Comic Books, Graphic Novels and the Holocaust: Beyond Maus ed. by Ewa Stancyzk

Abstract

Reviewed by: Comic Books, Graphic Novels and the Holocaust: Beyond Maus ed. by Ewa Stancyzk Lynn Marie Kutch Comic Books, Graphic Novels and the Holocaust: Beyond Maus. Edited by Ewa Stancyzk. Routledge: New York, 2019. Pp. 132. Cloth $155.00. ISBN 978-1138598645. Although the standard debate about comics belonging to low art or high art continues in general discussions and as part of comics studies, Art Spiegelman’s Maus has continually emerged as evidence that comics can in fact treat subjects as weighty as the Holocaust. While Spiegelman’s work was indeed ground-breaking, the collected volume at hand introduces readers to works from other countries and various decades since the 1940s, when the themes of war and the Holocaust reemerged as part of national discourses. The anthology, which was first published in its entirety as a special issue of the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies in February 2018, considers a variety of aesthetic methods and historicized approaches, including nationally specific ways of examining the Holocaust through comics. The studies in the volume perform the [End Page 635] important work of expanding the critical dialogue about comics and the Holocaust, even if it is unclear why the journal’s contents were reprinted without revision into anthology form (even directing researchers to use original journal citations)—perhaps the contributors sought to thereby reach a wider audience. Nevertheless, the publication is a welcome contribution to comics studies scholarship, with its original and well-crafted theoretical and content-related analyses. The volume begins with Kees Ribbens’s discussion of a 1940s antisemitic comic strip in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands—specifically, Peter Beekman’s “Odd, but True Comments.” In the strip, Beekman presents then-current events from a National Socialist point of view. The chapter points out that the strips were a mix of entertainment and political propaganda, using the comic technique of amplification in order to exaggerate Jewish stereotypes. Ribbens performs a close reading of distinct visual aspects of the comic, including Jews as a separate nation, Jews and greed, and Jews and the evil of communism. He convincingly argues that, although the comic medium would suggest a different aim than that of Nazi propaganda, the comic’s reliance on visual stereotypes and common clichés indicates largely the same motivations. Sean Eedy transports the discussion to East Germany and children’s comics as examples of educational materials that framed the Holocaust as a form of antifascist resistance and a way to develop awareness of a socialist class struggle. Eedy reminds his readers that in East Germany confronting the Nazi past took on a much different character than it did in West Germany—perhaps best summed up with the official East German position that labor camps were filled with communist resistance. Eedy also seems to leave the door open to future research that would consider how East German children (who are now aware adults) may have reacted to these messages. In the third chapter, volume editor Ewa Stancyzk investigates Polish comic books, with publication dates spanning from 1940–2000 and genres ranging from newspaper cartoons to graphic novellas and educational comic books, that all present a “de-Judaizing” of the Shoah. In her chronological reading, Stancyzk categorizes the comics into entertainment, postmodern challenge, an exercise in history making, and educational material. Stancyzk demonstrates through her readings that although a progression of national attitude and thought is evident, the representation of the Shoah plays a consistently smaller role than that of other topics in the comics that she analyzes here. Ultimately the comics still take a more selective approach to the Polish past. In his chapter, Paolino Nappi examines the content of Italian comic books over a three-decade span as it relates to the topic of the Holocaust “slowly being adopted into the Italian historical consciousness” (51). Nappi maintains that the Italian comics tradition has seen a delay in entering mass popular tradition and instead reflects a general evolution of the relationship between the Shoah and Italian culture, ending in comics rooted in an Italian politics of memory. [End Page 636] Jose Alaniz considers the theme of the Shoah as found in Czech and Slavic comics. In his reading, he discusses a...