Emotional History and Legacies of War in Recent German Comics and Graphic Novels

Abstract

Comics and graphic novels provide a singular way to explore and portray historical events and narratives, particularly dark heritage and difficult history. Recently, several German-language graphic novels and comics have been published which explore the Third Reich and the Second World War from the perspective of those who experienced it first-hand: ordinary citizens, war children, Hitler Youth members, soldiers, and civilians. Such works, which include literary adaptations, memoirs, and oral testimony, can be viewed as part of the recent turn towards ‘felt’ or ‘emotional’ history [‘gefühlte Geschichte’] in German-language representations of the past—a shift towards an ‘emotional’ account of history, in contrast to documentary descriptions, that offers a chance to encounter not only what happened, but how it felt to be there. This chapter examines narratives of war and dictatorship in three recent works: Lina Hoven’s Love Looks Away (Liebe schaut weg, 2007), Barbara Yelin’s Irmina (2014), and the crowd-funded Großväterland: Eye-Witnesses Tell about World War II (Großväterland: Zeitzeugen erzählen vom Zweiten Weltkrieg, 2016). It considers the aesthetic strategies used to depict the past, particularly the adaptation of authentic documents such as diaries, photographs, and letters. Close readings of the primary texts are situated within a discussion of how such works contribute to the highly contested legacy of that historical period within contemporary cultural memory.