Between free movement and confinement: overcoming boundaries in Simon Schwartz’s drüben! and Colleen Frakes’s Prison Island

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a comparative analysis of Simon Schwartz’s drüben! and Colleen Frakes’s Prison Island, two graphic memoirs that thematise the significance of border crossing and the overcoming of boundaries for their children protagonists. drüben! and Prison Island are autobiographical graphic narratives that rely on the spatiality of the comics medium to narrate the characters’ engagement with places that have changed after the original boundaries have shifted. While scholars have so far highlighted the pedagogical relevance of drüben! in relation to other narratives that visualise life in the GDR, my analysis aims at showing how Schwartz’s work emphasises the relation between free movement and confinement in the process of identity formation. By positioning drüben! and Prison Island within the context of childhood autobiographical comics that rely on spatiality, this essay proposes a reading that brings these two works together beyond their national contexts. My reading focuses on how these two graphic narratives foreground space and transitional encounters in their storytelling. Via the analysis of how the protagonists’ stories are visualised in the comics medium, I argue that characters’ identities can be better understood in relation to the spaces they inhabit and the boundaries they overcome.

KEYWORDS:

• Autobiographical comics
• boundaries
• Colleen Frakes
• GDR
• McNeil Island
• Simon Schwartz
• transnational

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Christina Kraenzle and Julia Ludewig for their generous work as guest editors of this Special Issue.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The studies on autobiographical comics by Chute (2010), El Refaie (2012), and Kunka (2017) confirm these ongoing attempts.

2. Stewart (2015, 189) continues: ‘This line marked the border between nations as well as ideologies, doubling as the fault line separating spheres of international influence during the Cold War, and its significance continues to resonate long after its erasure from world maps. Dislocatedness, often appearing in conjunction with disappointment, nostalgia, reevaluation (as well as revaluation), and transformation, is perhaps one of the most frequently recurring themes in contemporary East German writing.’

3. Krueger elaborates on this generation, ‘the so-called Third Generation East, a term that loosely refers to a specific “generation” of children born in the GDR between 1970 and 1985, and that was coined by a group of people who founded the Initiative Third Generation East Germany (Dritte Generation Ostdeutschland) in 2010’ (Krueger 2016, 148). Artists from this generation include Flix (Da war mal was…, Flix 2009); Claire Lenkova (Grenzgebiete. Eine Kindheit zwischen Ost und West, Lenkova 2009); Mawil (Kinderland, Mawil 2014); and Thomas Henseler and Susanne Buddenberg (Grenzfall, Henseler and Buddenberg 2011). For more considerations on East Germans’ graphic comics see also Nijdam (2015).

4. Schwartz is the author of several other comics works. With Packeis, which focuses on the Afro-American polar explorer Matthew Henson (1866–1955), the first human being to reach the North Pole in 1909, he won the Max and Moritz Award in the category ‘Best German Comics’ in 2012. In 2014, Schwartz published Vita Obscura, a collection of unusual biographies which had previously appeared in Der Freitag. His newest work, Ikon, came out in March 2018.

5. Scholars who discuss drüben! from a pedagogical perspective include Nijdam (2015), Hoffmann and Lang (2016), Krueger (2016), and Ludewig (2017). The Senatverwaltung für Bildung, Jugend und Wissenschaft (Senate Department for Education, Youth and Science, 2016) also edited a booklet dedicated to the teaching of drüben! in German schools.

6. All English citations are taken from the published English translation by Laura Watkinson, The Other Side of the Wall (Schwartz 2015), hereafter OS in the main body of the text. For other textual references that do not include translations, I refer to the German publication, abbreviated as D in the text.

7. Reflecting on the style of drüben!, Schwartz defines it as a ‘historical document of his way of working at the time’ (Schacht 2014, my translation).

8. Hoffmann and Lang (2016) discuss the pedagogical use of this panel and the challenges it posed when students tried to analyse and interpret this silent scene in drüben! (195–197).

9. The English translation of Schwartz’s work includes some explanatory notes and a glossary to clarify concepts and ideas that may not be familiar to an English-speaking audience.

10. See Ludewig (2017) for a reading of the scene with a pedagogical focus.

11. Between 1962 and 1989, people leaving the GDR for West Berlin had to pass through this point of crossing, which was colloquially referred to as the Tränenpalast (Palace of Tears). This space, regulated by police and customs controls, was the site of departures and reunions of many families and visitors. In 2011, a permanent exhibition was inaugurated in the Tränenpalast, which can still be visited today.

12. For an analysis of the scene from a pedagogical perspective, see Hoffmann and Lang (2016, 200–202).

13. In 1936, the whole island became the possession of the federal government and all its inhabitants were forced to vacate their properties (Galentine 2006, 69). In 1976, McNeil prison was closed, but in 1981 part of the facility was leased to be used as a correction centre (86). In spite of its closure in 2011, the island still hosts a Special Commitment Centre for sex offenders.

14. All quotations from Frakes’s work have been taken from Prison Island (San Francisco: Zest, Frakes 2015), hereafter abbreviated with PI in the text.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Olivia Albiero

Olivia Albiero is an Assistant Professor of Italian and German at San Francisco State University. She holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Germanics from the University of Washington, Seattle. Her primary research focuses on storytelling in contemporary German-language literature, which she explores through the lens of narratology, as well as on the depiction of individual and collective stories in comics. She is particularly interested in the narrative representation of moments of rupture in literature and graphic novels, which often ensue from crucial experiences of physical and metaphorical mobility or lack thereof.