Four colour anti-fascism: postwar narratives and the obfuscation of the Holocaust in East German comics

ABSTRACT

Foundational narratives of the German Democratic Republic as an anti-fascist state subsumed accounts of Jewish suffering and victimization before and during the Second World War. Though there was little or no outright denial of the Holocaust, this was instead expressed in terms of Marxist class conflict that valorized socialist resistance and the construction of socialism as a bulwark against future western imperialism. This article examines children’s comics published in East Germany during the 1970s and 1980s. Because of shifting Cold War relations, it was necessary that these socialist comics foreground narratives of the war and Holocaust as episodes of anti-fascist resistance to educate children and develop their awareness of socialist class struggle in the face of increasing western influence. These narratives demonstrated socialist experience in a vacuum, undermining the recognition of Jewish claims to victimhood and of (East) German perpetration to buttress the future of the socialist state through children’s education in comics.

KEYWORDS:

• Anti-fascism
• Atze
• comics
• East Germany
• Holocaust
• socialism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Sean Eedy is a recent Ph.D. from Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. He has published on East German socialist comics culture in the 1960s and nostalgia in German Wende novels. He also has a chapter on DEFA animated fairy tale films in a forthcoming volume from Camden House. While still convinced that Jason Aaron’s Mighty Thor is the best book currently published by Marvel, Sean was recently enamoured by Tom DeFalco’s Thor run of the late 1980s. Sean lives in Ottawa with his wife and two cats.

Notes

1. From December 1955 until the end of 1959, the comic book Mosaik was published by Verlag Neues Leben, the publications of which were directed toward an older youth audience. From a request made in mid-1959, Mosaik was transferred to Buchverlag Junge Welt at the beginning of 1960 to capitalize on the strengths of comics for a younger audience while also utilizing the experience of Junge Welt’s editorial staff in the production of publications for children. Here, when the author mentions Buchverlag Junge Welt, it is in regard to the publication, Atze, as this comic was not transferred between publishers and is the focus of discussion in the essay (BArch DY 24/5790).

2. The Weltraumserie saw two of the three Digedag characters abducted to the planet Neos. There, they found themselves amid an interstellar cold war that made the educational material of the stories more apparent than was previously the case in Mosaik without taking anything from the comics’ entertainment value. Moreover, this story tapped the growing East German fascination with space travel following the successful launch of the Russian Sputnik satellite in 1957 (Eedy 2016, 99). The story introduced children to science and technology essential to the SED state and its constructions of national identity with alien technologies virtually identical to those found in the GDR and the Soviet Bloc (Augustine 2007, 232).

3. This and subsequent, similar, references are from the Bundesarchiv (BArch), Berlin-Lichterfelde.

4. I expand on the argument made here by Thomson-Wohlgemuth to include comics in the construction of the socialist personality (Eedy 2014).

5. After the re-profiling of Atze beginning in January 1966, issues were published monthly, numbered according to the month and year of publication. Therefore, the issue in question here was published in November 1984. All subsequent numbering of Atze follows this convention.

6. In the context of justice in the GDR during the 1950s and 1960s, Wendy Lower also suggests that Jewish organizations were perceived as “Zionist” agencies in league with Western powers. This perception emerged from anti-Zionist campaigns emanating from Moscow and was, in part, responsible for the turn away from the prosecution of Nazi crimes against Jews during the Holocaust (Lower 2010, 59).