Comics, the Holocaust and Hiroshima

Jane L. Chapman, Adam Sherif, Kenneth A. Loparo

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137407252
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Seconda guerra mondiale

Comics, the Holocaust and Hiroshima breaks new ground for history by exploring the relationship between comics as a cultural record, historiography, memory and trauma studies. Comics have a dual role as sources: for gauging awareness of the Holocaust and through close analysis, as testimonies and narratives of childhood emotions and experiences.

1

Introduction

Abstract: This chapter provides the context for discourse on how cultural historians may further include comic strip references and comic books on the Holocaust and Hiroshima in their corpus of representations. Should the obliteration, devastation and institutionalised violence of these events impact on the nature of cultural record used? How can such history be appreciated using comics? The chapter posits a role for comics as cultural record, introducing the methodological connections that the book makes between trauma and transference with historiography.

Chapman, Jane L., Dan Ellin and Adam Sherif. Comics, the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137407252.0003.

The tenets of democratisation and widening of debates and sources imply an extension of the range of cultural record relating to persecution, genocide and the atomic bomb from 1939 to 1945, with comics connecting new cultural history, historiography, memory and trauma studies.

The Holocaust and Hiroshima are both episodes in history that involved obliteration, devastation and institutionalised violence. Should this impact on the types of sources historians are able to consider? How can such history be appreciated using comics, and how should their potential contribution be included in our palette of sources for writing about the past? The purpose of this study, taking comics as cultural record, is to further a case for their serious assessment as historical evidence and to demonstrate how they might be incorporated into processes of historical narrative construction, speaking to specific live areas of historiography (Chapman et al., 2015).

The debates of new cultural history have called for a widening of sources, topics and content, and a recognition of the democratising effect of such approaches to extend the historian’s boundaries (Burke, 1992; Hunt, 1989; Jordanova, 2006; Zemon Davis, 1984). This book follows in this expansive vein, in this case exploring and thereby extending the range of record relating to National Socialist persecution and genocide in Europe, and the US use of the atomic bomb against Japan – aspects of extreme trauma that took place between 1939 and 1945. How well do comic books published contemporary to events capture and address these particular breaches of humanity in the Second World War, and can the form act as an appropriate source? How effective is the medium when presenting historical narratives of trauma as memoir?

These questions are addressed here by engaging with relevant historiographies, memory and trauma studies, and in the process, by bringing these disparate fields together. The principal focus, following the theory and methodology set out in Comics and the World Wars, is on the use of comics in furthering and complementing historical analysis. At this juncture, it is necessary to affirm that although it deals with the sequential art form, this is a work of history with the stated intention of considering comics in terms of evidence. As such, this study is generally not concerned with their critical appreciation as art objects, or how they function as art, but rather with the determination and utility of their content to the historian, how they function as record. Although this study certainly benefits from the legitimisation of comics as a valid academic pursuit in both art history and comics studies, the methodological traditions of those disciplines, established and effective as they undoubtedly are for their fields, are not inherently appropriate for our purposes here. The way we read comics is a deliberate choice for the assessment of historical value, different by design and intention than methods for critical or artistic analysis. What may be a fresh contribution for comics studies is the call for more comprehensive incorporation of the medium in another discipline, history, and the clear provision of an approach for doing so.¹

First, the existence and validity of comics as primary historical sources needs to be established, by exploring how text and sequential image can record narratives and detail of traumatic historical events. Chapter 2 starts this process through an analysis of the American anthology comic books of the Quality Comics Group published during the Second World War, arguing that these are primary documents whose narratives both capture and reflect the contemporary events and developments with which their publication was concurrent. Most of the stories in these books consciously feature the global conflict as a constant and inevitable backdrop. The challenge is to decode, present and categorise the historical content resident in these comics, illustrating how they function as records of different aspects of National Socialist persecution and genocide during the war within the context of public awareness in the United States.

Chapter 3 and 4 both examine deliberate retrospective record of children’s experience as victims – firstly of the Holocaust in Paroles d’étoiles (‘Words of the Stars’– a ‘double entendre’ reference to the star of David, and also to stars in the sky, hence death) and subsequently of the bombing of Hiroshima at the close of the global conflict in Barefoot Gen. These provide a popular interpretative insight into the very elements of human experience that academic history does not often emphasise. Comics can fulfil that function; Rocco Versaci has previously discussed the importance and power of comic books at representing autobiographical narratives (Versaci, 2007: 26, 36), and Brandy Ball Blake applies trauma theory to the graphic novel Watchmen (Blake, 2009). Versaci examines Maus as a Holocaust memoir and compares the medium to the ‘text’ of photographs (Witek, 1989, Versaci, 2007: 81–108). Of course, Maus is not a primary source in that recollections of a survivor were interpreted and subsequently communicated by his son, using animals as a symbolic rather than a more direct attempt at the representation of reality.² Paroles d’étoiles and Barefoot Gen are different: unlike Maus they are more direct historical sources, providing a cultural record of a diverse range of personal testimonies. In the case of Barefoot Gen, the author/artist depicted the events he himself experienced. It is a memoir and so as relevant a historical source as an autobiography, or oral history. In the case of Paroles d’étoiles the act of recording was prompted collectively as a community action. The ‘Association d’enfants cachés’ (the association for hidden children) created a new framework of reference after the event within the field of popular history and testimony. With Paroles d’étoiles they appropriated a cultural form and collaboratively developed a package of publishing for a French audience (as opposed to an international one in the case of Maus, for instance (Chute, 2009: 340–362).³ Paroles d’étoiles is important for indications of the way survivors have wanted contemporary readers to receive individual memories of the Shoah, here essentially directing the processes of the creation of a new kind of document.

In some ways, the scholarly need for different types of sources for Holocaust studies has already been acknowledged:

What would be desirable would be the proliferation of such ‘experimental’, reflexive texts as Sarah Kofman’s Paroles suffoquées,⁴ texts which stress their ‘making’ as much as their complement, as well as more conventional narratives of topics which have [either] been taboo. ... Such would be narratives of women’s experiences of the Holocaust, narratives of children’s experiences, both departing from the need to describe victims in the conventional language of heroism. (Stone, 2003: 263)

Whereas Jewish victims of the Holocaust were encouraged to come forward with their stories, in contrast, Japanese survivors of the atomic bombs were typically silenced. Silencing also happened in Vichy France. Memory has in the past been suppressed on different levels. However, Keiji Nakazawa refused to be silenced, instead creating his own comic books of his memories and reflections, analysed in Chapter 4.

Holocaust and representation

In terms of any potential synergy between the academic and the popular, use of testimonial provides a space where common ground can be explored. Yet the uses and nature of testimonies relating to the Holocaust have always been an issue for this field of scholarship (Rosen, 2008: 497–518). It is within Holocaust Studies that the debate on sources, use of testimony and their forms of representation has raged most fiercely. Discourse has centred on the burden of the process of creating historical record, shouldered by witnesses who feel a moral obligation towards future generations and to those who survived (Jockusch, 2008: 135–167). In addition, Holocaust revisionism has prompted a greater focus on how testimony should be recorded: the writer must record a reality that has become an expression of the impossible (and) at the same time convince his audience that whatever distortions he employs do not negate but clarify reality and subject it to an illuminating metamorphosis (Langer, 1975: 24). There is a need for veracity, it is argued, because a flood of creative memoirs could lead to accuracy being questioned by Holocaust deniers: the lines that separate fact and fiction need to be scrupulously observed, therefore, lest the tendency to reject the Holocaust be encouraged by reducing it altogether to the realm of the fictive (Rosenfeld, 1980: 161).⁵

The relationship between history and memory is a complex one in the context of Holocaust Studies, for it attests to both amnesia and a fascination with the past, the ironies of which are best summed up by Langer in his claim that ‘Holocaust memory redeems only when it falsifies’ (Langer, 1995: 35).⁶ This in turn raises the issue of truth. The debate about truthful representation of the Holocaust first surfaced in Saul Friedlander’s edited collection on representation of the Holocaust (1992: 1–21). Friedlander argues that discussion over methods of representation, such as use of rhetoric, figuration and emplotment, can all mean we overlook empirical truth. Hayden White, who argues that the historian always has structural and narrative choices when writing, concedes in this same volume that the choices may well be more limited in the case of the Holocaust (White, 1992: 37–53). The same sort of warning seems to come from Didi-Huberman when he discusses the binary representational dilemma between historical fact and image (on the one hand), and fetish and image (on the other) (Didi-Huberman, 2012: 72). Neo-Nazis, for instance, fully exploit the latter.

Whereas Didi-Huberman develops a rigorous argument out of this very tension, White, in contrast, seems to be on shaky ground when it comes to Holocaust representations. As Martin Jay argues:

In his anxiety to avoid inclusion in the ranks of those who argue for a kind of relativistic anything goes, which might provide ammunition for revisionist sceptics about the existence of the Holocaust, he undercuts what is most powerful in his celebrated critique of naïve historical realism. (1992: 97–107)

White has long emphasised the importance within the process of historical writing played by interpretative narrative, rather than objective empiricism and/or social theorising (White, 1978), but does Holocaust Studies require a more rigid empiricism, ‘lest we ever forget’? Realist-orientated comics may be a valid form in principle for the presentation of history, but is too much imagination inappropriate to the representation of certain events? Where should creative and imaginative accounts be positioned if they are decidedly and definitively primary? The danger is that too rigid a stand on the part of Holocaust scholars, if adopted more generally within historiography, could be construed as being excessively narrow, even intellectually intolerant.

There is a case for suggesting, contrary to these reservations, that the inherent self-consciousness of the comics form, its transparent construction, provides a format in which apparent ‘distortions’ can become a ‘truthful’ representation. Metaphorical aptness, established by White as a valid kind of historical truth tied to processes of narrativity, should not be dismissed outright in the case of Holocaust Studies, especially insofar as primary sources are concerned (White in Cohen, 1989). Although the comic strip form has been well established in popular culture since the 1930s, the significance of its distinctive subjective elements is sometimes overlooked, particularly in the historical context. The form of subjectivity inherent in comics is rather different from other cultural forms, based as it is on the combination of words and images, itself touching on conceptual binaries (or relativisms) of language/art and realism/symbolism. The comics form typically communicates the inadequacies of any representational strategy, highlighting for example with its literal framing and borders the subjectivity inherent in the selection of images to depict. This could be said to recall Sontag’s assessment of the printed photograph (Sontag, 1977). This study engages with the tensions of the form as part of the argument for cultural record, but focuses principally on establishing potential historical content therein. Again, as such, the objective is not critical or artistic appreciation, but source evaluation in historical terms. Using Stone’s definition of memory as a way of making the absent present – a somewhat loose definition that could also be said to apply to the writing of history more generally – then a rigid separation of historiography from memory may not be appropriate. History may well be ‘anchored in, or productive of the collective memory’ (Stone, 2003: 132).⁷ If this is so, then aspects of history may well meet with testimony, and in the case of this study, trauma, in a borderline territory.

Borderlines, testimony and trauma

Indeed, some writers have referred to the borderlines that exist between subjectivity and objectivity, the outer and the inner world, the self and society, as well as the boundary that exists between forgetting and remembering (Radstone, 2000: 11–12). Dominick LaCapra argues that memory is distinct from history without necessarily being incompatible with it (1998: 21–23). For LaCapra, memory, despite its often fickle nature, is a crucial source for history, and history reciprocally provides a means by which memory can be critically tested and renewed, supplementing memory through authentication, interpretation and wider narrativisation. How do comics fit into such working definitions, given the fact that the examples that follow consist of artists’ visualisation and textual representation? Cathy Caruth (1996: 74) argues that there are new ways of listening to the primary witness (‘the other’, as she terms him/her) and new forms of address through which trauma can nevertheless be articulated in literary and artistic production, that could be described as specialised forms of secondary witness, but nevertheless a primary source for historians. As LaCapra observes, secon...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction
• 2  Case Study: National Socialist Persecution and Genocide in Contemporary U.S. Comic Books
• 3  Childhood Memories of the Holocaust and Vichy
• 4  Barefoot Gen and Hiroshima: Comic Strip Narratives of Trauma
• 5  Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index