Abstract
Comics and graphic novels provide a singular way to explore and portray historical events and narratives, particularly dark heritage and difficult history. Recently, several German-language graphic novels and comics have been published which explore the Third Reich and the Second World War from the perspective of those who experienced it first-hand: ordinary citizens, war children, Hitler Youth members, soldiers, and civilians. Such works, which include literary adaptations, memoirs, and oral testimony, can be viewed as part of the recent turn towards ‘felt’ or ‘emotional’ history [‘gefühlte Geschichte’] in German-language representations of the past—a shift towards an ‘emotional’ account of history, in contrast to documentary descriptions, that offers a chance to encounter not only what happened, but how it felt to be there. This chapter examines narratives of war and dictatorship in three recent works: Lina Hoven’s Love Looks Away (Liebe schaut weg, 2007), Barbara Yelin’s Irmina (2014), and the crowd-funded Großväterland: Eye-Witnesses Tell about World War II (Großväterland: Zeitzeugen erzählen vom Zweiten Weltkrieg, 2016). It considers the aesthetic strategies used to depict the past, particularly the adaptation of authentic documents such as diaries, photographs, and letters. Close readings of the primary texts are situated within a discussion of how such works contribute to the highly contested legacy of that historical period within contemporary cultural memory.
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Notes
- 1.
Lynn Marie Kutch’s recent edited volume is a welcome contribution to the field (Kutch 2016).
- 2.
See, for example, Ulli Lust’s Voices in the Dark (2017) (Flughunde, 2013), based on Marcel Beyer’s 1996 novel (translated as The Karnau Tapes), and Isabel Kreitz’s The Invention of the Curried Sausage (Die Entdeckung der Currywurst, 2005), based on Uwe Timm’s 1993 novel.
- 3.
See in particular Guido Knopp’s documentary films (Kansteiner 2006: 154–183).
- 4.
The 2016 English translation of Irmina includes no German text. In the English translation of Love Looks Away, the text is also entirely in English, though two different typefaces are used to indicate when either German or English was being used in the original-language publication.
- 5.
It was only in 2011 that the first comics publication by a major publishing house in Germany (Suhrkamp) appeared: Nicolas Mahler’s graphic novel adaptation of Thomas Bernhard’s Alte Meister.
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Lloyd, A. (2020). Emotional History and Legacies of War in Recent German Comics and Graphic Novels. In: Davies, D., Rifkind, C. (eds) Documenting Trauma in Comics. Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37998-8_3
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