Historiographics: Framing the Past in Comics - June 15-17, 2023

A review of the international conference held in Munich

 Expertly organized by Dr. Charlotte Lerg (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität) and Dr. Johannes Schmidt (University of Flensburg), and held at the Amerika Haus in Munich, the Historiographics conference attracted scholars from a number of European countries (Italy, France, Czech Republic, Poland, Romania), as might be expected, but also researchers from places as far away as Australia and India, and even, of course, from the United States. As an American academic, it was humbling for me to meet specialists in American studies from Germany, Romania, and Poland, among other places. The mix of historians, Germanists, Americanists, and comparatists sparked lively exchanges over our thoughtfully curated and ecologically friendly lunches (using all glass containers! Why can’t we Americans do that, too?). Given that there were three simultaneous streams of panels, it’s not feasible to cover them all, but I’ll give some highlights from Hillary Chute’s keynote “Comics at the End of the World,” the tour of the National Socialist Documentation Center, and the history in comics workshop that followed.

Comics at the End of the World

Hillary Chute (Northeastern University) opened by citing Art Spiegelman (quoting English writer Robert Harris): “History is far too important to leave to the historians.” The times require other methods of reaching audiences given that “there is an appetite for visual storytelling worldwide” on the one hand, and yet we are overwhelmed by increasing polarization and misinformation, on the other. Last year in the US, Art Spiegelman’s Maus was banned by a Tennessee school board, catalyzing another debate about censorship, fiction vs. nonfiction, and confirming that comics continue to be a relevant medium for posing questions about truth and justice. “This is disturbing imagery,” he commented in an interview, “But you know what? It’s disturbing history.” In a timely coincidence, last fall Chute published Maus Now, which examines the now canonical texts from a variety of disciplines and national perspectives. But the subject of her talk was not Maus as such. She asked how comics might productively intervene in this bewildering contemporary moment, and developed three thematic strands that speak to our current “state of emergency” in 2023:

--The struggle for Black rights

--The COVID pandemic

--The war in Ukraine

From the title, historiographics (coined by Kate Polak, who was also in attendance), Chute excavated how—“graph”—from the Greek, which means to “draw” but also to “scratch”—associates the act of writing with carving a wound in the body. Increasingly in comics studies, there is an interest in the “embodied” quality of the line, as flowing from the subjective viewpoint of the cartoonist (see also Comics and the Body by Ezster Szep). Then there is “historiography,” which emphasizes how history is constructed, and from whose perspective.

Some prominent American historians—Paul Buhl, Ibram X. Kendi, Timothy Synder, Howard Zinn, and Rebecca Hall—have, in recent years, had their work adapted to comics form to bring their work to a larger audience. Chute lingered on the example of Rebecca Hall’s Wake: The Hidden History of Women Slave Revolts, noting how she brings archival evidence into the narrative (notably by including slave ship diagrams) to lend authenticity and credibility to the stories of women who otherwise would be absent from the historical record. Where the historical record ends, Hall employs Saidiya Hartman’s concept of “critical fabulation,” and imagines what their stories might have been. Transitioning to images from the war in Ukraine, many of which are now disseminated over Instagram, Chute discussed the work by Yulia Vus (who was also published in the Washington Post). Chute ended with a preview of the cover of Nora Krug’s latest project: a book of stories on Ukraine to be published this fall titled Diaries of War. By slowing us down, by making us attentive to the embodied nature of the drawn lines, comics help us “learn to see, as well as see to learn.”

And we did see and learn at The National Socialist Documentation Center (NS-Dokumentationszentrum). Our guide, Nathalie Jacobsen, explained that it is not a “museum” (to discourage idolatry of objects), but a documentation center.  The tour was detailed, comprehensive, interactive, and devastating—at least it was for me. Jacobsen started by stating that “It didn’t have to be like this.” Our little group was huddled in front of a 6ft high reproduction of a black and white photo of German soldiers. Dead bodies—some covered by tarps, some partially exposed—were strewn around a large pit; I couldn’t help thinking of the cover of Chute’s Disaster Drawn, which shows blindfolded prisoners in Srebrenica getting shot and dropping into a mass grave (a page from Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Goražde). Slowly, methodically, Jacobsen built up the argument of how the Germans had been injured and humiliated by WWI, and how Hitler effectively manipulated this sense of injury and discontent to his advantage through the use of stagecraft, radio, cinema, and carefully orchestrated imagery. She described Hitler’s failed putsch of 1923 (in my traumatized American bubble, I thought about Jan 6, 2021 and the attack on the US capital). In 1933, Germans began to call Hitler “der Führer.” The National Socialist party began winning larger majorities, and Hitler was appointed Chancellor. “Democracy is fragile,” Jacobsen warned. We diligently took notes.

The following day, under the direction of Sheree Domingo, we worked on various exercises from Lynda Barry to warm up. Everyone got to draw themselves as Batman (always a plus). Through free-writes, image inventories, and playful copies, we assembled elements of our mini-historiographies. Gradually images and ideas from the prior day appeared in image-text pairings and ideas began to coalesce on the white boards as we taped up our examples. We wrote scripts, made grids, and worked on page layouts. I ran out of time. As a Comparative Literature person, I got bogged down in swathes of text and nuance; the graphic designers did much better. We pledged to finish our pages. The last hour of the workshop was weirdly interrupted by the pounding sounds of the rock band Kiss, who were performing only a few blocks over. Hearing the rhythmic chanting was uncomfortably surreal as we struggled to process our hours studying the rise of National Socialism. When I got home, I looked up Gene Simmons, the bass guitarist and tongue-wielding central figure of the group—he was born in Israel, and his mother was a Holocaust survivor.