Casting Shadows: Anke Feuchtenberger's Comics and Graphic Narration

Abstract

50 WLT MARCH / APRIL 2016 cover feature international comics “Lillienwald”(Forest of lilies), from wehwehwehsuperträne.de (Mamiverlag, 2009) WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 51 Pathos und Peinlichkeit. Pathos and pain. Aus dem Land, wo die Sprechblasen Schatten werfen. From the country where speech bubbles cast shadows. I n an interview published in European Comic Art, East German –born comics artist Anke Feuchtenberger revealed the dictums of her artistic production.1 The first, “Pathos und Peinlichkeit,” engages the aesthetic content of her art. Dark, expressive, and innately corporeal, Feuchtenberger’s panels reveal the fundamentals of human nature: emotiveness, passion, pain, and sex. Feuchtenberger’s second aphorism, on the other hand, “aus dem Land, wo die Sprechblasen Schatten werfen,” provides insight into the context from which her art emerges. Connecting notions of national identity and national history, it situates her comics in a tradition of specifically German comic art. She also draws connections to more recent German history, referencing both the country in which she currently works, united Germany, and the socialist state in which she was trained, the German Democratic Republic (gdr), where the comics medium was dismissed as capitalist propaganda. Trained under the doctrines of socialist realism, engaged in traditional printmaking techniques less favored by West German art academies, and working without an established comics canon, Feuchtenberger pushed German comics into a new realm, redefining the medium in cultural, political, and aesthetic terms. Born in an East Berlin house in 1963 to a graphic designer father and an art teacher mother, Feuchtenberger was heavily influenced by the art she encountered as a child. She began studying the fine arts at the age of fifteen in evening classes at the Berlin Academy of the Arts. After four years, she accepted a two-year photography internship, and in 1983 she entered the graphic design program at the Academy for Visual Arts, Berlin-Weißensee. There she and other students (Henning Wagenbreth, Detlef Beck, and Holger Fickelscherer) formed the oppositional group PGH Glühende Zukunft.2 Looking to the American underground comix scene as a model, Feuchtenberger and the group fostered a new avant-garde comics movement in Germany that broadened the aesthetics of the medium, changed public opinion about the legitimacy of comics, and developed an independent comics scene that continues to be influential today. The first phase of Feuchtenberger’s professional artistic production is her most overtly political. Spanning from her graduation in 1988 until after German unification in 1991, it is characterized by the artist’s work with the Independent Women’s Association and her activism in the East German Women’s Movement. After the opening of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, the women of East Germany rallied to influence the course of the revolution. While popular sentiment called for the unification of Germany, many intellectuals and activists sought governmental reform rather than complete abolition of the state. These activists did not see the Federal Republic as the “better Germany” and criticized West Germany’s excessive consumerism. They also recognized, however , that the GDR was in need of fundamental change. Committed to developing democracy, these East German activists also shared a dedication to socialism that had developed over the forty years of the GDR and sought to maintain its achievements.3 Consequently, a movement committed to a “third way” aimed to reform the GDR to re-create the nation as an autonomous, democratic state rather than dismantling it as history actually unfolded.4 Feuchtenberger worked in collaboration with the activists of the Independent Women’s Association to produce posters advocating Casting Shadows Anke Feuchtenberger’s Comics and Graphic Narration by Elizabeth Nijdam 52 WLT MARCH / APRIL 2016 for the rights of women and children and encouraging citizens to vote in East Germany’s first democratic elections in 1990. Her work during this period is optimistic in its expression of utopian ideas about the future of women and women’s rights. Featuring strong central and often naked female figures, Feuchtenberger’s early posters express the political movement ’s excitement about the role of women in determining the future of Germany. By the election in March 1990, however, the illusion of political reform was shattered by a vote in favor of unification...