘, ‚Das Schloss‘, ‚In der Strafkolonie‘ und ‚Amerika‘ grandios in Szene gesetzt und man fühlt sich, auch wenn man die literarischen Vorlagen bisher nicht gelesen hat, umfassend informiert. Mairowitz und Crumb beweisen Gefühl für das Wesentliche der Geschichten, für die Essenz - und was könnte sich besser zur Darstellung dieser Essenzen eignen als die Illustration? (Weigand n. pag.) Mairowitz greift in seinem Comic selbst den Ausdruck „kafkaesk“ auf, wenn er schreibt: „‚Kafkaesk‘ heißt meist: voller Schreckensvorstellungen und bitterer Seelenqualen. […] Aber mögen Kafkas Geschichten noch so grausig sein, so sind sie fast alle gleichzeitig komisch“ (Mairowitz/ Crumb 25). Das Komische im Ernsten prägt auch den Malstil von Crumb. Ein Beispiel ist eine gezeichnete Szene, die einen historischen Sprung ins Heute macht und in der Leute auf einer Party über das Kafkaeske sprechen. Als Gag ist Kafka selbst dabei, der sich jedoch abwendet und sich die Ohren zuhält. 302 Helga Kraft In Mairowitz/ Montelliers Der Process und in Das Schloss von Mairowitz/ Jaromír 99 sind zwar die Protagonisten, Josef K. und K., dem Dichter selbst sehr ähnlich gezeichnet, jedoch geht es in erster Linie nicht um das Leben, sondern um eine Einführung in die Werke Kafkas, wie Mairowitz, der die Texte ausgewählt hat, ausführt: „[…] der Zweck [dieser Comics] bestand darin, junge Leser an große Namen wie Franz Kafka […] heranzuführen“ („Genau das ist Kafka“ n. pag.). Da der Name Kafka zwar vielen bekannt ist, seine Texte aber nur von wenigen gelesen werden, erscheinen solche Einführungen durchaus sinnvoll. Es stellt sich aber die Frage, wie kreativ die Comic-Autoren eigentlich mit den Texten umgehen dürfen, ohne die Ästhetik und Intention der jeweiligen ‚Vorlage‘ aus dem Blick zu verlieren. Was jedoch die Zeichnungen von Der Process anlangt, die von Montellier stammen, ist sich die Kritik darin einig, dass auch die nicht in Kafkas Text selbst enthaltenen Elemente gelungen sind: Montellier hat die Graphic Novel sehr surreal, fließend und filigran gezeichnet. […] Zwischen den sehr realistischen Zeichnungen fließen immer wieder die Motive eines grotesk lachenden und scherzenden Skelettes mit Kerze und Messer in den Händen sowie einer Uhr mit in die Bilder ein. Und surreale Bilder, die eine nackte Frau, die aus einem Skelett erwächst, die eine Kerze in der Hand trägt und aus deren Hut wiederum eine Uhr schlüpft, unterstreichen auch teils das Absurde an der ganzen Handlung - […]. Dadurch wird das Paradoxe, das Deterministische und Resignative klar demonstriert. (Dingeldey n. pag.) Es gab jedoch auch kritische Stimmen, die sich von der oberflächlichen Symbolik abgestoßen fühlten: „[…] andere Motive, wie Phallussymbole am Bildrand, untermalen die sexuelle Konnotation, wenn etwa K. diverse Frauen zu benutzen versucht. Dadurch ergeben sich aber auch einige Probleme, die die Handlung zu sehr fixieren“ (Dingeldey n. pag.). Bei der graphischen Umsetzung von Kafkas Das Schloss von Jaromír 99 (Pseudonym des tschechischen Künstlers Jaromír Svejdik) ist dies anders. Die Zeichnungen sind holzschnittbzw. scherenschnittartig gehalten. Die Geschichte, die in eine dumpf-düstere Atmosphäre getaucht ist, mutet wie ein Märchen für Erwachsene ohne Happy End an. Sie zeigt kaum die subtile Ironie und Komik von Kafka. Der Historiker und Politologe Philip Dingeldey bemerkt: Die Umsetzung dieser Graphic Novel ist komplett anders als beim „Process“. Die Zeichnungen sind weniger filigran, weniger realistisch, bleiben düster, fast nur konturenhaft und grob. Auf Lautmalerei bzw. andere Stilmittel und Effekte wird größtenteils verzichtet. Alles bleibt abstrakter, reduzierter. Vor allem die Düsternis der Zeichnungen vermittelt hier dem Leser die beklemmende Stimmung um das Schloss und das verschneite, (sozial) kalte Dorf. (Dingeldey n. pag.) Kafka in Comics. Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von Moritz Stetters Das Urteil 303 Etwas detaillierter soll noch auf eine neuere Kafka-Adaption mit dem Titel Das Urteil. Nach Kafka eingegangen werden, die 2015 von dem Comiczeichner Moritz Stetter veröffentlicht wurde und auch in den zuletzt veröffentlichten Comic-Studien noch nicht behandelt worden ist. Stetter verzichtet auf jegliche Personenähnlichkeit mit Kafka und lässt das Biografische konsequent in den Hintergrund treten. Da er fast den gesamten Wortlaut der Originalgeschichte einbezieht, ohne eigene Worte hinzuzufügen, kann Kafka als Koautor gelten. Stetters zeichnerischer Stil kann nicht mit Mahlers witzigen Strichmännchen 304 Helga Kraft Kafka in Comics. Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von Moritz Stetters Das Urteil 305 verglichen werden. Obgleich sein Buch aus oft minimal ausgeführten Personen, Objekten und Landschaften besteht, strahlen diese starke Emotionen aus und können entsprechende Reaktionen bei Leser/ innen auslösen. Während sich bei den beiden Comic-Adaptionen der Romane die Frage aufdrängt, nach welchen Gesichtspunkten die wenigen Originaltexte aus den umfangreichen Texten ausgewählt worden sind, fragt man sich in Stetters Fall, warum einige Stellen aus der relativ kurzen Erzählung Das Urteil nicht aufgenommen wurden. Bei den Passagen, die weggelassen werden - es handelt sich um wenig mehr als zehn Prozent des Textes - geht es vor allem um Wiederholungen. Ihre Aussparung verändert oder verfälscht also nicht den Text des Autors. Stetter bebildert oder illustriert die Erzählung nicht, sondern es gelingt ihm, eine eigenständige, visuelle Adaption zu schaffen. Auch das Ironisch-Komische hat er nicht unterschlagen. Es leuchtet ab und zu auf, z. B. wenn der Vater zu einem Baby schrumpft, oder winzig mit wehendem Nachthemd und entblößtem Hinterteil an der Uhrenkette der ihn in dieser Szene bevormundenden riesigen Figur des Sohnes hängt. Stetters Leistung besteht meines Erachtens darin, dass er nicht nur die äußeren Realitätsmerkmale der Geschichte, sondern auch die innere Gefühlsebene des Protagonisten Georg Bendemann visuell umsetzt. Da in Kafkas Texten fast immer eine sehr persönliche Wahrnehmung der äußeren Welt durch die Protagonisten ausgedrückt wird, die im Gegensatz zu einer objektiven Außenperspektive steht - also um Reflexionen eines inneren Zustandes in der Auseinandersetzung mit den Ansprüchen der Gesellschaft - müssen Comiczeichner Wege finden, diese Problematik bildlich umzusetzen. In einer Rezension von Ute Friedrich wird Stetters Leistung wie folgt beschrieben: Stetter schafft […] zwei Bildebenen, die nebeneinander bestehen bzw. zunehmend ineinander verwoben werden. Auf diese Weise eröffnet er zwar nicht direkt einen neuen Deutungshorizont, er verstärkt jedoch das Gefühl der Verunsicherung eindrücklich, das auch beim Lesen der Kafkaschen Erzählung vorherrscht. […] Zentral für seine Adaption ist das Motiv des Baums. Wurzelartige Verflechtungen ziehen sich als optische Strukturen durch den gesamten Comic. (Friedrich 2015, n. pag.) Interessanterweise kommen Bäume in Kafkas Das Urteil aber gar nicht vor! Um diesen merkwürdigen Widerspruch angemessen würdigen zu können, ist ein Blick auf die Baummetaphern bei Kafka und in einem Kafka-Comic von Peter Kuper hilfreich. Stetters Baummetaphorik kommt nicht von ungefähr, zweifellos kennt er Kafkas Aphorismus „Die Bäume“, der 1903/ 04 entstanden ist, aber erst 1913 veröffentlicht wurde, im gleichen Jahr wie die Erzählung Das Urteil. Der Text ist so kurz, dass er in voller Länge zitiert werden kann: „Die Bäume. Denn wir sind wie Baumstämme im Schnee, und mit kleinem Anstoß 306 Helga Kraft sollte man sie wegschieben können. Nein, das kann man nicht, denn sie sind fest mit dem Boden verbunden. Aber sieh, sogar das ist nur scheinbar“ (Kafka 1994, 89). In einem anderen Aphorismus spricht Kafka davon, dass der Mensch wertvolle und tiefe Einsichten ins Leben erhalten könne, wenn er über Bäume sowohl aus christlicher wie kabbalistischer Sicht nachsinne: Es gibt für uns zweierlei Wahrheit, so wie sie dargestellt wird durch den Baum der Erkenntnis und den Baum des Lebens . Die Wahrheit des Tätigen und die Wahrheit des Ruhenden. In der ersten teilt sich das Gute vom Bösen, die zweite ist nichts anderes als das Gute selbst, sie weiß weder vom Guten noch vom Bösen. Die erste Wahrheit ist uns wirklich gegeben, die zweite ahnungsweise. Das ist der traurige Anblick. Der fröhliche ist, dass die erste Wahrheit dem Augenblick, die zweite der Ewigkeit gehört, deshalb verlischt auch die erste Wahrheit im Licht der zweiten. (Kafka 1953, 109) Es ist durchaus möglich, dass Kafka in seinen Baumvorstellungen durch seine kabbalistischen Studien beeinflusst worden ist (Alt 582). Sein Schreiben drückt durchgängig eine tiefe Unsicherheit zwischen seiner gelebten Weltlichkeit und dem verlorenen Glauben aus. Die Kabbala stellt durch den Lebensbaum Sephirot begrifflich und bildlich eine Auswahl der göttlichen Schöpfung aus dem Nichts dar und offenbart als Aspekt der Natur auch die Göttlichkeit, die menschliche Seele, sowie den geistigen Pfad in der Fortentwicklung des Menschen (Fortune). Die höchste Stufe ist die Erkenntnis. Gershom Scholem schreibt über Kafkas Gespaltenheit in einem Brief: I later [found in Franz Kafka] the most perfect and unsurpassed expression of this fine line [between religion and nihilism], an expression which, as a secular statement of the Kabbalistic world-feeling in a modern spirit, seemed to me to wrap Kafka’s writings in the halo of the canonical. (qtd. in Biale 32) Im zitierten Aphorismus „Die Bäume“ von Kafka sind diese schon zu Stämmen, man könnte sagen zu Bauholz denaturiert, doch werden sie explizit mit Menschen verglichen („wir sind wie Baumstämme“) und erlauben so einen Vergleich mit den Stammbäumen der Familie und weiterhin der gesamten menschlichen Familie ( Jagow 406). Der amerikanische Comiczeichner Peter Kuper hat diesen Aphorismus in einem vierseitigen Comic in schwarz-weiße Bilder verwandelt (Kuper 47-52), der 1995 in den USA und 1997 in Deutschland erschienen ist. Während Stetter dem Text fehlende Bäume visuell hinzufügt, zeichnet Kuper gar keine Bäume, obgleich sie in Kafkas Titel explizit genannt werden. Es ist unklar, ob Kuper bzw. Stetter wussten, dass Kafka sich mit verschiedenen Religionen auseinandergesetzt und sich intensiv mit der Kabbala beschäftigt hat. Bei Kuper sind die Bäume zu Hochhäusern, zu Betonbäumen mutiert. Kafka in Comics. Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von Moritz Stetters Das Urteil 307 308 Helga Kraft Sie deuten unmissverständlich auf den Stand einer Gesellschaft hin, die aus der Natur herausgefallen ist. Sie ragen weit über die Menschenmassen hinaus, die im Comic klein und ohne Identität auf den Straßen wimmeln. Kuper deutet einen dichten Verkehr an, von dem auch am Ende von Kafkas Das Urteil die Rede ist. Da es zu Kafkas Zeiten kaum dichte Ansammlungen von Wolkenkratzern gegeben hat, spielt Kuper offensichtlich auf zukünftige Entwicklungen an. In einer sterilen, versteinerten Landschaft kauert eine ältere männliche, in sich versunkene Gestalt, die verletzlich wirkt und Züge des Mannes vom Lande im Roman Der Proceß trägt. Diese Figur wird überragt von einem von Kuper erfundenen riesigen, furchterregenden Polizisten, der mit geballter Eisenfaust fast wie ein Roboter anmutet, auf einem der Panels die Größe der Hochhäuser annimmt und den nun auf dem Boden liegenden Mann mit einem mächtigen Knüppel erschlägt. Dieser wird am Ende tot weggetragen, was ebenfalls in Kafkas Aphorismus nicht vorkommt. Der Comiczeichner konkretisiert hier offensichtlich Kafkas Todesfantasien, die sich in Der Proceß , Die Verwandlung und Das Urteil finden, wo die Protagonisten von höheren Autoritäten umgebracht werden, bzw. selbst den Tod suchen. Kupers Zeichnungen ignorieren durchweg den Wortlaut des Aphorismus - z. B. ist auch kein Schnee zu sehen; doch die Kälte der Obrigkeit ist durchgängig spürbar. Der Zeichner liefert eine eigenständige Interpretation, die eine im Text unausgesprochene Bedeutung artikuliert. Mit den beiden auseinanderklaffenden Bedeutungsebenen von Text und Bild werden die Comicleser/ innen animiert, ihre eigene Interpretation hinzuzufügen. Gerade in der Aktivierung der Leser/ innen liegt der besondere Wert von guten literarischen Comics, die den literarischen Ursprungstext nicht verzerren oder schädigen, sondern ihn um eine neue visuelle Ebene bereichern. Stetters Ansatz unterscheidet sich von dem von Kuper, denn er integriert Kafkas Das Urteil fast vollständig in seinen Comic und weist der Baummetapher einen prominenten Platz zu. Sie wird zum Hauptakteur seiner Comicversion . Wenn man an den Aphorismus „Die Bäume“ und die zitierten Überlegungen Kafkas zu Bäumen denkt, wird deutlich, dass Stetter ein wesentliches Element in Kafkas Denksystem erkannt hat, obgleich der Baum in Kafkas Urteil fehlt. Die Titelseite von Stetters Comics zeigt den Schatten zweier Bäume. Da ist zum einen der schmächtige Baumschatten, den der Protagonist Georg Bendemann wirft. Er selbst steht so weit oben auf der Titelseite, dass sein Kopf nicht mehr zu sehen ist. Zum anderen dominiert ein kräftiger, bedrohlich schwarzer Schatten die ganze Seite, der mutmaßlich einer höheren Autorität gehört und dem Sohn kaum Platz lässt. Doch Stetter wagt sich weit über Crumb, Kuper, Montellier, Jaromír 99 und andere Zeichner hinaus, denn er bringt, wenn auch sparsam, Farbe in den Comic ein. Auf der ersten Seite sehen wir eine lange Allee mit jungen Bäumen in hellgelbem Sonnenlicht, die gerade Knospen angesetzt Kafka in Comics. Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von Moritz Stetters Das Urteil 309 haben. Diese freundlich anmutende Umgebung reflektiert eine gewisse Selbstgewissheit des Protagonisten, die er zunächst noch besitzt. Aber schon zwei Seiten später betrachtet er verunsichert einen dunklen, kahlen und knorrigen Baum vor einer Stadtlandschaft, die wenig Anheimelndes hat. Das helle Sonnengelb auf den Panels zu Anfang, die Aufbruch und eine positive Entwicklung versprechen, wechselt bald in eine matt-rötliche Färbung. Die wenigen blässlichen und sparsam aufgetragenen Farben haben eine starke Symbolkraft: Gelb verbreitet Erwartung, das satte Grün erinnert an Träume und Fantasien, das Rötlichbraune weckt Assoziationen an das Ungemütliche und Unwirtliche, das Rot signalisiert Chaos und Katastrophen, das Schwarze verbreitet Schrecken und das Weiße evoziert die Vorstellung einer beängstigenden Leere. Wenn man der Interpretation des Religionswissenschaftlers Karl Erich Grözingers folgt, steht „rot für Gottes strenges Gericht, weiß für seine Liebe und Gnade“. Er bezieht sich hierbei auf Gershom Scholem und die Interpretation von Farben in der Kabbala (Grözinger 130). Während Georg noch den unwirtlichen, entlaubten Baum vor einer Fluss- und Stadtlandschaft ansieht, denkt er schuldbewusst an seinen Freund, der sich in Russland in Not befindet und den er lange nicht kontaktiert hat. Bildlich wächst aus dem Kopf des Protagonisten nun lianenhaft ein kräftiges tropisches Baumgrün, vor dem der Oberkörper seines vermeintlichen Freundes eingezeichnet ist. Ein paar Seiten weiter mutiert das Grün zum Bart des Freundes, den er zu seiner Hochzeit einladen will. Auf den folgenden Seiten überwuchert das üppige Grün der fremden Umgebung des Freundes auch Georgs Welt. Das Undifferenzierte der tropischen Wucherungen - oder sollte man sagen, der wuchernden kreativen und abstrakten Phantasie, in die Georg sich verstrickt - lassen seinen zwielichtigen Gemütszustand erkennen, sowie die Fragwürdigkeit seiner Behauptungen über seine Freundschaft und seine Ambivalenz dem Vater und der Heirat gegenüber. Zurück in der Realität mit gelbem Hintergrund werden die zartgrünen Frühlingsbäume auf Georgs mentalem Weg visuell zu gemauerten Schornsteinen. Eine Realität hinter der Realität dringt somit aus dem Innern der Figur des Protagonisten, für den der Comiczeichner die Welt so malt, wie Georg sie fühlt. So verwandelt sich der schwarze Fabriksmog, der aus den Schornsteinen steigt und die Angstsituation des jungen, überforderten Kaufmanns widerspiegelt, in einen giftig-ungesunden Wald mit fast tiefschwarz wehenden Baumkronen. Stetter visualisiert aber auch Georgs Erfolgsphantasien und seine sexuellen Wünsche, um sie sogleich wieder in Zweifel zu ziehen. Die Heirat, die Georg schon geplant hat, würde ihn an die Fabrik des Vaters - die Stetter angsteinflößend in ihrer kalten Technik fast wie in Chaplins Film Moderne Zeiten darstellt - und damit an die von ihm gefürchtete Gesellschaft und Familie ketten. 310 Helga Kraft Eine Sexszene vor gelbem Hintergrund zeigt zunächst zwei nackte Leiber im Liebesspiel auf einem Bett, um dann - unerwartet - daneben Georgs übergroße Fäuste zu präsentieren, die Wut und Abneigung signalisieren. Dass hier Franz Kafka und seine Verlobte Felice Bauer gemeint sind, ist schon daran zu erkennen, dass das bekannte Verlobungsfoto der beiden in gleicher Pose an der Wand hängt, die Gesichter jedoch total ausgelöscht sind. Auf diese Weise werden biografische Elemente minimal angedeutet (Stetter 15), die Ambivalen- Kafka in Comics. Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von Moritz Stetters Das Urteil 311 zen, die Kafka sozialen und erotischen Bindungen gegenüber empfand, jedoch explizit herausgearbeitet. Offensichtlich steht die Beziehung zur Braut und zur Sexualität im Konflikt mit Georgs Sehnsucht nach dem exilierten Freund, der für ihn - wie es visuell angedeutet ist - Kreativität und ein geistig aktives Leben bedeutet. Zu Beginn des Textes wird Georg Bendemann von Kafka als ein Mann gezeichnet, der den Vater zu entmachten und mit einer Heirat eine gesellschaftlich anerkannte Position zu erringen sucht. Stetter zeichnet Georg jedoch nicht als einen erfolgreichen Geschäftsmann, sondern durchweg als einen verunsicherten Jüngling, der ganz und gar nicht wie Kafka aussieht. Es fällt auf, dass die Gesichtszüge des Freundes in Russland visuell nur dann sichtbar werden, wenn er allein auf einem Panel erscheint (Stetter 8-9); wenn Georg und sein Freund zusammentreffen, ist das Gesicht des Freundes stets unkenntlich (z. B. 19). Manchmal wird er dunkel als Scherenschnitt dargestellt (34); eine Ausnahme bildet nur das Panel, das der Vater imaginiert (29). Durch Hut und Bart wird der Freund stets als Fremder und Reisender gekennzeichnet. Stetters Zeichnungen deuten darauf hin, dass hier zwei Figuren eine Identität teilen, wie es auch Kafkas Text nahelegt. Durch sein Engagement im Geschäft und seine Heiratspläne sieht Georg sich irrtümlicherweise nahe am Ziel seiner Wünsche, die Stelle des Vaters einzunehmen. Dieser ist jedoch keineswegs so kränklich und senil, wie Georg dies wünscht. Auf der anderen Seite ist Georg in seinem Machtbegehren durchaus gespalten, er fühlt sich dem sensiblen Freund verbunden, der sich in der Gesellschaft, die der Vater vertritt, nicht zurechtfinden kann. Stetter setzt die Baummetapher besonders für das Spannungsverhältnis zwischen Vater und Sohn ein (20). 312 Helga Kraft Wenn Kafkas Text davon spricht, dass Georg ins Zimmer des Vaters gehen will, steht Stetters Georg plötzlich vor einem knorrigen, dunklen, fast farblosen Baum ohne Blätter, der trotzdem riesig und vielfach verzweigt vor schwarzem Hintergrund aufragt. Dies deutet an, dass der Vater bzw. die Gesellschaft trotz fehlender Vitalität noch immer stärker als der schmächtige Sohn sind. Vor dem Baum und vor dem Vater wirkt die Georg-Figur winzig und verloren. Offensichtlich fühlt sich der Sohn bedroht und hat Angst vor den Furcht einflößenden väterlichen Instanzen. Durch seine Realität geht ein Riss, der an Büchners berühmte Erzählung Lenz erinnert. Zunächst findet sich neben Georgs Kopf ein rötlich kolorierter Fleck, von dem sich spinnenartig schwarze Risse ausweiten. Deutet dieses Rot auf das kabbalistische „Gottesgericht“? Ein paar Seiten später erscheinen die gleichen Risse auch auf Georgs Stirn. Es ist endgültig etwas gerissen. Stetter zeichnet den Protagonisten konsequenterweise dann auch gespalten, indem er ein Panel mit dem Bild seines Kopfes zerschneidet und diesen auseinanderklaffen lässt (16). Dadurch wird so etwas wie Wahnsinn sichtbar. Dann folgen noch acht Seiten surrealistischer Anklagen des Vaters gegen ihn, höllisch rötlich und schwarz koloriert, wobei der Vater ihn als gefährlichen Rivalen wörtlich zum Tode verurteilt (42). Gegen Ende des Buches drängt sich wieder verlockend die Gegenwelt - die tropisch grünen Bäume, die mit dem Freund und seiner wuchernden Phantasie assoziiert sind - in Georgs Imagination hinein. Er geht in diesem Dschungel dem Freund entgegen, der erstmalig nicht mehr dunkel, sondern als weiße Figur gezeichnet ist und aus den Baumkronen schließlich ins Schwarze fällt: das Ende ist vorprogrammiert (34). Ist dies das kabbalistische Weiß der Gnade, und das farblose Schwarz des Nichts? Der Fall des Freundes zieht Georgs Sturz in den Fluss nach sich. Im Gegensatz zum fallenden, imaginierten geistigen Freund acht Seiten vorher, der weiß erschien, ist die stürzende Figur Georgs schwarz gezeichnet; sie ist das Negativbild, die andere, dunkle Seite seiner gespaltenen Persönlichkeit. Anstatt am Ende den „unendlichen Verkehr“ zu bebildern, von dem in Kafkas Text die Rede ist - und den Kuper visualisiert hat - platziert Stetter als letztes Bild stattdessen noch einmal einen riesigen, total zerzausten Baum, der nun recht gebrechlich scheint und jeden Moment abzuknicken droht. Der Zeichner signalisiert auf diese Weise, dass es auch um die Gesellschaft, in welcher der Vater eine Machtinstanz war, schlecht bestellt ist. Stetter schafft damit eindrucksvolle neue Bilder und aktualisiert in genialer Weise Das Urteil für eine junge Generation von Leser/ innen, die Kafkas Angstbilder in der heutigen globalen Gesellschaft gut verstehen können. Kafka in Comics. Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von Moritz Stetters Das Urteil 313 314 Helga Kraft Works Cited Alt, Peter-André. Franz Kafka: Der ewige Sohn. Eine Biographie. München: C. H. Beck, 2005. Biale, David. “A Letter from Gershom Scholem to Zalman Schocken, 1937.” Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History . Cambridge, MA : Harvard UP , 1982. Corbeyran, Eric und Richard Horne. Die Verwandlung von Franz Kafka . Trans. Kasi Wilksen. München: Knesebeck, 2013. Dingeldey, Philip J. „Kafka im Comic.“ Titel. Kulturmagazin 17. Sept. 2014. Web. 8. Juli 2015. Fellner, Friederike. Kafkas Zeichnungen . Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2014. Fortune, Dion. The Mystical Qabalah. York Beach, ME : Samuel Weiser, 2000. Friedrich, Ute. „Komik - Comic. Komische Elemente in den Texten Franz Kafkas und ihre bildliche Umsetzung in verschiedenen Comic-Adaptionen.“ Magisterarbeit. Philosophische Fakultät der Rheinischen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Bonn, 2009. -. „Franz Kafka im Comic. Kafkaeske Verunsicherung.“ Tagesspiegel 16. Aug. 2015. Web. 25. Nov. 2015. „Genau das ist Kafka.“ Interview mit David Zane Mairowitz. Intellectures 2. Nov. 2013. Web. 25. Nov. 2015. Grözinger, Karl Erich. Kafka und die Kabbala . Das Jüdische im Werk und Denken von Franz Kafka. Frankfurt a. M.: Campus Verlag, 2014. Hohlbaum, Christopher. Kafka im Comic. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2015. Jagow, Bettina von und Oliver Jahraus, eds. Kafka-Handbuch: Leben - Werk - Wirkung. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008. Janouch, Gustav. Gespräche mit Kafka . Aufzeichnungen und Erinnerungen. Frankfurt a. M.: S. Fischer, 1981. Kafka, Franz. „Das Vierte Oktavheft.“ Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande und andere Prosa aus dem Nachlass . Gesammelte Werke. Frankfurt a. M.: S. Fischer, 1953 (Lizensausgabe von Schocken Books, New York). -. Beschreibung eines Kampfes. Gesammelte Werke in zwölf Bänden . Vol. 5. Frankfurt a. M.: S. Fischer. 1994. Kuper, Peter. Gibs auf! und andere Erzählungen. Illustriert von Peter Kuper. Hamburg: Carlsen Verlag, 1997. Mahler, Nicolas. Franz Kafkas nonstop Lachmaschine. Berlin: Reprodukt, 2014. Mairowitz, David Zane und Robert Crumb. Kafka. Trans. Ursula Grützmacher-Tabori. Berlin: Reprodukt, 2013. Mairowitz, David Zane und Chantal Montellier. Der Process nach Franz Kafka. Trans. Anja Kootz. München: Knesebeck, 2008. Mairowitz, David Zane und Jaromír 99. Das Schloss nach Franz Kafka . Trans. Anja Kootz. München: Knesebeck, 2013. Modern Times . Dir. Charles Chaplin. Charles Chaplin Productions, 1936. Platthaus, Andreas. „Sind Comics Kunst? “ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 8. Nov. 2013. Web. 16. Sept. 2015. Kafka in Comics. Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von Moritz Stetters Das Urteil 315 Politzer, Heinz. Franz Kafka: Parable and Paradox . Ithaca, NY : Cornell UP , 1962. Rehberg, Peter. lachen lesen. Zur Komik der Moderne bei Kafka. Bielefeld: transcript, 2007. Ricard, Sylvain, Maël und Albertine Ralenti. In der Strafkolonie. Nach Franz Kafka . Trans. Anja Kootz. München: Knesebeck, 2012. Schmitz-Emans, Monika. Literatur-Comics. Adaptionen und Transformationen der Weltliteratur. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012. Steinaecker, Thomas von. „Gescheiterte Verwandlung: Kafkas Werk als Comic Graphic Novels ohne Tiefe und Fantasie“. Die Welt 17. Juli 2013. Web. 3. Juli 2015. Stetter, Moritz. Das Urteil nach Franz Kafka. München: Knesebeck, 2015. Trabert, Florian, Mara Stuhlfauth-Trabert und Johannes Waßmer, eds. Graphisches Erzählen. Neue Perspektiven auf Literaturcomics. Bielefeld: transcript, 2015. Weigand, Sophie. „David Zane Mairowitz & Robert Crumb - Kafka.“ Literaturen 26. Mai 2013. Web. 25. Nov. 2015. Weitzman, Erica. Irony’s Antics. Walser, Kafka, Roth, and the German Comic Tradition. Chicago, IL : Northwestern UP , 2015. Wintersteiger, Christina. „Die Lücke als Aufforderung. Comicadaptionen von Franz Kafkas Leben und Werk.“ Medienimpulse. Beiträge zur Medienpädagogik März 2013. Web. 20. Nov. 2015. Images Fig. 1. Mahler, Coverbild. © Nicolas Mahler und Reprodukt. Fig. 2. Mahler 49. © Nicolas Mahler und Reprodukt. Fig. 3. Mahler 55. © Nicolas Mahler und Reprodukt. Fig. 4. Fellner 163. Fig. 5. Mairowitz und Crumb 5. © Reprodukt. Fig. 6. Mairowitz und Montellier 67. © Knesebeck GmbH & Co. Fig. 7. Mairowitz und Jaromír 99 8. © Knesebeck GmbH & Co. Fig. 8. Kuper 49. © Peter Kuper. Fig. 9. Stetter 5. © Knesebeck GmbH & Co. Fig. 10. Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times . Fig. 11. Stetter 34. © Knesebeck GmbH & Co. “Ganz normale Deutsche”: Confronting the National Socialist Past in Barbara Yelin’s 317 “Ganz normale Deutsche”: Confronting the National Socialist Past in Barbara Yelin’s Irmina Brett Sterling University of Arkansas Abstract: Despite the growing popularity of historical comics in German-speaking Europe, the Second World War and the Holocaust are as yet underrepresented among German-language works in the genre. Barbara Yelin’s Irmina (2014) is a key addition to the comics landscape that provides an important reflection on the period. Irmina presents a character study of a so-called “normale Deutsche” whose political indifference leads to an eventual embrace of the Nazi regime. This essay analyzes Yelin’s comic as an attempted reckoning with Germany’s National Socialist past for younger generations eager to understand their grandparents’ actions and motivations. The essay focuses particularly on the visual and narrative strategies Yelin employs to depict the titular character’s slide into complicity. The historical figure of the bystander is also discussed with attention to its formative psychological characteristics. Finally, the essay addresses the relative absence of Jewish figures in Yelin’s comic and explores the implications of this artistic choice. Keywords: bystander, complicity, Mitläufer, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, comics, graphic novels, race, National Socialism, erasure In recent years, the genre of the historical comic has become especially popular. In German-language comics, this has included a range of biographies from Martin Luther to Fidel Castro 1 ; the historical crime comics of Peer Meter and co. 2 ; and a great number of comics on the “Wende.” 3 With a few notable exceptions, 4 the Second World War and the Holocaust have received relatively little coverage in German comics. Given the central place these events occupy in German history, each new comic on the subject is a welcome addition. One such important addition is Barbara Yelin’s Irmina (2014), which focuses on a 318 Brett Sterling key aspect of Germany’s National Socialist past, namely the passive support of Hitler’s regime by so-called “ganz normale Deutsche” (Korb 275). Irmina is neither a war comic nor a Holocaust comic, but rather a piece of historical fiction about the everyday life of an average woman in National Socialist Germany, as she slides increasingly into silent complicity with the Hitler regime. Yelin’s comic presents an important exploration 5 of the motives that kept bystanders from speaking out or taking action against the discrimination, deportation, and extermination of Germany’s Jewish population. This essay provides an analysis of Irmina as a reckoning with Germany’s past, specifically the attempt by younger generations to better understand—but not excuse—the inaction of their grandparents’ generation. On the narrative level, this essay will examine the eponymous protagonist’s development into a follower of the regime with particular attention to aspects of her character, manifestations of anti-Semitism and National Socialist ideology in her thinking, and the role of chance and choice in determining her actions. For context, I will provide a brief summary of the comic’s plot. Based loosely on the life of the artist’s grandmother, Barbara Yelin’s Irmina explores the life and actions of a bystander to the genocidal project of the Hitler regime. Irmina von Behdinger is a young, middle-class German woman who moves to London in 1934 to study at a secretarial school. While there, she meets Howard Greene, a black Oxford student from Barbados, with whom she becomes romantically involved. The two are separated, though, when political and financial issues force Irmina to return home. Back in Germany, Irmina takes a job as a secretary in the Reichskriegsministerium with the ultimately futile hope that she will be transferred to the German Consulate in London and thus be able to reunite with Howard. But when Irmina loses contact with Howard, the crushing disappointment saps Irmina’s desire to escape, and she grudgingly accedes to the courtship of a zealous SS officer. She subsequently marries, has a son, and eases into an increasingly uncritical acceptance of National Socialist ideology and the promise of the Volksgemeinschaft —the concept of a prosperous society based upon the unifying element of German racial purity. After her husband’s death in the war, Irmina lives a quiet life until she unexpectedly reunites with Howard as an older woman and is forced to reflect on her own inaction during the Holocaust. Irmina von Behdinger was neither a victim nor a perpetrator of the Holocaust, but rather a bystander, someone who was, in Victoria J. Barnett’s words, “immediately present, an actual witness, someone for whom involvement was an option” (xv). Throughout Yelin’s comic, Irmina is marked by her failure to act; instead of becoming engaged on either side, Irmina insulates herself from personal responsibility in the conviction of her identity as a disinterested bystander to events seemingly beyond her control. In order to better understand Irmina’s “Ganz normale Deutsche”: Confronting the National Socialist Past in Barbara Yelin’s Irmina 319 position, it is useful to look at the factors that contribute to the development of the bystander persona. In her study on the moral psychology of rescuers, bystanders, and Nazis during the Holocaust, Kristen Renwick Monroe identifies several aspects that can predict which of these roles an individual is likely to play in a genocide. The most applicable of these aspects, which will each be viewed in the context of Irmina’s character, are self-concept, worldview, and values. To begin, Monroe claims that an individual’s self-concept is the “central psychological variable” and most important predictor of behavior during a genocide (711). That behavior is, in turn, influenced by how an individual sees the world and what values he or she considers constitutive of a good life. Each of these aspects of Irmina’s character is established within the first chapter of the comic, when she is afforded opportunities for self-development and -actualization, and her trajectory toward Nazi complicity is not yet inevitable. At the outset, Irmina is depicted as an independent, inquisitive woman who values her freedom above all else. Against the expectations of the time, Irmina repeatedly rejects the notion that she needs a man’s permission or support to achieve her goals. All that Irmina really needs, she states repeatedly, is the freedom to shape her own life: “Ich möchte […] tun und lassen, was ich will” (Yelin, Irmina 89). Her stay in London is an expression of this desire, since her secretarial training is a means to attaining financial security without the aid of her family or a man. Irmina’s strong sense of independence fuels personal ambition—a desire, “jemand [zu] sein” (265)—and a taste for adventure: her childhood goal was to sail the world, discovering uncharted islands and lost treasures. However, this core of self-actualization and independence coexists uneasily in Irmina’s personality alongside a conviction that she is an unremarkable, average person. By conceiving of herself as just one individual among many, Irmina is able to absolve herself of the “special” responsibility of political action. A key aspect of Irmina’s self-concept and her worldview is the notion that politics occupies a sphere of existence separate from the everyday lives of average citizens, and that those same citizens are neither directly affected by, nor able to affect the political situation as it develops. For example, when confronted by her English host father about Hitler’s purge of the SA during the so-called “Night of the Long Knives,” Irmina insists that the state-sanctioned violence has nothing to do with the German people: “Aber … das ist doch Politik! Das betrifft die anderen doch nicht” (67). For Irmina, the government’s actions appear unrelated to her own experience, and are thus of little interest to her. As a self-described “normale Deutsche” (79), Irmina feels free to go about her business, pursuing personal goals without the need to take a position on the political issues of the time. Irmina’s political apathy is at the center of her worldview, alongside a belief in the essential rationality and justice of the political system. 320 Brett Sterling Like other bystanders in Monroe’s study, Irmina demonstrates the feeling that the world is “run by forces somehow beyond [her] control,” namely by an unknown class of politicians operating above and beyond the citizenry (Monroe 721). According to such a worldview, the individual need not feel compelled to intervene in political situations, since such intervention is believed to be ineffectual: in response to the SA purge, Irmina asks in exasperation, “Was kann ich dafür? ” (Yelin, Irmina 67). Irmina’s political inaction is further supported by “just world thinking,” the belief that there are justifiable reasons for the existence of suffering and violence in the world (Staub 67). Rather than expressing dismay at politically-motivated extrajudicial killing, Irmina rationalizes Hitler’s murder of SA officers as the result of some wrongdoing on the part of the latter: “Wer anständig ist, hat nichts zu befürchten” (Yelin, Irmina 67). Additionally, Irmina indicates a faith in the ability of existing political structures to correct the influence of extremism on the status quo. Even as the entire world watched Hitler’s power grow in the early 1930s, Irmina is convinced that it is a momentary phase not to be taken that seriously: “Ich kann’s nicht mehr hören. Hitler … Hitler … Hitler! Der hält sich doch nicht. Das ist eine Phase! Davon bin ich fest überzeugt” (54). If the political system is inherently just and self-correcting, then anything that occurs within it, no matter how violent or odious, must have been done for good reason or it will be righted by a swing back to the center. Taken in combination, the belief in a just world—in the form of Germany’s political system—and in the lack of political efficacy of the individual round out a worldview that makes it extremely difficult for Irmina to resist the machinations of the Hitler regime. At the core of Irmina’s self-concept and worldview there is one main value: the freedom and independence of the individual. The value of independence has both positive and negative effects on Irmina’s personality. On the one hand, it is Irmina’s great strength: her independence makes her resourceful, perseverant, and self-reliant. On the other hand, it fuels self-absorption, a concern for personal comfort, and a disinterest in the welfare of anyone not immediately connected to Irmina. Beyond the internal conflict created by these opposing aspects of Irmina’s independent nature, there is the external threat posed by National Socialist ideology, which works to tamp down the liberating side of independence while simultaneously instrumentalizing self-concern against empathy for others. For example, in spite of her desire to make something of herself and to experience a world beyond the confines of established gender roles, Irmina has internalized the Nazi state’s stigma against women’s self-determination. In her adolescence, Irmina was passed over for higher education after the family’s money went to educating her brothers. Yet on top of expressing bitterness at her missed opportunities, Irmina recites state propaganda as a half-believed “Ganz normale Deutsche”: Confronting the National Socialist Past in Barbara Yelin’s Irmina 321 justification: “Aber bei uns sagen sie jetzt, Studieren sei nichts für die deutsche Frau. Ist etwas für Blaustrümpfe. […] Frauen, die studieren, folgen nicht ihrer … Bestimmung. Ihrem Land dienen sie durch andere Tätigkeiten, verstehen Sie? ” (44—45). Within the National Socialist mythos, the Aryan woman was expected to serve the German people first and foremost as a mother, not as an educated member of the workforce. Irmina’s stay in London is intended specifically to liberate her from such a domestic life, but the ideology of maternal duty erodes Irmina’s confidence in her path of self-actualization. Whereas Nazi gender policy undermines the liberating aspect of Irmina’s independence, the ideology of racial superiority emerges in combination with Irmina’s heightened degree of self-concern. Within the comic, Irmina’s greatest chance for avoiding the snare of National Socialist ideology is Howard. In her relationship to Howard, Irmina finds a person who believes in her and supports her efforts to make something of herself beyond the constraints of social expectations, while challenging her to think critically about politics. The fact that Howard is black also exposes Irmina to the otherwise abstract phenomenon of racial prejudice, which she has never experienced personally. On the night that Irmina meets Howard at a London society party, a drunken young man who had been hitting on Irmina insults the pair by invoking stereotypes of black men as physically and sexually threatening: “Mit ihm reden Sie also, ja? Keine Angst vor dem schwarzen Mann? […] Jetzt wird’s mir klar, Miss … Sie befolgen nur die Befehle Ihres Führrrrerrs … Germans, wählt Brrrraun! ” (27). After Irmina leaves with Howard, she is completely shocked at the young man’s actions, but more so at the fact that no one stepped up to silence him: “Wieso sagt denn keiner was? ” (30). Irmina has never been talked to this way, but for Howard, verbal assaults are a part of everyday life. When the couple goes to the movies together, a white patron refuses to sit next to a “Darkie,” prompting Irmina to speak out vociferously in Howard’s defense: “Dieser Mann ist Bürger des British Empire … und Oxford Stipendiat! Ha! Und SIE ? ! Ein PROLET sind Sie! Ein widerlicher, ungebildeter Engländer! ” (98). In light of her previous experience, Irmina refuses to let prejudicial statements go unchallenged, but she does so from a position of privilege. Irmina is frequently unable to recognize the precariousness of Howard’s situation: as a black man in England, Howard must work twice as hard as white students and accept verbal abuse without complaint, lest he lose his scholarship and be forced to return to Barbados. As a German in England, the consequences of Irmina questioning the social status quo are negligible. Irmina’s willingness to defend Howard against discrimination is the closest she ever comes to overcoming the politics of racial division. Yet in spite of Irmina’s genuine love for Howard, it only takes a moment of perceived person- 322 Brett Sterling al injury to activate latent racial animosity against him. In one scene, Irmina expresses resentment at Howard for his seemingly posh position as an Oxford fellow, while she perceives her own situation to be much more tenuous: “ DU hast leicht reden! DU mit deinem Stipendium! […] In Deutschland würde einer wie DU überhaupt nichts bekommen” (86—87). Although Irmina immediately apologizes for her statement, it is evident that she is vulnerable to the influence of racial prejudice when she feels her own status threatened. While Irmina’s relationship with Howard brings her into personal contact with the concrete expression of racial prejudice, her experience working within London’s activist circles presents her the opportunity of evolving beyond her stated apolitical neutrality. Through Howard, Irmina secures work as a social companion to a duchess and former suffragette who uses her wealth to fund philanthropic and political projects. In a preliminary interview, the duchess attempts to assess Irmina’s political position: “Ganz normale Deutsche”: Confronting the National Socialist Past in Barbara Yelin’s Irmina 323 GRÄFIN . Und aus Deutschland sind Sie emigriert? Jüdin? IRMINA . N… Nein - weder noch. Ich … Ich bin einfach eine normale Deutsche. GRÄFIN . NORMALE Deutsche? Kind, Sie wissen ja nicht, was Sie reden! Ihre normalen Deutschen richten gerade großes Unheil an. Und wie es aussieht, wird es noch mehr. Lesen Sie keine Zeitungen? IRMINA . Ach, die Zeitungen. GRÄFIN . Kind! Sie haben noch viel zu lernen. […] Sie sind noch viel zu jung, Kind, um zu wissen, ob sie zu den Emigranten … oder Ihren normalen Deutschen gehören wollen. (78—81) Upon questioning, Irmina again articulates her self-concept as an unremarkable, apolitical German citizen; she sees herself as disconnected from the actions of her fellow Germans, and shows no desire to inform herself about those actions (“Ach, die Zeitungen.”). The duchess generally takes in Jewish and communist émigrés from Germany to provide them with work and shelter, but she makes an exception with Irmina in the hope that Irmina might evolve out of her political detachment and learn to see the world differently (84). In a double-page montage, Yelin shows the variety of situations and activities to which Irmina’s job with the duchess exposes her: rallies for women’s rights and against fascism, working the line at a soup kitchen, distributing bread to impoverished urban families, and attending dinners with the political and social elite (82). In the individual panels, Irmina is shown on the margins, listening to, but not engaging with the activists and politicians around her. Irmina expresses admiration for the duchess and her daily fight for social justice, but the political ideals never take hold. Rather than becoming inspired to action, Irmina becomes more convinced that the duchess’s life must be painfully lonely, and thus undesirable. Ultimately, Irmina refuses to choose a political side, insisting instead on an individuality that defies being pigeonholed into a single category, as she explains to Howard: HOWARD . Ach, Irmina. Ich frag mich manchmal, wer du eigentlich bist? IRMINA . Ich? Na … das weißt du doch. Blaustrumpf! Tippse! Kommunistin! Nazifräulein! Emigrantin! Suffragette! Ich bin ich. Das muss reichen. (88) Irmina is reluctant to allow herself to be defined by others, to be limited by the constraints of labels. This suggests a fluidity in her identity that could hold open a variety of avenues of positive or negative development. Simultaneously, Irmina’s insistence on independence serves as an excuse not to accept the consequences of taking a position and acting according to principles larger than self-actualization. On the day of her return to Germany, it remains unclear where her path will take her. 324 Brett Sterling The first chapter of Yelin’s comic presents Irmina as a headstrong, independent woman who wants to make something of herself beyond the societal expectations placed on her as a woman. Inquisitive, adventurous, and vital, Irmina displays an openness to the world and new experiences. In her relationship with Howard, she is her most progressive self, willing to speak out against discrimination. Simultaneously, though, Irmina’s behavior and statements are often informed by self-interest and indicate a substratum of latent National Socialist ideology at work, including a tacit acceptance of women’s domestic and maternal roles in German society, and the belief in German racial superiority. These aspects of Irmina’s character come to the fore in the comic’s second chapter, when Irmina returns to Germany and is surrounded by the full apparatus of National Socialist propaganda. Irmina’s eventual slide into complicity with the actions of the Nazi state is determined, I argue, by chance—unforeseen developments in world politics and in Irmina’s personal life—as well as by choice, a series of conscious decisions made by Irmina without compulsion that are somewhat obscured by the comic’s focus on the role of external forces in determining Irmina’s actions. In the early stages of Irmina’s reentry into German society, she is motivated ostensibly by a desire to earn money in order to return to London and reunite with Howard as quickly as possible. In the austere economic climate of the early 1930s, Irmina experiences real privation living in a communal apartment with several others, unable to afford heating and only barely able to feed herself. She does, however, secure stable work: as a secretary in the Reichskriegsministerium . Irmina hopes that her English language skills will net her a transfer back to England and a position at the German Consulate in London. Initially, Irmina shows no outward sign of party affiliation or loyalty, indeed she is openly critical of the disparity between the regime’s utopian promises and her own lived experience of poverty. As she tells her future husband, an SS officer and true believer in the National Socialist cause: “Hier kann ich nicht mal meine eigenen bescheidenen Kosten hereinarbeiten! Ich wohne in einer unbeheizten Kammer, ernähre mich von Graupensuppe! Ihre Gedankengebäude mögen Großes verheißen, aber davon kann ich mir keine Bulette kaufen” (138). Irmina’s rejection of the Volksgemeinschaft project is rooted in a pragmatic skepticism that causes her to mistrust idealism without evidence of results that will directly improve her own life. Throughout the comic, Irmina’s focus on personal prosperity makes her resistant to ideological influence, at least in the form of grand visions; Irmina is more interested in having her needs met than in crafting a golden future for Germany. Irmina’s cynical view of the regime even overrides her sense of caution, as in a scene where she publicly derides a propaganda poster encouraging “Ganz normale Deutsche”: Confronting the National Socialist Past in Barbara Yelin’s Irmina 325 Germans to follow Hitler’s lead and abstain from a lavish meal one Sunday per month ( Eintopfsonntag ): “Glaubst du im Ernst, der Führer löffelt am Sonntag Wassersuppe? ” (143). In spite of her friend’s frantic reminder that such talk would constitute sedition under German law, Irmina continues to criticize the state on a personal, but not on a systemic level. In the comic’s second chapter, a number of factors combine to push Irmina ever deeper into acquiescence to, if not outright acceptance of the National Socialist regime and the notion of the Volksgemeinschaft . The first major setback to Irmina’s plans of a return to London comes when she is notified that the political situation has worsened, and that there is no chance that she will be transferred to the German Consulate. In a panic, Irmina resolves to borrow money from a friend to finance a return to England that very night. When she arrives home to pack, though, her plan proves futile: Irmina’s most recent letter to Howard has been returned, with a note that the addressee’s whereabouts are unknown. In this moment, Irmina’s hopes collapse, and she begins to resign herself to a fate in Germany. With Howard gone, Irmina begins a relationship with her suitor, Gregor Meinrich, which quickly develops into marriage and the creation of a family. On a first reading, this situation appears to be a blow dealt to Irmina by fate, altering the path of her life beyond her control. The rejection of her transfer request, but even more so Howard’s disappearance, seems to explain her downtrodden acceptance of a second path that she would not have chosen otherwise. I argue, though, that this presents a much too passive picture of Irmina as a character who has no control over her own destiny and whose fate is determined by the unpredictability of chance. Upon closer reading, Yelin’s narrative reveals a much more problematic character, one for whom other avenues existed, but were not chosen. The importance of choice in determining Irmina’s personal trajectory begins before her return to Germany. When Irmina’s parents are forced to cut off her financial support, she chooses to return to Germany-a country viewed from England as devolving into a political and humanitarian nightmare-against Howard’s advice and entreaties. Irmina is a fiercely independent woman, protective of her freedom, who places great value on her personal dignity. When Howard suggests that she could find other employment in London to remain with him, or even take a loan from him, Irmina refuses: working as a domestic servant would be beneath her, and having a debt held over her would be too great a constraint on her freedom. She chooses instead to return to Germany, rather than to stay on someone else’s terms. Irmina’s willingness to return is also informed by her apolitical stance: in her mind, Hitler is a passing fad and a component of the political sphere that does not really affect her life. 326 Brett Sterling Once in Germany, Irmina makes a massive political statement that is presented in the comic (and by Irmina herself) as another twist of fate: through a well-connected uncle, Irmina receives a position as a foreign language secretary in the Reichskriegsministerium . On the one hand, it is Irmina’s stated objective to use this position to return to London, and thus her employment there would seem to be no more than a means to an end. On the other hand, though, it is difficult to claim that one is separate from politics while working directly for a central part of the state apparatus, specifically the organ responsible for planning and carrying out military actions. Irmina’s willingness to work for the government in this capacity can be explained as a pragmatic choice to achieve her objectives in whatever way possible, while also being indicative of her established political disinterest and ignorance. However, this same choice also makes clear that, while she may not vocally espouse the regime’s ideology, she benefits from it and more than tacitly supports it by becoming a part of the government. It is stated in the comic that work is scarce, but if Irmina had any kind of political conviction against the National Socialist regime, she could have chosen to work elsewhere. The same can be said of her choice in life companion, Gregor Meinrich. From their first meeting, Meinrich repeatedly attempts to convince a skeptical Irmina that a brave new world awaits Germany, provided all are prepared to make personal sacrifices for the prosperity of the nation as a whole. In Meinrich’s view, women like Irmina are of immense importance to the creation of Germany’s grand vision, so much so that for her to leave the country would be a betrayal: “Ich halte es für UNverantwortlich […] dass Sie wegfahren, Irmina! […] Deutschland braucht Sie jetzt! Es gibt so viel hier zu tun. Frauen wie Sie werden gebraucht. Verlassen Sie uns nicht. Gehen Sie nicht weg! ” (149—50). In the absence of clearly defined character traits that would set Irmina apart from other women, it becomes clear that Irmina’s value to the state is first and foremost as a woman, that is as a potential wife and mother. Meinrich’s appeal to Irmina’s sense of duty and responsibility attempts to invest a traditional domestic role with gravity and honor, but Irmina rejects the advance as a threat to her personal autonomy. After the revelation of Howard’s disappearance, though, Irmina is presented as demoralized and resigned to a life of stagnation. In the vacuum left behind, Meinrich’s dogged pursuit begins to win Irmina over, as the social mobility and material gains promised by the Volksgemeinschaft become more accessible through their acquaintanceship. In a key extended scene, Yelin uses color and double-page spreads to depict the effectiveness of National Socialist pomp and opulence in wearing down Irmina’s practical objections to the regime. The scene begins with the image of a crowd gathered at Potsdamer Platz, arms raised in salute to Hitler’s mo- “Ganz normale Deutsche”: Confronting the National Socialist Past in Barbara Yelin’s Irmina 327 torcade, which has passed unseen off of the right page. In the background, a two-story portrait of Hitler is flanked by two enormous red banners, bearing the swastika. The image occupies two full pages and creates a sense of foreboding under the heavy grays and blacks of Yelin’s pencil drawings, with the strong accent of red breaking through the darkness. On the next page, Irmina pushes her way through throngs of onlookers to meet Meinrich after her plans to leave Germany have fallen through. At the door of a packed hotel, Meinrich runs into an influential SS officer who gets the couple access to a ball for the party elite being held inside. Along the right side of the final panel, the doorway to the hotel glows red, echoing the banners of the previous scene. On the following page, red dominates, combining the opulence of the ballroom’s decor with the color of National Socialism to represent the infernal appeal of party affiliation for Irmina. After some initial surprise upon learning of Meinrich’s SS membership, Irmina begins to be taken in by the romance and glamor of the evening, which Yelin emphasizes in a one-panel close-up of Irmina gazing into Meinrich’s eyes. Irmina’s openness not only to Meinrich’s romantic advances, but to the attraction of the NSDAP and the comforts it promises, is made clear in the final double-page spread that ends the scene. From a series of close-up panels, Yelin pans out and shows the cavernous ballroom, filled with well-dressed party members smoking around a crowded dance floor. Surrounded by red, Irmina and Meinrich are shown in the middle of the dance floor as Irmina utters the only text on the page: “Nicht so schlimm” (164—65). 328 Brett Sterling In the context of the previous scene, Irmina is ostensibly reacting to Meinrich having stepped on her foot, but the statement reads as a commentary on the kind of luxurious life that being in the party’s inner circle promises. The hope for financial gain and material comfort proves to be a central motivator for Irmina’s ultimate decision to align herself with the regime through a relationship with Meinrich, and the couple is married within three pages of their first dance. Irmina soon learns, though, that the Volksgemeinschaft does indeed demand sacrifices from the community. Shortly after her marriage to Meinrich, Irmina abandons the workplace for a life of domesticity, which is in direct contradiction to her independent character and personal ambitions. In Mothers in the Fatherland , Claudia Koonz argues: “Women who decided to support Nazism accepted their inferior status in exchange for rewards” (3). Irmina confirms Koonz’s claim by tying her satisfaction with domestic life to her husband’s successes and the resulting financial gains. While Irmina expresses dissatisfaction at being tied down and caught in a static life of waiting for her husband, she indicates that a certain amount of luxury could counteract her malaise: “Ich hab es satt. Ich bin nicht gut im Warten. Was ist denn nun mit deinen großen Erfolgen? Den illustren Gesellschaften? Der geräumigen Wohnung? Meinen Namen habe ich weggegeben für dich” (Yelin, Irmina 173). Irmina makes it clear that she has sacrificed for the Volksgemeinschaft , namely her independence and identity, but the rewards have not been forthcoming. It is important to note, again, that Irmina’s criticisms of the regime are apolitical, driven by personal desires and completely indifferent to the effect of National Socialism on Jews and other groups targeted for persecution. 6 As previously mentioned, Yelin’s comic is primarily a depiction of the life and political entanglement of an average German under National Socialism, not a comic about the Holocaust. In discussing the life of a bystander, though, the analysis cannot lose sight of the implications of inaction and indifference to suffering inherent in even the most minimal acceptance of the National Socialist regime. Aside from the overt employment of anti-Semitism in state propaganda, to which all German citizens were exposed, there is a growing consensus among historians that contrary to the oft-repeated refrain among postwar Germans, “Davon haben wir nichts gewusst,” 7 most Germans were aware to some extent of the Nazi’s genocide against the Jews (Dean 81). After granting that most Germans knew what was happening to Jews and other persecuted groups, many historians like Carolyn Dean argue that “bystanders were never merely indifferent but often ambivalent, sometimes complicit, occasionally heroic and mostly not” (82). The question then becomes, within the context of Yelin’s comic, what does Irmina know, and how does she respond to anti-Semitism: with indifference, ambivalence, or complicity? “Ganz normale Deutsche”: Confronting the National Socialist Past in Barbara Yelin’s Irmina 329 Anti-Semitism is present in Irmina in many ways, most conspicuously in the statements of Gregor Meinrich, Irmina’s suitor turned husband. On several occasions, Meinrich uses Jewishness to devalue or discredit people and institutions: the architecture of Walter Gropius is described as “seelenlos … technisch, berechnend. Jüdisch” (135), the foreign press is lumped together as “Jüdische Zeitungen” (167), and Ernst vom Rath’s assassin, Herschel Grynszpan, is referred to as a “Judenbengel” (171). Initially, Irmina does not signal agreement with, nor repeat Meinrich’s anti-Semitism, but neither does she reject or refute it. Irmina does, however, indicate an openness to anti-Semitism born out of a sense of personal injury done to her while in London. When Irmina’s financial support evaporates, she appeals to her benefactor, the duchess, to loan her money on a short-term basis. The duchess not only denies Irmina’s request for money, but also asks her to move out of her lodgings to make room for a homeless Jewish refugee. In a moment of vulnerability, Irmina feels betrayed and supplanted by an interloper who becomes a scapegoat for Irmina’s personal misfortune. According to Monroe, personal losses and traumas like Irmina’s often led bystanders “to retreat into themselves and adopt a defensive posture” (700). In Irmina’s case, her defensiveness of her own well-being is expressed as a bitter conviction that Jews and other refugees receive better treatment than ethnic Germans. Shortly after returning to Berlin, Irmina disparages emigrants while discussing the departure of an elderly Jewish woman from a friend’s apartment complex: “Auswanderer. Weißt du, dass die bei den Engländern beliebter sind als normale Deutsche? ” (118). Although Irmina never addresses the woman’s Jewishness, the woman is subsumed under “Auswanderer,” who are perceived to have abandoned their country and are denied the status of “normale Deutsche.” Irmina’s employment of the phrase “normale Deutsche” in this context reveals the insidious secondary implication of her previous insistence on being an ordinary, politically insignificant and unimplicated German citizen: she “counts” as German, as a member of a nation defined not by citizenship, but by racial identity. 8 This is confirmed a few pages later when Irmina acquires her “Kleiner Arier-Nachweis,” documentation of her racial purity necessary for working within the National Socialist party apparatus. The express focus on Irmina as a “normale Deutsche” also serves to obscure the existence of Jews within the context of the comic. The world in which we find Irmina is one largely devoid of a Jewish presence. In the Berlin Yelin depicts, Jews are not shown, but rather alluded to by the ubiquitous signs forbidding their entry into restaurants and businesses. And yet Yelin incorporates these images subtly into her compositions, making them as inconspicuous to the reader as they seem to be to Irmina. In several panels, 330 Brett Sterling Yelin depicts storefronts announcing “Juden unerwünscht” (126) and “Juden sind unser Unglück! ” (199), but the signs usually occupy a less central position at the panel’s edge such that they appear a normal part of the city scenery. These placards go unnoticed by Irmina: she demonstrates neither surprise at, nor condemnation of the messages they convey. In one full-page panel, Irmina is shown coming through the door of a café, unaware of or uninterested in a sign displayed prominently to her left—equal in size to the figure’s torso—that declares: “Juden: Zutritt verboten! ” (152). The banishment of Jews from public places is fully unremarkable in Irmina’s world, where the existence of Jews is signaled first and foremost by their absence. By removing Jewish figures from all but a few scenes, Yelin’s comic visualizes the violence of bystander indifference. Dean describes indifference to the suf- “Ganz normale Deutsche”: Confronting the National Socialist Past in Barbara Yelin’s Irmina 331 fering of victims as a “symbolic erasure whose brutality is palpable to those who disappear whether or not bystanders feel good or guilty, whether they are ignorant or knowledgeable, or concerned to help but regret that they cannot” (104). Irmina’s lack of attention to the plight of Jews and her failure to even register their presence is more than just complacency or passive ignorance: it amounts to the active negation of an entire people. It is fitting that Yelin’s narrative, which follows and is driven by the character and actions of Irmina, should reflect her indifference. On the visual level, the comic uses a filmic style of presentation that flows smoothly from one panel to the next, reinforcing the supposed normality of experience being depicted: as Irmina fails to see the extraordinary nature of events and her place within them, the comic avoids experimentation. Yelin creates a formal representation of the psychological profile of the bystander as inherently unremarkable through her use of a realistic, if sketchy drawing style with a subdued color palette, geometric panel grids, and a stable narrative progression. These visual and narrative elements, combined with the absence of depicted violence and victims in Irmina’s immediate environment, reflect the distance that Irmina creates between herself and the world. Irmina’s comfortable separation from reality persists until she is unavoidably confronted with the presence and open persecution of Jews during the pogrom of the Reichskristallnacht on November 9—10, 1938. In the night of November 9, Irmina is awakened by lights and the sound of an approaching vehicle. She watches from her darkened window as Nazi foot soldiers ransack a Jewish shop across the street, drag a man out of the building, and drive away. Irmina is shown in a sequence of panels watching silently from above, framed in her window, as the scene plays out below. When the silence is broken by a disembodied voice—a single word balloon against a black background exclaiming, “LOUIS! ! ! Er hat doch nichts getan! ”—Irmina’s eyes widen in surprise at the noise as she backs into the shadows. In the next panel, the small figure of a woman is shown standing in the darkened street as she shouts for help: “Ist denn niemand wach? Warum hilft denn keiner? ” (180). The woman’s entreaty is reminiscent of Irmina’s own protest against the prejudicial treatment of Howard: “Wieso sagt denn keiner was? ” (30). And yet Irmina does not speak, nor does she intervene: she retreats instead further into the darkness of her room, unseen by the woman on the street and thus exempted from a response. The distance between Irmina and the woman on the street is expressed in the visual structure of Yelin’s panels as well. Throughout the scene, the reader views the action from the same kind of secure remove that Irmina does, as an observer rather than a participant. Irmina is shown in relative close-up, while the woman is depicted in miniature, conveying her diminished importance in the eyes of the main character, Irmina. The Jewish shopkeeper’s plight is not without 332 Brett Sterling effect on Irmina, though. In the panels that follow, Irmina moves—physically— from a place of observation to one of contemplation: she leaves the window and returns to bed, finds her husband gone, and lies awake in thought, presumably contemplating her own (in)action and the implications of her husband’s absence. The next morning, Irmina goes out into the city—against Gregor’s explicit warning—and encounters the full scope of the destruction she witnessed in her own neighborhood the night before. Over several pages, Yelin moves Irmina past shattered shopfronts, where the Jewish owners are forced to sweep up glass with their bare hands. The faces of the shopkeepers are not clearly visible, and Irmina looks away from them with a hat pulled down nearly over her eyes. In silence, Irmina passes through crowds, casting furtive glances at the wreckage. In each successive panel, Irmina is increasingly incorporated into the surroundings: Yelin pushes her to the margins of panels or puts her far into the background, leaving her hat as a barely recognizable marker of her presence. As Irmina vanishes into the throng, those around her present a cross-section of public responses to the November pogrom. Some voice support for the action, blaming the Jews for their own persecution (“Na, haben sich die Juden doch selbst eingebrockt.”), while others lament the loss of material goods (“Aber die Sachen …”, “Die hätte man doch noch benutzen können.”) or balk at the impropriety of open violence and disorder (“Ein wenig … vulgär, nicht? ”). 9 Only one bystander voices shame for his government’s actions (“Eine Schande. Schämen sollten wir uns.”) and acknowledges the collective responsibility of German citizens for the violent and discriminatory treatment of German Jews (187—88). The majority of those assembled, like Irmina, stand in stunned silence, intervening neither for nor against the Jewish citizenry. In a stark double-page spread, Yelin portrays a crowd of onlookers watching as the Fasanenstraße synagogue burns with ghostly white and gray flames. “Ganz normale Deutsche”: Confronting the National Socialist Past in Barbara Yelin’s Irmina 333 334 Brett Sterling Strikingly, the color red is absent from the fire and reserved for the Nazi flags that flank the scene. The pallid fire engulfing the synagogue corresponds to the matte, passionless attitude of the onlookers, for whom even wanton destruction is not a motivator to action. Irmina is not exempt from the numbness experienced by the crowd: rather than even address what she is seeing, Irmina leaves the scene almost in a trance to complete her grocery shopping. In the aftermath of Reichskristallnacht , Irmina questions her husband about his involvement in the pogrom, but she cannot bring herself to formulate direct questions: “Was ist da draußen? Was ist … mit dir? ” (194). Gregor responds with the party line that a generalized public wrath (“der Volkszorn”) was responsible for the violence against Jews, which is discredited by the stunned passivity Irmina herself witnessed in the streets of Berlin. When questioned yet again about his personal role, Gregor merely screams “ WAS , Irmina? ! ” bringing an end to all further questioning. At the end of the scene, Irmina draws the curtains and symbolically closes herself off from the external world and the plight of others. As Yelin describes it, “sie blendet das aus und stellt eben keine Fragen mehr” (Yelin, “Interview” n. pag.). Any hope of possible resistance dies with Irmina’s decision not to see, and not to question the actions of the regime. The remainder of the comic’s second chapter takes Irmina through the course of the war in quick succession, as she becomes increasingly bitter and jaded by the constant sacrifices and disappointments of life in the Third Reich. During this time, Irmina gives birth to a son, Gregor’s illustrious architectural career flounders as Germany’s war effort intensifies, and he eventually joins the military to take part in an expected German victory. As Germany’s expulsion and genocide of European Jews intensifies, information about deportation and extermination begins to trickle back to Irmina. On a rare visit home, Gregor begins to reveal what he has seen firsthand (“Nun kommen immer Güterzüge nach Osten durchgefahren, vollgepfercht mit …”) before being abruptly cut off by Irmina: “Gregor! ! Nicht vor dem Jungen! ” (201). Her response reveals that she knows enough of what is occurring to want to shield her child from that knowledge, even if the details remain unclear. As time progresses, though, Irmina becomes increasingly beleaguered and bitter, allowing the ubiquitous anti-Semitism to take root where there was once only willful ignorance. The increasing austerity and severity of life during wartime have a hardening effect on Irmina, causing her already characteristic self-interest to ossify into a hostile defensive posture. As Irmina is forced to scrape by, struggling to feed herself and her son while Gregor is at the front, she begins to echo the regime’s propaganda about the Jews as the source of all social ills and hardships faced by the German people. In one scene, while out for a walk with her son, Irmina is unmoved by the sight of Jewish deportees’ belongings being auctioned on the “Ganz normale Deutsche”: Confronting the National Socialist Past in Barbara Yelin’s Irmina 335 street. When her son asks innocently what Jews are, Irmina responds in exasperation: “Unser Unglück! Die Juden sind unser Unglück! ” (203). From her initial political indifference and seeming concern, at least for the violence and destruction inflicted on the Jews in her environment, Irmina has become a mouthpiece for National Socialist ideology. In Irmina’s case, as for many bystanders, her anti-Semitism is combined with a retreat into the private realm and a general lack of compassion for anyone but herself and her immediate family. Irmina even coldly turns out a friend whose house was destroyed by Allied bombing. When the friend tries to share her personal experience of witnessing the deportation of Jews firsthand, Irmina refuses to hear the truth, and dismisses the genocide as less important than her personal suffering: “Kein Wort mehr, Gerda. Ich will nichts weiter hören. […] Wir haben hier genug Leid und Sorgen. Was gehen uns die Juden an! ” (212). Irmina’s striking lack of empathy is underscored by Yelin’s visuals, which show Irmina displaying greater concern over the destruction of a jar of jam in the same scene: while the large-scale murder of Jews is of no consequence to Irmina, the loss of the jam (a final connection to Gregor) is a great misfortune. As Irmina kneels to clean up the jam, the red of the berries resembles blood amid the shards of glass, invoking both the earlier Kristallnacht scene and the unseen deaths of millions of people outside of Irmina’s immediate environment. When death and destruction finally enter her world during the Allied bombing campaign, Irmina clearly articulates the importance of looking away as a means of shielding herself from the implications of her own inaction. Surrounded by bodies in the rubble on their way to safety in the Bavarian countryside, Irmina advises her son: “Mach es wie ich, Frieder. Nicht hinsehen” (213). Irmina’s strategy of looking away, of refusing to hear, and of actively repressing un- 336 Brett Sterling comfortable knowledge is intended to guarantee a distance from culpability, an innocence by virtue of ignorance that is belied by the second chapter’s closing scene. Prior to the arrival of American forces in the village where Irmina and her son found refuge, Irmina burns all of the documents tying her to the Nazi regime, and along with them the evidence of her culpability. In one panel, the white glow of flames obscures Irmina’s face, except for the eyes: she is washed out, erased by the same passionless fire that consumed the Fasanenstraße synagogue earlier in the comic, while her wide-open view indicates a full awareness of the nature of her complicity. The pale fire of destruction thus clears Irmina’s personal record, allowing her to live a quiet life without having to answer for her own inaction, at least not yet. The final chapter of Yelin’s comic finds Irmina in her old age, working as a school secretary in Stuttgart. She lives an unremarkable life with few, if any, substantial social connections. It is made clear that Irmina’s past, her life in London as well as her close connection to the National Socialist state are unknown to those around her. Irmina’s mundane existence is interrupted by the unexpected arrival of a letter from Howard, now Governor General of Barbados, with an invitation to visit him on the Caribbean island. After Irmina’s arrival, the two struggle to navigate a relationship that ended so abruptly fifty years prior. Howard is married with children, which precludes any renewed romantic involvement, but Irmina is perplexed to learn that his entire family seems to know her: the “mutige Irmina” is something of a family legend. After days of waiting, sightseeing, and minor state events, Irmina learns why when she is presented as the guest of honor at the birthday party of Howard’s daughter, also named Irmina. During the years they were apart, Howard nurtured an image of Irmina as the young woman who defended him from insult, a courageous and fiercely independent person who wanted to explore the world. He named his daughter after this woman in the hope that it would help her, “wagemutig [ihren] Weg zu gehen” (261). When Howard’s daughter asks about Irmina’s past—what became of her after she left London, what adventurous life she created for herself, and how she experienced the war—Irmina begins to collapse under the weight of accumulated guilt and disappointment. In a faltering response, Irmina censors herself in an effort to efface her role at the center of the Nazi political machine: “Ja … ich - wissen Sie - ich wollte zurück nach London! Ich hatte in Berlin schon eine Stelle am Kr… an einem Ministerium …” (262). When Howard’s daughter mentions “die schrecklichen Nazis,” Irmina becomes lightheaded and recedes into the darkness over a series of panels. The exchange forces Irmina to confront her past and consider that, for all of her insistence on political neutrality, she could be considered among those same “schreckliche Nazis.” “Ganz normale Deutsche”: Confronting the National Socialist Past in Barbara Yelin’s Irmina 337 In a final conversation with Howard, Irmina tries to understand the processes that changed the trajectory of her life so radically. In several panels, Yelin focuses on Irmina’s face in the darkness, while her downcast eyes express guilt and the weight of a half-century of unspoken regrets. With her back to Howard, she attempts to explain herself to him: Damals, als mein Brief an dich zurückkam … Ich … Ich hatte sogar schon ein Ticket. Ich hätte einfach fahren können … Nur - ich wollte doch etwas werden. Jemand SEIN . Und dann … Ich … Ich war nicht … Vorhin, als deine Tochter … was soll ich ihr sagen? … Howard, ich war nicht … ich WAR nicht die mutige Irmina … Kannst du mir das … (266; ellipses in original) As Irmina’s confession ends before it is ever really uttered, she turns to see Howard, whose figure is obscured in the darkness. There is no response, only an ellipsis of silence, as Howard blends into the background and Irmina is left alone with the knowledge of her past. Confronted by the gravity of her complicity, Irmina is unable to speak directly about her experience under Nazi rule. Through her broken statements, though, there is a clear recognition of the fact that in the face of injustice and genocide, she was unwilling or unable to demonstrate courage against the regime. Irmina’s realization is delivered with a combination of shame and bewilderment at her own actions, but stops short of acknowledging specific transgressions. Not only is the knowledge of Irmina’s personal failure too painful to articulate, even her plea for forgiveness fades into silence: to ask for absolution would require answering the question, “For what? ” Irmina’s silence about her past is representative of an entire generation of Germans, in whom the Nazi past was repressed and shut away, never to be talked about or even acknowledged. With the complicated past of German bystanders, as Alexander Korb notes in the afterword to Irmina , it is less a matter of a topic that one could speak of if one so chose, but rather a period so thoroughly repressed that all that remained was “eine Sprachlosigkeit, die kaum zu überwinden war” (283). Such is the case for Irmina, who offers neither excuse nor explanation for her behavior, overcome by silence in the face of the unspeakable history in which she participated. In Irmina , Barbara Yelin presents a character similar to the large number of Germans whose support of the regime did not extend to an active role in its campaigns of terror and genocide, but whose inaction enabled their perpetration. Irmina is a complex and flawed human being, neither a devil, nor an angel. Looking at her hopes and ideals at the beginning of the comic, the reader sees a range of alternatives that might have enabled Irmina to live a life of exploration and freedom, a life away from Germany. External constraints and historical developments made the achievement of such a life more difficult, but 338 Brett Sterling Irmina ultimately opted for the security and stability of life within the regime over passion and ambition. The analysis of Irmina’s character performed in this essay helps to explain how her insistence on the value of independence led her from a path of liberating openness to one of callous self-interest, and further how Irmina’s self-image and worldview as a “normale Deutsche” predicted her complicity. Irmina’s insistence on her own apolitical normalcy and intense focus “Ganz normale Deutsche”: Confronting the National Socialist Past in Barbara Yelin’s Irmina 339 on herself—on her own social status, financial well-being, and physical safety— more than on others led to an absence of the empathy for humanity necessary to resist the regime and its genocidal policies. Yelin’s contribution to German historical comics is a narrative about the entanglement of unremarkable people in the machinery of totalitarianism. Irmina offers a glimpse into everyday life under Hitler’s regime and forces the reader to ask whether they would have acted differently in Irmina’s position. There is, however, an inherent danger involved in projecting oneself into the role of the bystander. As Carolyn Dean warns: This retrospective identification with those who were not Nazis, opportunists, and thugs but “normal” people who watched indifferently or helplessly and therefore numbly or guiltily, is apologetic even though it is accompanied by sincere hand-wringing, and unwittingly repeats the self-protective numbness into which some have argued onlookers must have retreated. But most important, this identification with bystanders once again “forgets” the victims except as those “we” could not help or against whose pain we would naturally protect ourselves. In so doing, it unwittingly performs a similar symbolic erasure of the victim—albeit with far less dire consequences—whose own experience of bystanders’ grace or cruelty is hardly discussed at all. (104) Irmina engages in the same foregrounding of the bystander experience, inviting readers to view the protagonist’s experience as a cautionary tale. Indeed, Yelin has stated explicitly that she intended the comic to be “ein Buch, wo sich jeder fragt: ‘Was hätte ich gemacht? ’” (Yelin, “Interview” n. pag.). In Irmina , Yelin attempts to understand on behalf of younger Germans how their grandparents’ generation became complicit in the genocide of European Jews. Viewed as such, Yelin’s choice to focus on a bystander is a logical one, but even as her comic deftly and convincingly represents the moral ambivalence and indifference of an average person to the suffering of others, the absence of victims within the narrative is palpable. In its avoidance of a direct depiction of the Holocaust and its victims, Irmina reenacts the silence of its protagonist, unable to speak of the true horrors contained within the space of a single ellipsis. Irmina is nonetheless an exceptional piece of art, with which Barbara Yelin has taken an important step toward German comics’ engagement with the National Socialist past. One can hope that Yelin’s comic will open a space for other German-language artists to approach the history of the Holocaust not just from the perspective of bystanders, but of victims as well. 340 Brett Sterling Notes 1 Moritz Stetter, Luther (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2013); Reinhard Kleist, Castro (Hamburg: Carlsen, 2010). 2 Peer Meter and Barbara Yelin, Gift (Berlin: Reprodukt, 2010), see Marina Rauchenbacher’s essay in this issue; Peer Meter and Isabel Kreitz, Haarmann (Hamburg: Carlsen, 2010); Peer Meter and David von Bassewitz, Vasmers Bruder (Hamburg: Carlsen, 2014). 3 See Susanne Buddenberg and Thomas Henseler, Grenzfall (Berlin: avant-verlag, 2011), Berlin: Geteilte Stadt (Berlin: avant-verlag, 2012), Tunnel 57 (Berlin: Ch. Links, 2013); Mawil, Kinderland (Berlin: Reprodukt, 2014); PM Hoffmann and Bernd Lindner, Herbst der Entscheidung (Berlin: Ch. Links, 2014); Max Mönch, Alexander Lahl, and Kitty Kahane, Treibsand (Berlin: Metrolit, 2014); Jörg Ulbert and Jörg Mailliet, Gleisdreieck. Berlin 1981 (Berlin: Berlin Story Verlag, 2014) and Westend. Berlin 1983 (Berlin: Berlin Story Verlag, 2016). See also Elizabeth Bridges’s essay in this issue. 4 Notable examples include Reinhard Kleist’s Der Boxer (Hamburg: Carlsen, 2012), Ulli Lust’s adaptation of Marcel Beyer’s Flughunde (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2013), and Caroline Gille and Niels Schröder’s I Got Rhythm (Berlin: be.bra, 2014). 5 On the strength of the comic’s depiction of complicity in wartime Germany, Irmina was republished by the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung in 2015 as part of its series on the history of National Socialism. 6 In this essay, I discuss Irmina’s position toward Jews, and not toward homosexuals, Roma and Sinti, the disabled, criminals, Communists, Jehova’s Witnesses, or other political and religious dissidents. This is intended to reflect the absence of these groups within the comic itself, which I address later in the essay as part of Yelin’s narrative focus on bystanders over victims. 7 See Longerich 7 and Kempowski. 8 Bajohr describes the widely-held opinion in contemporary Germany, “dass es sich bei Juden nicht um ‘Deutsche’ jüdischen Glaubens handelte, sondern um ‘Fremde’, ja ‘Andersartige’, die nicht wirklich dazugehörten” (Bajohr and Pohl 23). 9 This aligns with existing studies on public opinion surrounding the November pogrom by scholars including Frank Bajohr, who notes: “Kritisiert wurde vor allem die Zerstörung und Plünderung” (Bajohr and Pohl 37). See also Longerich 130, Bankier 85, and Allen 402 ff. “Ganz normale Deutsche”: Confronting the National Socialist Past in Barbara Yelin’s Irmina 341 Works Cited Allen, William Sheridan. “Die deutsche Öffentlichkeit und die ‘Reichskristallnacht’.” Die Reihen fast geschlossen. Beiträge zur Geschichte des Alltags unterm Nationalsozialismus . Ed. Detlev Peukert et al. Wuppertal: Hammer, 1981. 397—411. Bajohr, Frank, and Dieter Pohl. Massenmord und schlechtes Gewissen . Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 2008. Bankier, David. The Germans and the Final Solution. Public Opinion under Nazism . Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. Barnett, Victoria J. Bystanders. Conscience and Complicity During the Holocaust . Westport, CT : Greenwood Press, 1999. Dean, Carolyn J. The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust . Ithaca: Cornell UP , 2004. Kempowski, Walter. Haben Sie davon gewußt? Deutsche Antworten. Munich: Btb-Verlag, 1999. Koonz, Claudia. Mothers in the Fatherland. Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics . New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986. Korb, Alexander. “Irmina. Leben in der Zeitgeschichte. Ein Nachwort.” Irmina . Barbara Yelin. Berlin: Reprodukt, 2015. 275—83. Longerich, Peter. “Davon haben wir nichts gewusst! ” Die Deutschen und die Judenverfolgung 1933-1945 . Munich: Pantheon, 2007. Monroe, Kristen Renwick. “Cracking the Code of Genocide: The Moral Psychology of Rescuers, Bystanders, and Nazis during the Holocaust.” Political Psychology 29.5 (2008): 699—736. Staub, Ervin. “The Evolution of Bystanders, German Psychoanalysts, and Lessons for Today.” Political Psychology 10.1 (1989): 39—52. Yelin, Barbara. Interview by Norbert Joa. Bayerischer Rundfunk/ Bayern 2 11 Jan. 2017. Web. 11 Jan. 2017. -. Irmina . Berlin: Reprodukt, 2015. Images Fig. 1. Yelin, Irmina 30. © Barbara Yelin and Reprodukt. Fig. 2. Yelin, Irmina 164—65. © Barbara Yelin and Reprodukt. Fig. 3. Yelin, Irmina 152. © Barbara Yelin and Reprodukt. Fig. 4. Yelin, Irmina 180. © Barbara Yelin and Reprodukt. Fig. 5. Yelin, Irmina 185. © Barbara Yelin and Reprodukt. Fig. 6. Yelin, Irmina 192—93. © Barbara Yelin and Reprodukt. Fig. 7. Yelin, Irmina 212. © Barbara Yelin and Reprodukt. Fig. 8. Yelin, Irmina 266. © Barbara Yelin and Reprodukt. Schiller Reading Comics: The Aesthetics of Nostalgia and the Wende-Narrative in Contemporary Graphic Novels Elizabeth Bridges Rhodes College Abstract: Utilizing Schiller’s early medical writings that propose a cure for nostalgia, which was conceptualized as an illness in his time, this article explores the ways in which nostalgia - both in the modern aesthetic sense and in its original medical sense - can be used as a lens through which to examine history. Schiller’s cure involved a “rehearsal of return” to the ill patient’s place of origin. Comics, likewise, serve as a site for Schiller’s rehearsal of return, in this case to contentious points in the past. By analyzing two 2014 graphic novels dealing with the time surrounding the end of the GDR , Kinderland (Mawil) and Treibsand (Max Mönch, Alexander Lahl, and Kitty Kahane), this article posits a visual historiography of nostalgia-as-illness. This type of historical vision is especially productive in the autobiographical mode, where authors frequently use the medium of comics to carve out spaces for subjectivity against a backdrop of seemingly implacable historical forces. This article uncovers what it is specifically about the medium of comics, particularly in a German context, that makes the genre so suitable for precisely this sort of historical introspection. Keywords: Friedrich Schiller, comics, nostalgia, Ostalgie, Wende, graphic novels In Nostalgia in Transition, Linda M. Austin presents a history of nostalgia, first identified in the eighteenth century as a disease of soldiers and sailors serving for long years far away from their home country or region, a psychosomatic disease with real symptoms such as stomach pains, insomnia, and constipation (7—10). Austin credits Friedrich Schiller, author and physician, as author of the historical transition between an understanding of nostalgia as a medical condition and a mode of aesthetic perception (11). As a physician, Schiller provided 344 Elizabeth Bridges a “cure” for nostalgia not through the more mechanical medical treatments of his time, but rather through therapeutic experience - in the case of his patient Grammont, for example, he prescribes several visits to a countryside locale similar to the patient’s childhood home - and through this brief outing, the chance to reconstruct and relive those memories in simulation. Austin explains how Schiller would “rework this treatment in aesthetic terms” in his influential theories of art as naïve versus sentimental. She refers to this therapy as a “rehearsal of return,” which served to “illustrate the cathartic function of representation” (14); as “a substitution of (physiological) remembering for (cerebral) memory, the patient released blocked and obsessive thoughts of home by rehearsing the return in a representative space” (14). This is what most nostalgic texts do in aesthetic form. This is why we enjoy them. In the pages to follow, I will use this dual medical and aesthetic framework for nostalgia, derived from Schiller, as a lens through which to view German comics, particularly those dealing with the GDR. As we know, the GDR has been a notorious site of nostalgia, sometimes to the point of nostalgic indulgence, especially in German visual and literary culture around 2000, epitomized in the tragicomic family melodrama film Good Bye Lenin! (2003). In recent graphic novels, this trend appears to be changing. Indeed, several significant GDR -related graphic novels have appeared in the last few years ( Grenzfall ; Berlin - geteilte Stadt: Zeitgeschichten ; Gleisdreieck. Berlin 1981 ; and others). Two of these works, Treibsand by Max Mönch, Alexander Lahl, and Kitty Kahane, and Kinderland by Markus “Mawil” Witzel (both 2014), attempt to negotiate the legacy of November 9, 1989 and the end of the GDR in part through, but also against, the now well-worn aesthetic reminders of GDR nostalgia. These include in particular the familiar iconography of everyday life in the GDR (e.g., commercial products, FDJ uniforms) and the images of celebratory crowds in Berlin on the night of November 9. Despite their resistance against easy nostalgic tropes, these graphic novels nevertheless serve as a site for the Schillerian “rehearsal of return,” in this case to contentious points in the past (Austin 14). They offer the reader a way of negotiating historical narratives in a larger sense, but also in the more personal sense of the subjective experiences that compel the stories. These two comics accomplish this end through their (auto)biographical perspectives and personal narratives played out against the backdrop of history in the late GDR . What is it specifically about the medium of comics, particularly in a German context, that make the genre so suitable for this sort of historical introspection? As literary critic Holger Englerth puts it, Nun haben gerade Comics (oder, wenn man so will: Graphic Novels) ein zuweilen sehr inniges Verhältnis zur Geschichte - die Kombination von Erzählung, Text und Schiller Reading Comics: The Aesthetics of Nostalgia and the Wende -Narrative 345 Bild kann eine Unmittelbarkeit erzeugen, die sich einem der Ziele der Historiographie nähert: Vergangenheit erlebbar und nachvollziehbar zu machen. (Englerth n. pag.) What he refers to here relates to Schiller’s prescription for nostalgia, namely the simulation of a return to one’s homeland, in order to soothe feelings of loss of time. In the case of a textual or image-based rehearsal of this return, we move into nostalgic texts as not just a cure for illness but as an aesthetic response to that nostalgia. In the case of the GDR this has been referred to, as we all have heard and read ad nauseum, as “Ostalgie,” a particular type of nostalgia that has proven not a little problematic in historical hindsight. As Hillary Chute points out in her analysis of Art Spiegelman’s Maus , “[G] raphic narrative is a contemporary form that is helping to expand the cultural map of historical representation. Its expansive visual-verbal grammar can offer a space for ethical representation without problematic closure” (214). The word “closure” proves an interesting choice of terms by Chute here because closure is also a concept related to the experience of reading comics, as described by Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. In visual narrative terms, he defines “closure” as “the phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving the whole” (63). As readers of comics and observers of the world at large, we rely on closure to fill in missing parts of a visual image to ascribe meaning to it. This includes any visual image that we perceive, right down to our perception of two dots and a line as an iconic human face (☺) or a sun in one comic frame and a moon in the next as the passage of a day (McCloud 64). In comics, “a medium where the audience is a willing and conscious collaborator and closure is the agent of change, time and motion,” readers use the space between comic frames (the gutter) as a space of possibility for linking one image to the next in space and time (65). We, as readers, close the gap between images with our visual memory, experience, extrapolation, and deduction. Images create a different form of closure than words, one that leaves open the possibility of more fluid interpretation. For this reason, as Chute suggests above, the ability of images to convey meaning without “problematic closure” leaves that meaning open-ended, unlike more conventional historical narrative, which invites readers to draw distinct conclusions through the imposition of a prescribed, conclusive narrative framework (Chute 214). If, as Adorno asserted, it is barbaric to try to represent something like the unfathomable trauma of the Holocaust in words, perhaps images can offer a more appropriate narrative strategy with which to represent the otherwise unrepresentable without leading the reader to draw facile conclusions (30). The 2014 graphic novel Treibsand provides what Englerth calls “nahezu ein Lehrbeispiel” (n. pag.), illustrating the kind of historiography of which comics 346 Elizabeth Bridges are uniquely capable by simultaneously engaging in and refusing to accept the typical tropes of “Ostalgie.” In this comic, Tom Sandman, a German-speaking American journalist, is sent as a correspondent to Berlin during the period of protest leading up to the 1989 opening of the Berlin Wall. The reader experiences these events through Tom’s outsider perspective and through the perspectives of people he meets and becomes increasingly personally involved with in the course of his investigations. Tom’s boss back in New York, Mr. Burnes 1 , is a staunch anti-communist and presses Tom to find individual “heroes” on whom to focus his research, much like Tom has done previously with an award-winning story on the person he calls “Tank Man” in the Tiananmen Square protests on assignment in China earlier that year. Tom meets a young woman named Ingrid, a former GDR champion swimmer who had spent five years in prison after an attempt to flee the GDR by swimming a 24-mile stretch of the Baltic Sea to West Germany. She blames her friend Barbara for betraying her to the Stasi. As Tom gets to know Ingrid and her family, he eventually falls in love with her and can no longer bring himself to turn them into a story for his own gain. The two marry and return to New York after the events surrounding November 9, but they eventually split when Tom convinces Ingrid to return and investigate her own Stasi file. Ingrid discovers that her brother Jens had in fact betrayed her in order to advance his military career in the GDR . She blames Tom for convincing her to open the file that in turn destroys her already strained family relationships. This comic in particular continually and thoroughly subverts any possible indulgence in the kind of GDR nostalgia we know from various media texts from the past couple of decades. Instead, it focuses on the brutalities of the GDR , both visually and in its words. The closest we get to some of the more typical images of this era is a half panel featuring a Montagsdemonstration , partly blocked by Tom and Ingrid’s father and mitigated by the double framing device of a windowpane. In fact, the reader misses the otherwise ubiquitous celebratory scenes associated with November 9 because Tom passes out while on the phone with Burnes while trying to report the opening of the border. He has had a longstanding toothache with flare-ups that seem to happen around important historical events, and Tom has a pathological fear of dentists. Instead, he has attempted to ignore it or medicate it away the best he can since China. Like the mom in Good Bye Lenin! , Tom spends the heady days of border celebrations unconscious in a hospital and wakes up to find that the award-winning stories have all been written. With Tom as the point-of-view character, the reader is denied any visual access to the typical jubilant scenes associated with that time. The nostalgic impulse is cut off. In fact, the only tiny moment of GDR nostalgia anywhere in the book stands out in both its uniqueness and innocuousness: a container of Schiller Reading Comics: The Aesthetics of Nostalgia and the Wende -Narrative 347 the GDR version of Nutella called “Nudossi” that Ingrid’s mother sends to her daughter via Tom. Near the end of the book readers are left with this one image when the entire family finally gets together, and we see the forced nature of their own GDR nostalgia in the form of Ingrid’s pre- Republikflucht swimming career. 348 Elizabeth Bridges Treibsand very much equates nostalgia with illness, and indeed in the original Schillerian sense, in that every time a potentially “historic moment” starts to happen, Tom’s tooth starts to flare up, and his physical pain continually undercuts the reader’s desire to see a happy, unmitigated historical narrative that we can relate to as a purely nostalgic text. Closure - both in the narrative sense and in the visual sense described by Mc- Cloud - is denied to us as readers (McCloud 63). The artist does this at the level of image by giving us only partial bits of familiar tableaus that we have to work to relate to the larger historical narrative, but also in the narrative sense of barring us from drawing tidy conclusions. Therefore, both at the level of text and visually we are constantly blocked from nostalgic indulgence. In a more typical nostalgic text we would expect the ubiquitous tropes of a triumphal historical Schiller Reading Comics: The Aesthetics of Nostalgia and the Wende -Narrative 349 narrative and a non-messy family reunion, but by tying the story intimately to illness and to tragic personal events connected inescapably to the historical backdrop of the Wende , the reader is forced out of that nostalgic mode. Kinderland by Markus “Mawil” Witzel is a study of GDR politics in miniature via the story of two seventh-grade boys who wish to organize a ping-pong tournament to celebrate the anniversary of the Pioniere circa November 1989. Mirco is a nerdy child, small for his age. Indeed, his name, Mirco, almost looks like the diminutive “micro-.” He constantly tries to fit in with the older, bigger boys but never quite succeeds. Meanwhile his new friend Torsten just has moved to the school under somewhat mysterious circumstances. Rumors fly about Torsten because he refuses to join the FDJ , and his mother is a single, unemployed alcoholic. Because both boys are outsiders, they form a friendship, which leads to a violent fist fight when Torsten jumps to Mirco’s defense during a ping-pong match gone wrong. Because the FDJ sponsor in their school, Frau Kranz, believes that a pingpong tournament is not worthy of the solemn Pioniere event, the boys appeal to other authorities in the school. Eventually one day when Frau Kranz is out sick, the kids convince their FDJ peer leader “Angela Werkel” 2 to let them vote on whether or not to hold the ping-pong tournament in Frau Kranz’s absence. They do, and they decide to make Mirco the organizer because Torsten isn’t an official member of the FDJ . This quasi-political drama creates a rift in the boys’ friendship and an insider-outsider conflict. Then, on the night of the tournament, Mirco’s parents suddenly drag their son off to the opened border to visit the West, such that he can’t participate, meaning that he abandons Torsten once again. Mirco acquires a new ping-pong paddle at a West Berlin Woolworth’s to give to Torsten as a peace offering. The other boy refuses it at first, but then to show the seriousness of his offer, Mirco suggests they become blood brothers like they have seen in a Winnetou movie. Torsten cuts himself too deeply on the wrist and has to be rushed to the hospital. As Torsten’s mother’s boyfriend drives Mirco back home, he says “Was habt ihr dabei gedacht? Ihr seid doch keine Kinder mehr” (294). The final full-page panel, the last in the book, shows the car on Berlin’s Karl-Marx-Allee, heading in the direction of Alexanderplatz (296). The Berlin cityscape in the background of the image shows much more detail and is much more representational than most other images in the book. Significantly, the car is headed westward. This is evident because we can see the Bauhaus lines of Kino International to the right of the frame, and it suggests the ultimate fate of the GDR after the Wende . The declaration that Mirco and Torsten are no longer children describes their evolving relationship to each other, their loss of innocence in relation to the politics of their country, and it alludes to the growing pains of a united Germany soon to follow. 350 Elizabeth Bridges This graphic novel also in part refuses clear visual representation of Berlin Wall celebrations. Instead, the reader sees it mostly in the disjointed glimpses Mirco gets while surrounded by an impenetrable wall of adult legs as they all wait to cross the border. The bureaucratic realities and party affiliations of the GDR Schiller Reading Comics: The Aesthetics of Nostalgia and the Wende -Narrative 351 even affect childhood friendships, and instead of a sense of celebration of the end of the GDR , we feel the bitter sting of young people forever changed by the realities of life in a dictatorial state. The victory of the Wende , if any can be said to exist in this text, goes to consumerism. The crowds that shuffle Mirco un- 352 Elizabeth Bridges seeingly across the border lead to Berliner Bank, Woolworths, and C&A rather than to any sense of relief or freedom. It bears mentioning that both graphic novels employ nonor semi-representational artistic styles towards their respective narrative ends. Mawil’s aesthetic tends towards a more typically humorous, tongue-in-cheek German comic style similar to Ralf König or Flix, featuring characters with moderate physical detail and an emphasis on certain sometimes grotesquely exaggerated features, such as Torsten’s oddly discolored nose and Mirco’s exaggeratedly short and round stature. The panels are full-color, albeit in muted, often warm tones, which corresponds to the would-be nostalgic subject matter. While this visual style harmonizes with the book’s more humorous moments of childhood hijinks, and its conventional humor-comic styling coincides with the youthful exploits of its protagonists, this style delivers a distinct aesthetic contrast to its actual grotesque moments such as the cutting scene. And as with the last page, the artist sometimes gives more realistic detail to certain elements in his panels than others, thus drawing attention to distinct memories of everyday GDR life. By contrast, the art in Treibsand tends towards the truly grotesque in a way that reminds the reader vaguely of the strained, sometimes distorted figures of Egon Schiele. These images, accompanied by a stark but limited color palate, correspond more readily with the often traumatic instances that are recounted in this more somber personal-historical narrative. Despite the lack of great detail in most panels, the distorted images emphasize the strained nature of the relationships. Meanwhile, the use of the color red in the depiction of Tom’s dental issues create a visceral sense of distress in the reader. Both of these comics use these two forms of grotesquerie to different effect - Kinderland in its more comic mode that contrasts its sometimes painful subject matter and Treibsand in a more recognizably distressed and stark visual style that complements its often distressing depictions. With Kinderland’ s more conventional style we expect a more typically nostalgic November 1989 to conclude the book, which is jarringly circumvented both visually and narratively in the end. Treibsand circumvents the reader’s expectations of triumphal Wende nostalgia throughout via its less representational, but more visceral imagery. Susan Stewart writes in On Longing : “By the narrative process of nostalgic reconstruction, the present is denied and the past takes on an authenticity of being, an authenticity which, ironically, it can only achieve through narrative” (23). She explains nostalgia as a wish to reach a constantly receding horizon of originary experience, or “authenticity,” which can only be relayed in narrative form. But the narrative reconstruction that rehearses the nostalgic experience serves as a border between past and present, so to some extent a blockaded border. It demarcates an impenetrable boundary in that it only provides a sim- Schiller Reading Comics: The Aesthetics of Nostalgia and the Wende -Narrative 353 ulation of that experience, never the “real thing”; an idea both of these comics embrace in their non-representational visual styles. Remarkably, both of these comics deal with the matter of borders and boundaries - between east and west, past and present - through stunningly effective visual and narrative strategies, showing cognizance of the fact that nostalgia can be a hollow solace and indeed a kind of illness. Regarding Schiller’s plan of “recreational therapy” for a severely nostalgic patient, Linda Austin writes: “As Schiller represented his treatment of the patient, the obsessive and intense state of the tortured nostalgic mind shifted to the recreational nostalgic body, one that replaced obsessive and uncontrolled mental functions with free and pleasurable sensuous activity” (15). Do these contemporary graphic novels offer a “cure” for the problematic GDR nostalgia that pervaded German media in the late 1990s and early 2000s? I suggest that they certainly provide a potential course correction, in that they continually preclude our indulgence in nostalgia by visually disrupting the reader’s wish to see the tropes we have grown so used to through years of exposure to them: celebratory crowds, people hugging, champagne corks popping, hammers chipping away at the wall, and celebrations at the Brandenburger Tor. Yet, these works deliver this disrupted version of the Wende through inherently nostalgic means, namely comics. I call comics a nostalgic art form because, despite the ubiquity of graphic novels in today’s bestseller lists, they remain a medium many of us associate with childhood reading pleasure, with heroes and daring feats. In Treibsand , Tom the journalist protagonist refuses to make overblown “heroes” out of people just trying to live their lives in an oppressive system. This dynamic is duplicated in the book at large - and in Kinderland as well - in that both texts also refuse heroic, triumphal historical narratives in a larger sense. Although we no longer use the term “nostalgia” as the name of a disease, the familiar sense of longing that characterizes the modern aesthetic usage nevertheless carries with it something of the home sickness from the original meaning. The cathartic function of representation is therefore also tied up in our modern understanding of nostalgia. We find nostalgic texts attractive because they bring back pleasurable feelings and memories associated with a particular time, place or experience - if not from our own “home” or time per se, then from a past context that holds some specific personal or cultural meaning. Yet, in the case of these recent depictions of GDR life in comics, the pleasure is not so much in revisiting and reliving the past as they serve as a reminder that the past was precisely not the cozy homeland some artists and writers have highlighted previously. In Treibsand , there is that moment near the end of the book where Ingrid’s mother attempts to bring the family together through shared nostalgia by look- 354 Elizabeth Bridges ing at old photos. This description corresponds particularly well to the strained visual style of the comic as a whole and of the particular panel featuring the family gathering: Die Familie versuchte, mit aller Kraft das Glück der Vergangenheit in die Gegenwart zu holen. Doch es war vergebens. Auch wenn an diesem Abend viel gelacht wurde, die Vergangenheit war nicht vergangen. Sie hatten Angst vor der Wahrheit, die nur dann keinen Schaden anrichten konnte, wenn sie verschwiegen wurde. (156) In this panel in particular, with its strained pretense of family joy, we see the limits of nostalgia on display, and we see nostalgia as both an illness and an ever-receding horizon that cannot be reached, much as Stewart describes. With nostalgia understood in this context as a quasi-illness, Stewart’s characterization of “nostalgic reconstruction” through narrative posits only a partial or temporary cure. As a relief from the tension created by longing for a particular time, place, or experience, the narrative reconstruction or experiential simulation of that “authentic” experience can provide only glimpses of the originary moment. We might wish to view the naïve depictions of an idealized GDR homeland versus these more mature, albeit intentionally artificial in their nonrepresentational visual styles, in the context of Schiller’s naïve versus sentimental poetry. Schiller suggests that naïve art is not an imitation of nature or originary experience, but rather an attempt to duplicate it, contrasting it to the artificiality of the sentimental depiction of the nostalgic: If one could give to an artificial flower by means of the most perfect deception, the appearance of nature, if one could carry the imitation of the naive in morals up to the highest illusion, so would the discovery, that it be imitation, completely destroy the feeling of which we are speaking. (549) Our comics destroy this illusion on purpose in favor of a more reflective historical narrative. If we follow that the nostalgic text can only ever create an illusion, which marks a solid boundary, not merely a border - between now and then, here and there - then even Schiller’s beloved naïve poets can only ever imitate. All of the “flowers” are artificial, and regardless of how effective the illusion, representation remains representation. Nostalgia and Schiller’s would-be cure requires a denial of the present in favor of a golden time and place that may never have existed. Accepting the impossibility of duplicating the original experience, Stewart describes nostalgia as a disease of memory, one that we willingly contract in anticipation of a pleasurable albeit always incomplete cure. Schiller’s description of the disconnected modern subject and our continual state of nostalgia certainly still applies, but recreation of nature (originary experience) through Schiller Reading Comics: The Aesthetics of Nostalgia and the Wende -Narrative 355 text falls short as a substitute for the direct pastoral experience that provided relief to his patients. But of course, you can never go home again. Of Treibsand ’s historical narrative, Holger Englerth writes that it is “in der Groteske vielsagender, als in der puren Dokumentation” (n. pag.). I would also say that both of these comics, in their grotesque aesthetics, are also vielsagender than the typical, more naïve nostalgic indulgence we have sometimes seen in texts dealing with the Wende . They embrace their artificiality, using it as a means to circumvent naïve historical constructions. Thus, although these comics take the reader back to an imagined GDR “homeland,” by continually refusing to lapse into triumphal tropes, they posit a potential cure for “Ostalgie”. Notes 1 This is undoubtedly a reference to the irascible boss Mr. Burns on the TV show The Simpsons. 2 Angela sports a familiar, iconic hairstyle similar to that of Chancellor Angela Merkel. Works Cited Adorno, Theodor. “Prismen. Ohne Leitbild.” Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft I . Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 10. Trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977. Austin, Linda Marilyn. Nostalgia in Transition: 1780—1917 . Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2007. Chute, Hillary. “‘The Shadow of a Past Time’: History and Graphic Representation in ‘Maus.’” Twentieth-Century Literature 52.2 (2006): 199—230. Englerth, Holger. “Die Didaktik der Groteske - Eine Graphic Novel von Max Mönch, Alexander Lahl und Kitty Kahane zum Ende der DDR .” literaturkritik.de 18 Feb. 2015. Web. 10 Mar. 2016. Good Bye Lenin! Dir. Wolfgang Becker. X-Filme Creative Pool, 2003. Henseler, Thomas, and Susanne Buddenberg. Berlin - Geteilte Stadt: Zeitgeschichten . Berlin: avant-verlag, 2012. Mawil [Markus Witzel]. Kinderland . Berlin: Reprodukt, 2014. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics . New York: Harper Collins, 1994. Mönch, Max, Alexander Lahl, and Kitty Kahane. Treibsand . Eine Graphic Novel aus den letzten Tagen der DDR . Berlin: WALDE + GRAF bei Metrolit, 2014. Schiller, Friedrich. “On Naive and Sentimental Poetry.” Complete Works . Vol. 2. Philadelphia: I. Kohler, 1861. 549—80. Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP , 1984. 356 Elizabeth Bridges Ulbert, Jörg, and Jörg Mailliet. Gleisdreieck. Berlin 1981 . Berlin: Berlin Story Verlag, 2014. Ulrich, Johann, Thomas Henseler, and Susanne Buddenberg. Grenzfall . Berlin: avant-verlag, 2011. Images Fig. 1. Mönch et al. 101. © Metrolit Verlag GmbH & Co. KG. Fig. 2. Mönch et al. 156. © Metrolit Verlag GmbH & Co. KG. Fig. 3. Mönch et al. 6. © Metrolit Verlag GmbH & Co. KG. Fig. 4. Mawil 234—35. © Markus Mawil Witzel and Reprodukt. Fig. 5. Mawil 292. © Markus Mawil Witzel and Reprodukt. Autorenverzeichnis Dr. Elizabeth Bridges Rhodes College 2000 N. Parkway Modern Languages Dept. Memphis, TN 38112 USA bridgese@rhodes.edu Dr. Damianos Grammatikopoulos Dept. of German Language and Literature Rutgers University New Brunswick, NJ 08901 USA damiangramm@gmail.com Dr. Helga W. Kraft Dept. of Germanic Studies University of Illinois at Chicago Chicago, IL 60607 USA kraft@uic.edu Dr. Lynn Marie Kutch Dept. of Modern Language Studies Kutztown University Kutztown, PA 19530 USA kutch@kutztown.edu Dr. Marina Rauchenbacher Universität Wien Institut für Germanistik Universitätsring 1 1010 Wien, Austria marina.rauchenbacher@univie.ac.at Dr. Brett Sterling Dept. of World Languages, Literatures and Cultures University of Arkansas Fayetteville, AR 72701 USA bsterli@uark.edu ISSN 0010-1338 T h e m e n h eft: G e rm a n Comi c s G a s th e ra u s g e b e r: B rett S te rling a nd Lynn M a rie Kut c h B rett S te rling: I ntrod u c tion M a rin a R a u c h e nb a c h e r: O p po s in g V iewpoint s : Politi c s of G a z in g in th e G ra p hi c N ovel G ift Lynn M a rie Kut c h a nd D a mia no s G ra mm atikopoulo s : I nte rtextu al R efe re n c e s in E i c k m e ye r ’ s I m We s t e n ni c ht s N e u e s : E in e G ra p hi c N ov e l H elg a K raft: K afk a in Co mi c s . U nte r b e s on d e re r B e rü c k s i c htig u n g von M orit z S tette r s D a s U r t e il B rett S te rling: “ G a n z nor m ale D e ut s c h e ” : Confrontin g th e N a tion al S o c iali s t Pa s t in B a r b a ra Yelin ’ s I r m in a E liz a b eth B ridg e s : S c hille r R ea din g Co mi c s : T h e A e s th eti c s of N o s talgia a n d th e We n d e - N a r rative in Conte m pora r y G ra p hi c N ovel s periodicals.narr.de Band 48 Band 48 2015 Heft 4 Harald Höbus ch, Linda K . Worle y (Hr sg.) C O L L O Q U I A G E R M A N I C A I n t e r n a t i o n a l e Z e i t s c h r i f t f ü r G e r m a n i s t i k C O L L O Q U I A G E R M A N I C A I n t e r n a ti o n a l e Z e it s c h r ift f ü r G e r m a n i s ti k