Transnationalism in German comics

While, in terms of production, German-speaking countries do not possess a comics culture to rival that of comics superpowers such as Japan, the United States, France, or Belgium, they have long been part of a wider economy of ideas that continue to shape the world of graphic storytelling. Wilhelm Busch’s illustrated stories have often been hailed as an early form of comics and a direct line runs from his mischievous Max and Moritz characters to the groundbreaking Katzenjammer Kids strips drawn by German émigré Rudolph Dirks for the New York Journal. Rudolphe Töpffer, the son of a German emigrant in Switzerland, is deemed by many to be the father of modern comics. Belgian graphic artist Frans Masereel’s stark woodcut aesthetics were not only influenced by German expressionism, but Germany also became a catalyst for the dissemination of Masereel’s benchmark wordless graphic novels, such as Die Passion eines Menschen (A Man's Passion, 1928) and Mein Stundenbuch(My Book of Hours, 1957), when his works were re-published in Germany from 1921 onwards and started to wield their international influence, an inspiration that extends to such contemporary luminaries as Art Spiegelman.

As this brief history shows, comics – regardless of their location of origin – are often not easily separated into strict national categories: as comics historians have noted, from their earliest beginnings, comics have been influenced by migration and transnational exchange. This is even more evident today, and is true in the German context, where efforts to define just what constitutes ‘German’ comics are complicated by numerous factors. Take for example, the number of comics creators who live and/or work transnationally: German-born artists such as Martin tom Dieck and Jens Harder received their first critical acclaim and book contracts in France, with German editions released only afterwards. Similarly, Anna Haifisch’s international success came through her serialised publications of The Artist on vice.com; Barbara Yelin’s works first gained attention in France before the German market fully noticed her, and Olivier Kugler began his career in the United States and is now based in London. On the flipside, Italian-born Manuele Fior began his comics career in Berlin, publishing his first comics in German – including the homage to Berlin, Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday, 2005) – before moving to Paris and continuing his career in French. Spanish-born Alberto Madrigal is based in Berlin: in works like Berlin 2.0 (written in French and co-produced with the French writer Mathilde Ramadier, 2016), and the Italian-language publications Va tutto bene (All is Well, 2015b) or Un lavoro vero (A Real Job, 2015a), all set in contemporary Berlin, he similarly grapples with modern life in the German capital.

As these examples make clear, transnational artists can be deemed to belong to, and shape, multiple national comics cultures, depending on the different parameters – nationality, residence, thematic preoccupations, language, place of publication – typically used to make such claims. Rather than defining ‘German comics’ in strictly geographic or linguistic terms, we, therefore, employ the term broadly, and include a wide range of artists who have shaped comics production in German-speaking Europe. Of course, it is not only border-crossing artists, such as those noted above, who problematise national paradigms of comics cultures. The degree to which a work may engage with concepts and representations of transnationalism is not anchored in the biography of its creator, but in its engagement with narratives, histories, and imaginaries that transcend national boundaries as well as with practices of comics production indebted to multiple comics traditions.

As the title of this special issue suggests, it is the complex interactions between national specificity and transnational processes of cultural exchange and transfer that frame the contributions assembled here. On the one hand, the special issue aims to introduce and examine some of the particularities of the burgeoning sphere of contemporary German comics, a field that as yet has received little attention within the larger field of comics studies. At the same time, however, it seeks to take account of the many ways in which these comics participate in cultural, social, economic, or political forces that transcend national boundaries. The special issue thus hopes to build on recent interventions in comics studies, such as Shane Denson, Christina Meyer, and Daniel Stein’s Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives (2014) and the newly established book series Crossing the Lines: Transcultural/Transnational Comics Studies co-edited by Barbara Postema, Candida Rifkind, and Nhora Lucia Serrano, which challenge notions of comics traditions as ‘relatively self-contained phenomena’ (Denson, Meyer, and Stein 2014, 1), while still paying attention to national particularities or the local inflections of transnational tendencies.

Some trends in contemporary German comics

Trends in contemporary German comics are numerous and varied, often reflecting wider developments in international comics publishing; a survey of recent publications reveals how artists participate in a variety of prominent genres. Autobiography, biography, and memoir are frequent staples of the German scene: Ulli Lust’s Heute ist der letzte Tag vom Rest deines Lebens (Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life, 2009), Line Hoven’s Liebe schaut weg (Love Looks Away, 2008), Simon Schwartz’s Packeis (2015), and Reinhard Kleist’s biographies of international celebrities such as Nick Cave (2017b), Johnny Cash (2015), and historical figures such as Hertzko Haft (2012), Fidel Castro (2016), and Samia Yusuf Omar (2017a) are just a few notable examples. Documentary comics are also gaining in popularity: take, for instance, Ulli Lust’s Fashionvictims, Trendverächter: Bildkolumnen und Minireportagen aus Berlin (Fashion Victims, Defiers of Trends: Picture Columns and Mini Reportages from Berlin, 2008) or Tim Dinter’s Lästermaul & Wohlstandskind (loosely: Gossiper & Child of Prosperity, 2011), quasi-journalistic comics that provide images of contemporary, quotidian life, urban development, fashion, and gentrification in Berlin. Reportages on current political and social developments are similarly on the rise: see, for example, recently published books on the refugee crisis such as Mike Loos’s compilation, Geschichten aus dem Grand Hotel (Stories from the Grand Hotel, 2016), Olivier Kugler and Christoph Schuler’s Dem Krieg entronnen: Begegnungen mit Syrern auf der Flucht (Escaped from War: Encounters with Syrian Refugees, 2017), and Peter Eickmeyer and Gabi von Borstel’s Liebe deinen Nächsten (Love Thy Neighbour, 2017). In addition, graphic travelogues are becoming more popular and are exploring the narrative possibilities of comics to represent the embodied experience of travel or to reflect on the ethics of the cross-cultural gaze, e.g., Ulli Lust’s international prize-winning Heute ist der letzte Tag vom Rest deines Lebens (2009), Reinhard Kleist’s Havanna: eine kubanische Reise (Havanna: A Cuban Journey, 2008) or Sascha Hommer’s In China (2016). Another complex stylistic and thematic conversation across cultural borders is just starting with the advent of Germanga, mangas made by German-speaking artists.

German comics have also become an important medium for investigations into popular memory culture, as many works turn to reflections on the events and legacies of Germany’s 20^th-century past. By far the most frequently treated historical topic is the GDR and the fall of the Berlin Wall. While many recent comics on GDR history have a distinctly pedagogical tone (e.g., Susanne Buddenberg and Thomas Henseler’s Grenzfall [Borderline Case, 2015]), other works, such as Flix’s Da war mal was (Once There Was Something, 2009), Mawil’s Kinderland (Children’s Land, 2014), Simon Schwartz’s drüben! (The Other Side of the Wall, 2009), Ulla Loge’s Da wird sich nie was ändern (It’s Never Going to Change, 2015) or Claire Lenkova’s Grenzgebiete (Border Areas, 2009) explore personal, intergenerational, and collective memories, offering nuanced stories of everyday life beyond the familiar narrative of conformity and resistance. In addition to personal and collective memories, German comics and graphic novels also offer a visual archive of objects and landscapes that have rapidly transformed or have largely disappeared and they do so without making the claims to authenticity characteristic of heritage cinema, documentary photography, or the museum.

Several recent comics also deal with the legacies of the Nazi past; while many internationally acclaimed comics and graphic novels from around the globe centre on representations of WWII, Nazi Germany, or the Shoa, comic artists from Germany are increasingly adding their voices to transnational conversations about the Third Reich, its victims, and perpetrators. Hence, the past years have seen the publication of such well-received books as Barbara Yelin’s Irmina (2016), Reinhard Kleist’s Der Boxer (The Boxer, 2012), Moritz Stetter’s Bonhoeffer (2010), Gerlinde Althoff and Christoph Heuer’s Der erste Frühling (The First Spring, 2007), Isabel Kreitz’s Die Sache mit Sorge (The Issue with Sorge, 2014) and Nora Krug’s Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home (2018), which was later published in German as Heimat: Ein deutsches Familienalbum. These comics provide opportunities to compare how artists from different generations and national backgrounds employ the graphic form to work through traumatic histories. Moreover, as comics such as Yelin’s Irmina (2016) and Birgit Weyhe’s Madgermanes (2016) evince, narratives preoccupied with what at first glance may be considered primarily national histories can, on closer inspection, incorporate transnational perspectives. Exploring the intersections of GDR and Cold War history and the rise of fascism, respectively, with the history of colonialism, Madgermanes and Irmina are representative of new approaches to the past that consider entangled histories (see Werner and Zimmermann (2006) on the concept of histoires croisées). Thus, they look afresh at the ways in which collective memories, identities, and national narratives are intertwined, and the ways in which they span geographical and cultural locations.

German culture and literature in the form of comics have gained a place in global comics production through yet another avenue: world literature and its graphic adaptations. Both international and German comic artists have transformed German literary classics into comics and/or graphic novels. Even though comic adaptations of world literary classics are nothing new – one could argue that, particularly in Germany’s underdeveloped and de-valorised comics culture, series such as Illustrierte Klassiker (Illustrated Classics, 1952–1972) were one of the scene’s survival mechanisms – many recent adaptations are different in that they take extensive creative licence with the originals. The spectrum encompasses more reverent and restrained stagings of classics, for example Sylvain Ricard, Anja Berendine Kootz, and Maël’s adaptation of Kafka’s In der Strafkolonie (In the Penal Colony, 2012) which in turn followed a version by David Zane Mairowitz and Robert Crumb; Eric Corbeyran and Richard Horne’s Verwandlung (Metamorphosis, 2014); and Manuele Fior’s Schnitzler adaptation Fräulein Else (Miss Else, 2012). On the other end of the spectrum, we find bold and sometimes parodistic reinterpretations of literary classics such as Flix’s cartoonesque Faust (2017) version in which the hero falls in love with a Turkish-German ‘Gretchen’ or Frank Flöthmann’s Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale adaptations which do away with language altogether and where the characters communicate with whimsical pictograms (Grimms Märchen ohne Worte, [Grimm’s Fairy Tales without Words, 2013]). These stylistically innovative and medium-conscious graphic adaptations anchor German cultural and literary heritage on a comics map in which linguistic borders and national canons are less important than promising story material.

Publishing, institutions, and scholarship

A robust self-confidence of German comic artists, but also their frustration with a lack of private and public funding found expression in the Comic Manifesto, published on the occasion of the Berlin International Literary Festival in 2013. Comic artists, academics, intellectuals, and other Kulturschaffende (people working in the cultural realm) who signed the manifesto called for comics to be afforded the same recognition and the same monetary and institutional support that the sister arts enjoy. It speaks to a pan-national outlook that the underwriters placed their rally cry on the website of an international literary festival and offered French and English translations. It seems also fair to assume that they oriented their expectations, e.g., for a dedicated Comics Institute and for professorships for comics studies, on models abroad such as The Comics Studies Society or academic positions focused on comics, cartoon, and manga studies as they exist in countries like the United States or Japan.

If we shift our attention from the plane of comic artists and their books to the wider field of the German-speaking book market and its institutions, two insights arise: first, that the Kulturszene (‘cultural scene’) is waking up to the artistic and financial potential of graphic narratives, and second, that its agents such as publishers, book fairs, museums, etc. are often mindful of the international network in which German-language comic production is embedded. Hence, important book fairs such as Germany’s Frankfurter Buchmesse and Austria’s Buch Wien now regularly include sections for comics and graphic novels and are going to great lengths to couch German-language publications within an international framework. The interest generated at these traditional book fairs adds to the important platforms of dedicated comic festivals such as Fumetto (Switzerland), Nextcomic (Austria), and Comic Salon Erlangen (Germany). Comic magazines are another incubator of German, Swiss, Austrian, and international comic art, Strapazin being one of the best known. Founded in Munich in the spirit of the famous RAW magazine and now published in Zurich, Switzerland, it aims to promote young and independent comic art from the German-speaking world, while still paying attention to comics from around the globe, as recent thematic issues such as ‘Indische Nonfiction’ (‘Indian Non-Fiction,’ 2017) or ‘Comics aus Polen’ (‘Comics from Poland,’ 2015) show. This transnational outlook was evident when Anette Gehrig (2012) took the 30^th anniversary of the magazine as an occasion to reflect on Strapazin’s mission in a web brochure created by the Cartoonmuseum Basel and entitled Comics Deluxe!: ‘Strapazin [versteht sich] seit jeher als Teil der globalen Kulturform Comic und ermöglicht der deutschsprachigen Szene als risikofreudige, mit der ganzen zeichnenden Welt vernetzte Plattform Einblicke in das Comicschaffen anderer Länder’ (3, ‘Strapazin has always seen itself as part of the global cultural form of comics and offers the German scene – which is open to risk and a platform linking comic art globally – insights into the comics production of other countries’). Strapazin was nominated for the Eisner Award in 2001 in the category ‘Best Anthology’ and received particular recognition when Art Spiegelman included it in his private museum in 2012.

Exhibitions sit at the junction of scholarship and public culture, and they, too, are registering the inter- and transnational shifts in the comics scene. One example is ‘SICK! Kranksein im Comic/Reclaiming Illness through Comics’ which was on view from 2017 to 2018 at the Berliner Medizinhistorisches Museum, an affiliate of the university clinic Charité. In it, comics from eight countries were on display. Connected with this project and bespeaking its international and academic ambition was the conference ‘Stories of Illness/Disability in Literature and Comics. Intersections of the Medical, the Personal, and the Cultural’ and the Free University of Berlin graduate project ‘Graphic Medicine and Literary Pathographies: The Aesthetics and Politics of Illness Narratives in Contemporary Comics and Literature.’ This packaged approach shows how comics not only engage public and academic audiences, but also how the German comics scholarship casts itself as a space of international, and potentially, transnational conversation.

In the wake of the recent commercial and artistic successes of comics, academic interest in comics and graphic novels is also on the rise in the German-speaking countries. It would go beyond the scope of this introduction to list even the most significant research groups, publications, and conferences that have appeared on the German scholarly comics scene over the past decade(s). Yet, the interested reader will find the website of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Comicforschung ComFor (www.comicgesellschaft.de) and of the Patrimonium Deutsche Comicforschung to be good starting points (www.comicforschung.de). What is relatively new is that German comics scholarship systematically reaches beyond national or even language borders. One such endeavour originating at the University of Siegen, Germany, was the 2017 Summer School Transnational Graphic Narratives which in its call for applications invited researchers to study the transnational practices of production and reception of graphic narratives while also taking account of the continued importance of the national as a framework for cultural self-description and meaning-making. This puts German comics not only in the limelight, but does so with an eye for the power of cross-cultural comparisons and interdependencies. In a complementary, yet unprompted move, the North American German Studies Association (GSA) has recently formed a comics studies network. Spearheaded by scholars from Germany and North America, the network seeks to make connections between comics studies organisations on both sides of the Atlantic while also raising the international profile of scholarship on German-language comics.

Artists, scholars, book publishers, exhibitors: as these stakeholders add to the interest in German-language comics and thus create an ever-growing stream of discourse, we hope that German comics will establish themselves firmly in the cultural and academic scenes. The current special issue aims to accompany and contribute to the burgeoning field of (German) comics studies, a field that is mindful of both its national peculiarities and its transnational connections.

The transnational dimensions of German comics: individual contributions to the special issue

The six essays featured in this special issue all attend to the national-transnational nexus of German comics and explore transnationalism from a variety of angles. The essays begin with Paul Malone’s overview of West German comics history, a trajectory marked by Germany’s post-war reconstruction and Cold War divisions. Malone shows how the West German comics market was dominated by American and Western European imports, and often failed to support local talents, who frequently left Germany to pursue careers elsewhere. Nevertheless, there were some success stories, such as Rötger Feldmann, Walter Moers, and Ralph König in the 1980s, and – in the wake of a flood of new Japanese imports in the new millennium – the surprising emergence of home-grown manga, dubbed Germanga. Malone closes his essay with a look at the emergence of independent publishers and the rise of the graphic novel in the post-wall period, as well as the rise of young talents such as Reinhard Kleist or Ulli Lust whose works have gained substantial recognition beyond German-language markets. What Malone’s contribution highlights is that an understanding of (West) Germany’s comics culture requires attention not only to national specificities, but also to the transnational connections that have shaped patterns of consumption, production, and distribution from the post-war period to the present.

Elizabeth Nijdam takes a closer look at one of these post-wall transnational connections in her essay on manga made in Germany. While, by 2007, translations of Japanese manga comprised an astonishing 70% of German comics sales, the more surprising development was the local production of manga, or Germanga, created primarily by young female artists. Nijdam traces the evolution of Germanga, showing how it initially exhibited many of the same features as Japanese manga but, over time, combined Japanese conventions with new elements, including formal and stylistic innovations and themes typical of the Comic Underground. Using the work of artists Christina Plaka and Anike Hage as case studies, Nijdam furthermore considers how German shōjo-manga exhibits a feminist sensibility alien to its Japanese forerunners. Nijdam explores the dominance of manga in the German comics scene by investigating the transnational impulses at play in the conceptions of gender, sexuality, and feminism in these two artists’ works.

Female artists and feminist concerns are also central to Julia Ludewig’s essay in which she compares eight Indian and eight German artists’ contributions to a transnational collaborative issue of the all-women magazine Spring. Ludewig points out thematic, generic, and stylistic overlaps that can be seen as reflections of transnational trends: for example, many of the contributors to this issue of Spring display feminist concerns and operate within the mode of (auto)biography common to independent comics in a variety of national contexts. However, upon closer inspection, Ludewig shows how shared themes, genres, and stylistic choices also bespeak more local, national variations. For instance, while many of the contributors reflect on issues of female identity and embodiment, as well as the pressures to conform to social standards of beauty, the individual comics themselves show how the very notion of beauty is culturally constructed. Moreover, although many of the contributors consider personal and family histories, the Indian contributions show a broader historical scope, often reaching back several generations to shine a light on the hitherto unknown youth of a grandmother. In her essay, Ludewig considers these national variations and suggests how the specificities of Indian and German (comics) cultures may offer explanations for these national inflections.

Rüdiger Singer also takes a comparative approach in his essay, which juxtaposes Shaun Tan’s bestselling wordless comic, The Arrival (2006), with Paula Bulling’s lesser-known but critically acclaimed Im Land der Frühaufsteher (In the Land of the Early Risers, 2012). Although both comics treat themes of migration, Singer shows how their distinctive visual and narrative strategies position readers in fundamentally different ways. As Singer argues, Tan’s Arrival invites the reader to identify with and ultimately resolve feelings of fundamental otherness, resulting in a sense of mastery and successful closure. In contrast, Bulling’s Im Land der Frühaufsteher complicates the reader’s engagement with foreignness by presenting irreconcilable perspectives, blank or erased speech bubbles, and a direct discussion of the politics of representation. According to Singer’s analysis, Tan’s visual-narrative strategies facilitate a more romanticised and nostalgic view of migration while Bulling’s approach more frankly addresses issues of racism, marginalisation, and her own status as a privileged, white artist. In this regard, Bulling’s comic refuses facile reader identification that risks obscuring the power differentials that may exist between readers and the migrants depicted in her work.

Mobility is also at issue in Olivia Albiero’s essay, which places two culturally distant autobiographical comics in productive conversation. Albiero considers how the two works exploit the spatiality of the comics medium to reflect on the relationship between place, spatial confinement, and identity. At first glance, Simon Schwartz’s drüben! (2009) and Colleen Frakes’s Prison Island (2015) may seem to have little in common: drüben! recounts the story of the Schwartz family’s decision to leave the GDR to resettle in West Germany and the effects this has on various family relations, while Colleen Frakes’s memoir recounts her childhood spent on McNeil Island, which at the time was the last operating prison island in the US. Despite the very different cultural and political contexts of these two memoirs, Albiero underscores their striking similarities, from the composition of their cover pages, to shared narrative strategies such as the merging of temporal layers, to their common emphasis on the effects of space, border-crossing, and confinement on identity formation. Moreover, each memoir reflects on boundaries that no longer exist: the unification of East and West Germany has created what Albiero argues is a ‘post-transnational’ context. While the divisions in Frakes’s memoir do not constitute national boundaries, the author depicts McNeil Island and the mainland as akin to separate countries, a divide that is erased when the prison ceases operation. Both memoirs employ the spatial aspects of the comics medium to consider how past boundaries continue to affect identities long into the present.

Christina Kraenzle focuses more closely on the intersection of comics studies and memory studies in her essay on Flix’s Spirou in Berlin (2018), the first Spirou spin-off to be authored by a German comic artist. The creation of an original Spirou story may be unique in German comics, but the historical setting follows a major trend: like countless other comics of the 2000s, Spirou in Berlin is set in the former GDR. While Flix’s comic can be enjoyed simply for its entertainment value and the novelty of a German-created Spirou adventure, Kraenzle employs it as a case study for thinking about the different ways that memory can be conceptualised in comics studies. Referencing not only GDR history, but also the production history of the iconic Franco-Belgian character Spirou, as well as a variety of medial representations of the Cold War and divided Germany, Spirou in Berlin encourages a broader, medium-specific approach to memory that explores not only how comics act as a medium for the memory of historical events, but as a space to reflect on the memory of the comics medium itself. Kraenzle charts some of the more prominent intertextual references in Spirou in Berlin and the ways in which the comic can be read as a reflection on the dialectics of memory and forgetting in imaginings of the Cold War past. Finally, Kraenzle investigates the diverse ways that some readers responded to the deployment of memory in Flix’s Spirou in Berlin, invoking personal and collective memories of historical events, as well as memories of reading, of cherished books, and artistic styles.

In addition to the academic articles, Olivia Albiero’s interview with Simon Schwartz offers a glimpse at German-language comics production from the perspective of one of Germany’s most successful young comic artists. Together, the individual contributions to this special issue strive not only to draw more attention to the burgeoning field of German comics, but also to open avenues for further exploration of their border-defining and border-defying impulses.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christina Kraenzle

Christina Kraenzle is Associate Professor of German Studies at York University, Toronto, Canada. Her research and teaching focus on modern German-language cultural studies, with an emphasis on contemporary comics, film, literature, and memory studies.

Julia Ludewig

Julia Ludewig is Assistant Professor of German at the Modern and Classical Languages Department at Allegheny College where she teaches all levels of language, literature, and culture classes. Her research interests focus on comics and graphic novels, language pedagogy, and environmental studies.