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Postmemory and WWII Trauma in Nora Krug's Belonging

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Postmemory and WWII Trauma in Nora Krug's Belonging In Search of Lost Remembrances: Postmemory and WWII Trauma in Nora Krug’s Belonging and Art Spiegelman’s Maus Kirsten Mollegaard, University of Hawaii at Hilo Abstract This paper examines two graphic memoirs, Nora Krug’s Belonging: A German reckons with history and home (2018) and Art Spiegelman’s The complete Maus (1997), which both focus on World War II trauma and its effect on descendants of people who experienced the war and the Holocaust first-hand. The paper argues that memory and identity are interlinked on both individual and communal levels. Marianne Hirsch's (2001) theory of postmemory is applied to analyze how descendants of Holocaust survivors and Germans citizens cope with the after-effects of trauma and guilt. Through a comparative reading of Belonging and Maus, the paper analyzes examples of how the protagonists search for an understanding of who they are among the fragmented remembrances they uncover through family histories and archival research. It appears that memories, often traumatic, are transmitted affectively and that the experience of postmemory carries its own burden of frustration and disappointment. By situating Spiegelman and Krug’s graphic memoirs in relation to Maurice Halbwachs’ (1992) theory of collective memory, the paper concludes that the intertwined constitution of memory and identity is authentic, and that personal histories connect contemporary individuals to traumatizing historical events like World War II and the Holocaust. Keywords: trauma, memory, postmemory, Nora Krug, Art Spiegelman Foundational Concepts: War Comics, Postmemory, and Remembrance Since the 1990s, a significant number of comic-form memoirs and autobiographies have examined the long-term impacts of violent conflicts, in particular World War II, and explored war’s shattering effects on survivors and their descendants. With its intimately personal style of drawings that combine with segmented text to tell the story, the comics medium invites reader-response in affectively different ways than photography or traditional print texts do, most notably by forcing the reader to bridge the comics medium’s gutters (gaps between panels) and actively make meaning of the sequence of images in graphic narratives. As Wolfgang Iser (1974) argues in The implied reader, texts “not only draw the reader into action, but also lead him to shade in the many outlines suggested by the given situation” (p. 276), thus engaging the reader in filling in the text’s gaps and sort out its ambiguities. Author Tom Wolf (1977) seconds Iser’s position by noting that the “reading of words is but a subset of a much more general human activity which includes symbol decoding, information integration and organization” (p. 427). Such phenomenological aspects of reading graphic memoirs assign to readers an active role in the process of making the text meaningful within their own consciousness, and actively 32 immerse themselves in the author’s Weltanschauung, or worldview. This reader-response process happens via the graphic text’s artistic style and creative use of the comics medium’s expansion on the way we read literature. Ronald Schmitt (1992) contends that the comics form “represents a transitional medium that directly transforms the printed word and the framed picture, paving the way for a new type of literacy” (p. 160) and, hence, a new perspective on what literacy means because comics and graphic novels overturn common literary language patterns by inserting drawings as signifying literary text. Like handwriting, drawing style is a unique, hard-to-duplicate mode of expression. Comics artwork is always-already visually imbued with the artist’s personal style and choice of colors, scenes, and mise-en-page. At the same time, words are rendered in a greater range of visual forms than in traditional print texts by the artist’s choices of various kinds of fonts, colors, and writing styles, including handwriting, word balloons, thought bubbles, sound blasts, motion lines, and sprawling lines of text that can weave between and within panels (McCloud, 2006, p. 37). Hillary Chute (2016) observes, “through its spatial syntax, comics offers opportunities to place pressure on traditional notions of chronology, linearity, and causality” (p. 4). The comics medium is uniquely suited for the depiction of violence, trauma, and memory because of its artistic malleability and complex visual and textual layering. Peeling back those layers of narrative content engages the reader’s response affectively and produces an original reading experience that is at once highly subjective on the reader’s individual level and at the same time broadly human on the collective level. Although the mass-market, violent action-hero comics published by DC and Marvel have created the popular impression that the comics medium celebrates gratuitous, excessive brutality, it is important to point out that graphic-novel memoirs and autobiographies that deal with memories and postmemories of war and crimes against humanity are typically not focused on the pain and horrors of war and violence per se, but rather on the ensuing psychological effects of war and oppression, such as trauma, shame, guilt, anger, and confusion. Postmemory is a key term in the study of trauma and memory. It has been applied in particular to the study of Holocaust literature, which establishes a contact zone between past and present, witness and listener, testimony and memory, and individual and communal histories (Dragulescu, 2012, p. 139). According to Marianne Hirsch (2008), who coined the term “postmemory” in conjunction with an article she wrote on Art Spiegelman’s Maus and subsequently refined in her study of trauma and oral histories from Holocaust survivors and their descendants, postmemory is “a structure of inter-and trans- generational transmission of traumatic knowledge and experience. It is a consequence of traumatic recall but (unlike post-traumatic stress disorder) at a generational remove” (original emphasis Hirsch, 2008, p. 106). Postmemory, and memory in general, are constitutional elements in the understanding and maintenance of individual identity and sense of self in relation to the external world and its events. In addition, remembrance is a potent term in evaluating how memory and identity form. Remembrance can refer to the action of remembering, a memory itself, or a it can be an object that is kept or given as a reminder or in commemoration of someone (Oxford English dictionary 2002, p. 1210). Remembrance is also a keyword in the title of one of 33 the most celebrated works in the canon of Western literature, Marcel Proust’s monumental seven-volume À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of things past), written between 1913 and 1927, which is infused with observations on nostalgia for lost times, mingled with skepticism of memories’ reliability. With a playful nod to the instability of memory, Proust argues, “remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were” (quoted in Wang, 2016, n.p.). However, considering the fluidity of memory in À la recherche du temps perdu, Proust’s statement also invites us to question if there really is only one way to remember the past, and further to consider – as the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1992) speculated – that the construction of collective memory and historiography is part of external cultural and internal psychological processes that link memory and identity. The tensions and possible inconsistencies between individual and collective memories are thus at the core of postmemory and trauma studies. Questions of how identity is tied to memory and genealogy abound in long-form graphic memoirs. This paper will examine the representation of World War II trauma in two autobiographical graphic memoirs: Art Spiegelman's The complete Maus (1997) and Nora Krug's Belonging: A German reckons with history and home (2018). In the following sections I will first examine how Spiegelman and Krug respectively explore how war trauma is inherited by descendants of the people who actually experienced it, Spiegelman from the point of view of the son of Jewish concentration camp survivors, and Krug from the perspective of a granddaughter of a German soldier. Where Spiegelman's graphic narrative relies heavily on anthropomorphized animal characters and cat-mouse symbolism, Krug uses a collage method of piecing together historical clues, thus visualizing how gaps in knowledge about the painful past become existential lacunae. Both authors express confusion, shame, and frustration about their elders' silence and seek to express, via the comics medium, how trauma and memory are transmitted from one generation to the next. In the last section of the paper, I will return to the foundational concepts of postmemory, memory, and WWII trauma in conjunction with autobiographical graphic narratives, and focus on individual and collective memory. Reckoning with Personal and Collective Histories: Nora Krug German-American writer Krug asks a basic question: “how do you know who you are, if you don’t understand where you come from?” (2018, n.p.). The question is superimposed on her own rendering of Caspar David Friedrich’s famous painting Wanderer above the sea of fog (ca. 1818) (Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer), which shows a solitary male hiker on a mountain peak gazing down on the mysterious cloud- covered mountainscape stretching out before him (Fig. 1 Left). An icon of the Romantic Sturm und Drang (storm and stress) movement, this painting is often
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