Introduction

Art Spiegelman’s Maus transformed the comic book and revolutionized the cultural portrayals of war and genocide. More than 20 years after its publication, Maus is still the best-known and most celebrated graphic novel on the subject. And yet, as scholars have persuasively shown, the history of comic books on the Holocaust goes further back and is considerably richer than it is commonly thought (Chute 2016; Gonshak 2009; Gundermann 2015). What is the “Holocaust comic book” then? What themes does it cover? What formats and aesthetic conventions does it use? More importantly, what can graphic narratives teach us about the politics of Holocaust memory, on the one hand, and the personal and family memories of the Shoah, on the other? This special issue addresses those and other comparative questions, using case studies from several countries. Covering the period from the 1940s until today, the contributions in this edition speak to wider political, social, cultural and personal engagements with the Shoah and show how the comic book has developed as a genre.

The serialized publication of Maus from 1980 until 1991 coincided with a wider emergence of the Holocaust as an important event in the American historical memory. Only two years earlier, on 16–19 April 1978, NBC aired a four-part miniseries Holocaust: The Story of the Family Weiss, which attracted millions of viewers and met with an enthusiastic response.¹ Despite the popularity of this theme in theatre and film earlier on, to mention the highly successful Diary of Anne Frank, which opened on Broadway in October 1955, and the 1959 movie by George Stevens, it was popular television culture that led to the “Americanization” of the Shoah, making it into the transnational event that it is today (Doneson 2002). Of course, television more generally played a crucial role in redressing the silence surrounding the extermination of Europe’s Jewish communities long before Holocaust was aired. The Eichmann trial in 1961 was broadcast in nearly 40 countries, becoming one of the first global media events, with trial highlights and television specials being shown internationally (Keilbach 2014, 17–18). This too, lay foundations for the transnational memory of the atrocity. And yet, in 1961, the mass spectator was nowhere near as morally and emotionally invested as those first American viewers who watched Holocaust nearly two decades later.

What the NBC series achieved with television audiences, Maus did with its readers, particularly after its publication in book form in 1991. The comic book, which recalled the story of Spiegelman’s father, Vladek, a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor, was a natural continuation of the trend to “mediatize” and “aestheticize” the Shoah that we had known from television, film and theatre (Rothberg and Spiegelman 1994). It was also the first time that the comic book genre came to be seen on a par with other forms of so-called “high culture.” As Hugo Frey and Benjamin Noys put it: “No longer could works in comic book form simply be dismissed out of hand and the sophistication of these works had to be given recognition” (2002, 255). Maus thus paved way for a new generation of artists who used the genre to explore their personal, family and wider histories in a format that was fresh, sophisticated and captivating.

This Americanization of the Holocaust overlapped with political changes in Europe after the fall of Communism. Following the reunification of Germany, the new state saw the redressing of Nazi crimes as their own way of “overcoming the past” or Vergangenheitsbewältigung, as it came to be known. The inclusion of former Communist countries in the European fold and their prospective membership in the European Union called for a “foundation myth,” an overarching narrative of the past, which would make the continent whole again and forge a shared sense of identity. The Shoah, which took place on Europe’s territory and affected many European countries, was seen as such “myth.” But little did the European technocrats expect that this narrative would not only unite but (paradoxically) also divide the continent. In the countries of Eastern Europe, the debates on the Holocaust were to fight for supremacy with the memories of wartime occupation by the Soviet Union and the subsequent decades of Soviet influence. This was particularly complex in places like Estonia where those who had resisted the Red Army alongside Nazis were still revered as heroes, particularly in the immediate post-1991 period when the society was shedding the last vestiges of Soviet power and participating in fervent nation building. Those memories had to be eradicated to make way for a sanitized, Europe-minded perception of the past (Brüggemann and Kasekamp 2008).

However, it was not only in Eastern Europe that such vision of the Holocaust clashed with local memories. In Italy, the widespread image of Italiani brava gente (the good Italians), which had been etched in the national consciousness for decades, had to be revised to account for the racial persecution and imperialism of the Mussolini era, a process which is still ongoing (Fogu 2006). In Denmark, the prevailing positive narrative of the successful rescue of the country’s 7000 Jews, who were shipped to Sweden in October 1943 avoiding transportation to death camps, was to be put in the wider context of the mass annihilation of Europe’s Jews (Lammers 2011). Elsewhere, in neutral countries such as Ireland, new memories had to be brought to the forefront to show willingness to join the European commemorative contest. In this case, the only Irish victim of the Holocaust, Ettie Steinberg, who had married a Belgian man in 1937, moved to Paris and had later been killed in Auschwitz, was incorporated into the process of Europeanization of Ireland’s collective memory. Other countries with no direct experience of the Shoah, such as Spain, came to use the Holocaust as “a bridging metaphor” whereby the language used to discuss atrocity was employed to speak about the more familiar experiences of Civil War and the crimes of Franco’s dictatorship (Baer 2011).

All of those engagements with the Holocaust can be seen as examples of what Fogu and Kansteiner described as “delayed collective memory” which emerged decades after the actual event. Unlike personal or familial memory which often involves working through the traumatic past, this delayed memory “has more to do with political interest and opportunism than with the persistence of trauma or any ‘leakage’ in the collective unconscious” (2006, 290). For it is true that the Shoah has become a commodity which is readily exploited for political and financial gain. The universal message behind the Holocaust story, be it the message of threats posed by racial hatred or the more personal message of human struggle and defeat, is easy to export and apply in a variety of national settings, including post-conflict societies which have no direct experience of the Shoah (Chyrikins and Vieyra 2010; Gilbert 2012). Over the years, this universal quality of the atrocity has brought about a vast corpus of cultural portrayals which are, nonetheless, often repetitive. As Fogu and Kansteiner put it:

Millions of people share a limited range of stories and images about the Holocaust, although few of them have any personal link to the actual events. For many consumers the stories and images do not constitute particularly intense or overpowering experiences, but they nevertheless shape people’s identities and worldviews. (2006, 292)

Those by now familiar stories and symbols are meant to be referential and immediately identifiable with that particular event. Needless to say, they are constrained by a highly regulated diet of “shoulds” and “should nots.” Thus, emerging in the creative process are the issues of propriety and respect for the victims. Those are closely followed by the compulsion to maintain historical accuracy as well as the desire to impact the reader/viewer in a deeply emotional way. Only then does the artistic quality enter into the equation, leaving many of those representations prescriptive and formulaic. To some extent, this bleak diagnosis also applies to the comic book. It is predominantly the autobiographical narratives written by survivors and their descendants (including second- and third-generation) that escape those rigid conventions. But even those comic books and graphic novels are a telling expression of the temper of the times in which they were written, and the political engagements and disengagements with the Holocaust. Moreover, these works speak to the received view of the comic book, as well as the changing aesthetic “canon” and sensibility. In that sense, comic books on the atrocity can be a valuable material in tracing the nexus between cultural representations of war and genocide, the development of the genre and the political (and personal) uses thereof.

Comic books on the Holocaust were already being written as the war was raging. From the very beginning, these works have played an important evidentiary role. Written and drawn by Jewish prisoners in the ghettos and camps, these accounts documented personal experiences and recorded the realities of the Holocaust. One example is the autobiographical pencil drawings by the Italian Jew, Aldo Gay, who depicted the Raid of the Ghetto of Rome on 16 October 1943 when the majority of the ghetto inhabitants were rounded up and sent to Auschwitz.² Drawing and writing were also seen by prisoners as coping strategy. Humour was not absent from those works, as seen in Horst Rosenthal’s booklets Mickey au Camp de Gurs (Mickey Mouse in the Gurs Internment Camp – Published without Walt Disney’s Permission) and Le Journée d’un hébergé: Camp de Gurs 1942 (A Day in the Life of a Resident: Gurs Internment Camp, 1942), created in the French camp of Gurs shortly before Rosenthal’s deportation to Auschwitz (Rosenberg 2002).

At the same time, cartoons, particularly newspaper cartoons, were important tools of Nazi propaganda, one being the French juvenile weekly Le Téméraire which regularly featured anti-Semitic content (Tufts 2008).³ This was visible in other Nazi-occupied territories, including the Netherlands. As Kees Ribbens shows in his admirable contribution to this special issue, the Dutch daily newspaper, Volk en Vaterland, played crucial role in the spread of anti-Jewish sentiment. The resulting portrayals of Jews were thus a joint effort of the totalitarian state (which enforced discriminatory laws and policies), the publishing industry (which legitimized them in the eyes of the public) and individual illustrators (who employed their skill and talent in collaborating with the regime).

The advent of the Cold War brought about a mass politicization of the comic book on both sides of the Iron Curtain. In the United States, the superhero comic culture was “born under the mushroom cloud of potential nuclear war,” whereby a new type of a hero was brought into existence – one who developed superpowers as a result of genetic mutations and increased radiation after the nuclear attack (Costello 2009, 1). In the Soviet Union and its satellite states, the comic book was considered to be the tool of imperialist influence and infiltration, and initially discounted as ideologically dangerous. But soon enough, the socialist propagandists recognized the potential of the genre and readily began to employ graphic narratives in educating the youth. As Sean Eedy shows in his excellent paper, this was the case with East Germany, where (like elsewhere in Eastern Europe) comic books were indispensable in the construction of socialist identities. This ideological focus inevitably detracted attention from other themes. Holocaust was one such theme. Under Communism, the suffering of Europe’s Jewish populations became part of the wider narratives of anti-fascist struggle, victimhood and survival against all odds. Such narratives were prevalent also in the West, which naturally favoured the stories of resistance and innocence over those of complicity and guilt. As Tony Judt put it:

to be innocent a nation had to have resisted, and to and to have done so in its overwhelming majority, a claim that was perforce made and pedagogically enforced all over Europe, from Italy to Poland, from the Netherlands to Romania. (1992, 89–90)

It was such stories that were placed at the forefront of graphic narratives about World War II.

From the 1980s onwards, we see a slow emergence of the Shoah as a distinct theme in the comic book. As Paolino Nappi argues in his fascinating analysis of Italian comic books, in that period new (non-state) actors began to use graphic narratives to support their educational endeavours. In those narratives, many of which were financed and commissioned by the Catholic Church, Auschwitz emerged as an important site of Christian suffering. If Jewish figures (e.g. Anne Frank) were portrayed, this was done to enforce the universal values of sacrifice and selflessness, and to attract young readers using characters with whom they could supposedly identify. This “de-Judaization” of comic books on Auschwitz was and still is visible in other European countries. As I show in my contribution about Poland, whereas the death camp is often at the heart of those narratives, Jews tend to be pushed to the background. Instead, it is the gentile Poles who take centre stage in those stories, replicating the traditional national discourse of Poles as heroes and victims.

Both Nappi and myself talk about another important trend that surfaced in Europe in the past two decades, namely the proliferation of graphic narratives aimed at the young reader. These are produced by major institutions dealing with Holocaust education. Many such comics are aimed at transnational audience, being translated into several European languages. Representative examples include Episodes from Auschwitz, produced by the Auschwitz Museum, and The Search by Eric Heuvel et al., a project by the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. Before seeing the light of day, such comic books undergo a lengthy incubation process; they are reviewed by historians and educators, and tested in secondary schools across Europe. The end product is an attractive teaching material disguised as a graphic novel but often falling short of aesthetic value (Stallard Flory 2011). Part of this trend are narratives published by state institutions but targeting the adult reader. In his beautifully crafted contribution, José Alaniz, discusses a Czech anthology of graphic novellas, all based on first-hand accounts, that has been put together by the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes in Prague, an institution which deals with the crimes of Nazi and Communist regimes. The story analysed by Alaniz speaks to a wider process of uncovering the history of Czechoslovak anti-Semitism, a slow and difficult undertaking.

As several articles in this special issue indicate, in the last two decades, Maus has made an indelible mark on the comic book scene both in Europe and beyond. New postmodern narratives that play with symbols, combine different temporal planes and link the past with the present have come to the fore, pushing the boundaries of the genre and attracting new groups of readers. And yet, one cannot help but think that the impact Maus has had on Holocaust comic books has contributed to a proliferation of what Spiegelman himself termed as “Holokitsch” (quoted in Chute 2016, 261). Indeed, what makes Maus special is its personal and autobiographical dimension, one which is largely missing in contemporary graphic narratives on the Shoah. There is still a conspicuous absence of real-life stories, be it by members of the second or third generations, and a tendency to use Spiegelman’s style (including the animal allegory) in a way that is often unimaginative and mechanistic. Graphic novels created by American artists are a telling exception to the rule. The work of two well-known American authors is analysed by Diederik Oostdijk and Dana Mihăilescu, who look at autobiographical stories by Miriam Katin and Amy Kurzweil, respectively. Claire Gorrara joins in this discussion by providing an examination of a single work by the French comic book artist, Jérémie Dres. All of those excellent papers unpick the workings of family and collective memory, and explore the ways in which second- and third-generation artists use the Holocaust to reflect on their own Jewishness, their relationship with the country of family origin, and their attitudes to other issues, such as the Israeli policy in Palestine.

To summarize, the contributions to this special issue explore the portrayals of the Holocaust in a variety of national contexts and through different kinds of graphic narratives, such as newspaper cartoons, educational pamphlets, short stories and graphic novels. Focusing on recognized and lesser known illustrators and authors, the special issue looks at both autobiographical and fictional accounts, and seeks to paint a broader picture of Holocaust comic books in Europe and beyond. As we will see, the genre is a capacious one, not only dealing with the killing of millions of Jews but also with Jewish lives in war-torn Europe, the personal and transgenerational memory of World War II, and the wider national and transnational legacies of the Shoah. At the aesthetic level, we see both figurative and allegorical representation, as well as an application of different stylistics, from realism to fantasy. In terms of audiences, we are witnessing a revival of the theme in both alternative publications, aimed at the adult reader, and state-funded educational comics published with young audiences in mind.

Spanning the period from the 1940s to present, the articles in this issue consider both the convergences in the European and global cultural memory of atrocity, and the far more divided legacies of the Holocaust that lay partially or fully hidden beneath the transnational and reconciliatory discourses of World War II. Our contributions attest to the susceptibility of the comic book genre to ideological and political manipulation in democratic and non-democratic settings alike, and show how the cultural reflection on the Holocaust intersects with other variables such as memory, identity, race and religion. As such, the articles collected in this edition speak to specific political, social and cultural conditions which triggered and shaped the artistic interventions under scrutiny, including the anti-Jewish animus in Nazi-occupied states and the role of print media in the escalation of racism (e.g. in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands), the memorialization of the Holocaust under Communism (in Poland and East Germany), the iconization of Auschwitz victims (e.g. Maksymilian Kolbe), and the role of the Holocaust in the formation of Jewish diasporic identities in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my deep gratitude to colleagues and friends who offered their time, expertise and invaluable advice as this special issue was being put together. I am particularly indebted to the journal editor, Glenda Abramson, for her unceasing support and unwavering enthusiasm; and to John Paul Newman for invaluable advice and encouragement along the way. I am grateful to Anna Menyhért and Dana Mihăilescu who provided insightful comments on the introduction to this special issue, and to the anonymous reviewers whose unique expertise, combined with immense collegiality, made the special issue articles better. Last but not least, I am thankful to my contributors for their commitment, responsiveness, creativity and enthusiasm.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Ewa Stańczyk is Lecturer in European Studies in the History Department, University of Amsterdam. She holds a Ph.D. in Polish Studies from the University of Manchester (2010). She held several international research fellowships, including the EURIAS Fellowship at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, Leibniz Fellowship at the Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam and the Josef Dobrovský Fellowship at the Institute for Contemporary History, Czech Academy of Sciences, among others. She has just completed a book on the commemoration of World War II in Poland (under review). Her current research centres on the twentieth-century Eastern European history and memory cultures, with a particular focus on Jewish communal life after 1945.

Notes

1. Soon after, the series was shown in Europe. In some countries, it led to discomfort and collective soul searching, in others it was discounted as trivial and kitsch. See, for example, Perra (2008).

2. I would like to thank Paolino Nappi for drawing my attention to Gay’s work.

3. In stark contrast, in the U.S. comic books were used for spreading anti-Nazi propaganda, for example through a large number of military publications like The Boy Commandos, United States Marines and The American Air Forces. I would like to thank Dana Mihăilescu for pointing this out.