Between memory, didacticism and the Jewish revival: the Holocaust in Italian comic books

ABSTRACT

The aim of this article is to trace the development of the theme of the Holocaust in Italian comic books, attempting to frame it in the more general national memory culture. I look at both educational publications, aimed at adolescents, and those that speak to much wider social and political attempts at constructing a collective image of the Shoah. First, I explore three biographical comic books from the 1980s that focus on non-Italian historical figures, namely Maximilian Kolbe and Anne Frank, which are linked by the notion of sacrifice, in both a Catholic and universal sense. I then move on to works from the 1990s, which reveal more freedom in the way the topic is portrayed, not only at a thematic but also at an aesthetic level. Finally, I discuss several graphic novels that were published in the last few years which fit in well with the contemporary trend of rediscovering the past and constructing the collective memory around specific sites of memory, such as the concentration camp of Risiera di San Sabba in Trieste. As I show here, many of these narratives reiterate the common image of the Holocaust as a foreign (mostly German and Polish) event. This silences and underplays the Italian involvement in the atrocity. Nonetheless, more recent works demonstrate that the Shoah is slowly being adopted into the Italian historical consciousness as an important tragedy of the twentieth century.

KEYWORDS:

• Italian comic books
• Holocaust
• Anne Frank
• maximilian Kolbe
• Jan Karski
• Giorgio Perlasca
• Risiera di San Sabba

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Paolino Nappi is lecturer in the Department of French and Italian Philology at the University of Valencia in Spain. His research interests include contemporary Italian literature, cinema and mass media. His first book, L’avventura del reale. Il cinema di Vittorio De Seta (The Adventure of the Real. The Cinema of Vittorio De Seta), was published in 2012. His articles have appeared in numerous international journals. He is the editor of the Spanish journal of Italian Studies Zibaldone. Estudios italianos.

Notes

1. The antecedents of graphic narratives about the Shoah can be traced back to the autobiographical pencil drawings by survivors, such as Aldo Gay, who depicted the Raid on the Ghetto of Rome in October 1943 (Pezzetti and Silveri 2007). Sodi recalls a number of other Italian illustrators, most of them survivors of concentration camps who wrote memoirs “in which words are interspersed with drawings (anticipating the later success of Art Spiegelman’s stunning Maus and Maus II)” (2005, 228). These authors include Giovanni Baima Besquet, Agostino Barbieri, Eo Baussano, Lodovico Belgiojoso, Milovan Bressan, Aldo Carpi, Renato Daneo, Gino Gregori, Anton Zoran Music and Carlo Slama.

2. For an overview of Italian Catholic outlets in the post-war period, see Saresella 2011.

3. The idea is loosely based on the ODESSA network, an alleged underground Nazi association, which inspired a few popular novels and films, such as Frederick Forsyth's best-selling 1972 thriller The Odessa File and Ira Levin’s The Boys from Brazil (1976), later turned into a film by Franklyn J. Schaffner.

4. We find a similar Nazi doctor in another fantasy comic book, Michelangelo La Neve’s I dannati (1996). Here the Mago Nero (Black Wizard) is a hypnotist who used to torture gypsy children. The souls of the young victims are doomed to meander for years on, until their final liberation in Berlin’s sky. Although less interesting than the other stories we discuss, I dannati draws attention to the forgotten issue of Romani Holocaust.

5. In the past 10 years we have seen a mushrooming of comic books on Second World War or hinting at this event, including Ficarra 2009 and Gabos 2009. More recently, the biography of Primo Levi, the most important figure of Italian Holocaust literature, was turned into a graphic novel by Scarnera (2014).

6. See also other contributions in the special issue on the graphic novel, Lo Straniero 2013–2014.

7. Also important here are references to psychoanalysis. For example, the character of doctor Zeiss is likely to be inspired by another important figure from Trieste, Edoardo Weiss, Freud's disciple who migrated to the United States in 1938.