Paula Friedericke Hartmann

The Representation of Historical Crimes in the Graphic Novel. A Comparative Study of Perpetrator and Victim Narratives of the “Third Generation”

The National Socialist genocide of Jews before and during the Second World War occupies a special place in history. The Holocaust is a rupture of civilization that fundamentally changed history. While the culture of remembrance in Western Europe has been concerned with the Holocaust for decades, in the Baltic and Soviet regions the focus is primarily on the crimes of the Gulag.

Today we meet one crucial challenge: The contemporary witnesses belong to the last generation who can still report from their own memories. The window of opportunity for witness documentation is beginning to close. In addition to the remaining eyewitnesses, it is now the children and grandchildren of the victims or perpetrators of the historical event who tell about the crimes. According to Marianne Hirsch, these are the generations of postmemory: descendants of a generation that experienced the Second World War. It is the responsibility of these generations and today’s society to shed light on, record and deal with the crimes, because they must not be forgotten, weakened, or even doubted even if the contemporary witnesses is starting to disappear. This important work of remembering and processing is often carried out through literature. We currently live in a time in which multimodal texts have become an increasingly important part of the literary canon. Texts that compose visual and textual elements give us new opportunities to tell and reflect on different levels.

In my dissertation I will investigate graphic novels, written by the third generation in postmemory. The planned comparative project aims to answer the following questions: (1) How are the Holocaust and the Gulag staged through narrative voices today? (2) What possibilities does the genre graphic novel offer regarding historical authenticity? (3) How do the authors and narrators of the “third generation” represent the historical actors in the graphic novel genre and to what extent are they understood as victims or perpetrators?

• “Geschichte und Kultur in ‘grafischer Literatur’” [History and culture in ‘graphic literature’], Network Day for foreign language teachers in Trøndelag, NTNU Trondheim, November 29, 2023.