Demystifying Hitler and the Nazi Regime in German Comics

Vergangenheitbewältigung/coming to terms with the past: Demystifying Hitler and the Nazi regime in German comics

L. Kurnia Faculty of Humanities, Universitas Indonesia, Depok, Indonesia

ABSTRACT: Hitler has been a controversial figure in German history. Although he was regarded as a war criminal, his figure has attracted the attention of some people. This was mainly triggered by the various myths surrounding him and his mysterious death. These myths have led to a fraud publication in the magazine “Stern” about Hitler’s diaries. A myth about Hitler can even be found in Indonesia in a book by Soeryo Goeritno (2010), which fabricated a story claiming that Hitler died in Indonesia (sic!). The young generation in Germany has a unique way of coming to terms with the past by demystifying Hitler in comic books such as Wolfgang Moers’ Adolf der Bonker and Äch, bin wieder da! These two comic books use humor to show how Hitler would be perceived by the youth if he were still alive today. The theme of the Holocaust as a collective memory is represented in Maus, a survivor tale, by Art Spiegelman. Maus has been accepted as the first comic book to be considered “serious” and to be analyzed in the academic world. Demystifying Hitler is a process of coming to terms with the past.

1 INTRODUCTION

1.1 Hitler and the Nazis As a leading figure in German history, Adolf Hitler has always been a controversial figure. This controversy has been triggered in academic circles by a large number of analyses and stories about Hitler that have naturally led to different opinions and interpretations. Not much is known about the private life of Hitler outside his image of grandeur that was created and high- lighted when he was in the spotlight. To add to the numerous stories already circulating among the general public, historians came up with various analyses of Hitler, especially regarding his role in all sorts of economic, political, and military decisions, as well as the planned genocide of the Jews.1 The analyses of Adolf Hitler who was strongly linked to the atrocities of the Nazi regime against the Jews and the resulting war, which took place during his reign, have led to various studies on Hitler. One of the researchers of Hitler-oriented topics is Peter Matussek, a professor in the field of media. He published a book Affirming Psychosis, the Mass Appeal of Adolf Hitler in 20152, which discusses how Hitler was described or narrated in German history. According to Matussek, the writing or narration of history can be categorized into two types of arguments: the intentionalist and the functionalist. Intentionalist arguments tend to

1. The Genocide of the Jews is referred to as the Holocaust in the German literature. Holocaust is a Greek word, whereas in Hebrew it is termed Shoah. Holocaust means “burnt down” in Greek, whereas Shoah means “disaster”. These two words describe the systematic and well-planned annihilation of the Jews during the Nazi regime. The Nazi regime called it die Endlösung der Judenfrage (the final solution to the Jewish problem). 2. In the conclusion to his book, Matussek put forward four elements that he believes to constitute the most distinguishing personal characteristics of Hitler, namely his ongoing willingness to commit atrocities, his ability to admit the crimes that he had committed, his ability to control his actions, and the confirmation that he received from his supporters. These are the symptoms of a mentally disturbed person, and they were very prominent in Hitler.

167 support the view that all of the atrocities against the Jews and the subsequent wars that took so many lives were designed by Hitler, the Führer. On the contrary, functionalist arguments view the atrocities against the Jews as a result of various elements of the bureaucracy, namely the military, economy, and politics, where Hitler played a more passive role. At the core of the discussion proposed by Matussek is an attempt to reveal who Hitler really was and how a man like him could control a developed country with a long tradi- tion of high education. Matussek tended to classify his research as intentionalist in nature and considered Hitler as a psychopath who was extremely bold in expressing hatred and cruelty, something that does not usually occur in a society or among sane people. This was used by those who really wanted to get rid of the Jews and create the superiority of the white blue-eyed men over any other race in the world. Thus, Hitler was supported by people who matched his personality, and he became der Führer or the Leader for them. Hitler and his party NSDAP (National-Sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or abbreviated Nazi) then managed to provoke the German people who were hit hard by World War I, and he was made the Chancellor of Germany.

1.2 Myths around Hitler Various myths have arisen from Hitler’s figure because he was revered and praised by racists who believed in the superiority of the Aryan race.3 Thus, he became a great figure who was always surrounded by an aura of mystery. The mystery was also largely due to the fact that Hitler’s body went missing after Berlin was seized by the Allied Forces. Hitler was hiding in a bunker or a basement with Eva Braun whom he married shortly before they committed sui- cide. When the Allied Forces entered Berlin, the city had already been occupied by the Soviet Army. That is why the whereabouts of Hitler’s body remains unknown. An official statement from the Soviet Army asserted that the bodies that had been found in the bunker were burned. This incident, for instance, led to a myth in a book which argues that Hitler had fled to Indo- nesia and lived in Sumbawa Besar as a doctor known as Dr Poch who then married a Sunda- nese woman.4 This myth of Hitler’s death in Indonesia is so far-fetched that it makes no sense at all because the documents concerning the entrance of the Soviet troops and the discovery of the bodies of Hitler, Eva Braun, and Joseph Goebbels and his family are completely valid and accompanied by photographs. The myths of Hitler in Germany are even more sophisticated because they are not concerned about the whereabouts of Hitler himself but his diary. A diary is a document that is often used in historical analyses to determine the thoughts of a historical figure (see the figure below). Therefore, when Stern magazine in 1983 admitted to having purchased volumes of the diary from an antique dealer, it triggered an uproar. Stern was the victim of a mere fraud because it turned out that the diaries were forged.5 The majority of the German people are more inclined to regard Hitler only as a war criminal and want to maintain this image. When the German state was established after World War II, neither the state nor the German people wanted to acknowledge their dark past. They tried very hard to forget it and not to talk about it. Such a situation arose from the realization that they had committed countless of atrocities resulting in the genocide of the Jews and other

3. The supremacy of the Aryan race was the state’s ideology during the Nazi regime. This view was also based on racial myths that had been created by racist-pseudo-scientists for the Germans. The word Arya is derived from Sanskrit, and its meaning is not yet known. The word was used by Persians and Indians to depict themselves. Linguists assume that the word was taken from the language that was used by the Persian ethnic group in prehistoric times. 4. This scenario can be found in the book Hitler died in Indonesia, The Secret Revealed written by Ir. KGPH Soeryo Guritno, M.Sc. and published by Titik Media in 2010. 5. At that time, Stern was one of the qualified political magazines. However, after the fraud was uncovered, the magazine lost its reputation, even though the editors responsible for the incident had been dismissed. Fraud such as this is actually very easy to prove, but the editors of Stern were under a strong influence of Hitler myths. It also turned out that people purchased the diary volumes at a very high price without examining them carefully.

168 races that were considered to be inferior to them, such as the gypsies and other such com- munities. Moreover, the generation immediately after the war was the same as Hitler’s, and most of them were actually his supporters. This attitude is observable among both political and social conservative leaders. In the field of education, for example, German professors who survived the war were those who had sided with Hitler and after the war still behaved in the same manner. They were very conservative and rigid in their teaching practices. This was not to the satisfaction of the younger generations born after World War II. They understood well that their dark past had to be addressed so that they could overcome it together.6 The younger generations in the 1960s wanted reconciliation with their nation’s past. They started by revealing facts about the Nazi regime and how almost all of the German people had supported the regime. Efforts to deal with the past can also be observed in a variety of literary works, which may now have become classics, such as the works of Heinrich Böll, Wolfgang Borchert, the Nobel laureate Gunter Grass, Ingeborg Bachmann, and others. Although there are still groups of people from the younger generations of today who still revere Hitler and the Nazis, such as the Nazi and the Pegida party,7 there are also young people who do not want to be associated with this regime and who feel that it would be a heavy burden if Hitler or the Nazis remain part of the dark history of Germany. One of the many ways to channel this new attitude toward the past is by using various media in popular culture.8 One of such media is comics, where Hitler is portrayed through caricatures and cynicism. Comics are used as an instrument to ridicule and expose Hitler as a frivolous figure who is even ridiculed and considered ludicrous due to his posture and funny moustache. In this case, the comic functions as a platform for a history written by the younger generation from their perspective.

6. Vergangenheitbewältigung or “overcoming the past” is an endless theme in literature and particularly on today’s silver screen and movies. One example is das Weisse Band directed by Michael Haneke and won the Golden Palm in 2009. This movie tells about how a strict education that was grounded in reli- gious discipline in a village in Germany during the transition era from the Prussian Empire benefited the Nazi regime. This education robbed the children of a childhood full of creativity and innovation and turned them into people drenched in social trauma. 7. Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West (Pegida: Patriotische Europäergegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes) was founded in 2014 by Lutz Bachman, who was considered by his followers to be the reincarnation of Hitler. His party aimed to curb the immigration law and prohibit Islamic extremism and Islamization. They consider that it is very difficult for Muslims to be integrated into the German culture. They are very hostile toward foreigners, especially those who they consider as Muslims. The city of Dresden, where Pegida has its headquarters, is very anti-immigrant. 8. “Capitalist industrial societies are societies divided unequally in terms of, for example, race, ethnicity, gender, generation, sexuality, and social class. Popular culture is one of the principal sites where these divisions are established and contested, that is, popular culture is an arena of struggle and negotiation between the interests of dominant groups and the interests of subordinate groups” (Storey, 2007:51).

169 1.3 Art Spiegelman’s and Walter Moers’ comics A comic book entitled Maus (rat) written by Art Spiegelman was published in the United States in 1992. This book is a collection of the author’s strip-comics published in a magazine in New York. Comic books do not usually stir up the academic world because they tend not to be considered seriously by the academia; however, Spiegelman’s comics have attracted the attention of researchers because of two reasons. First, the pictures are unique in that they are able to function as a vivid allegory of the Nazi history and its atrocities. Second, the comics are able to bring those issues in a unique and interesting way. The narratives of those comics are also considered very different from comics in general. Common comics are usually entertaining because they are funny and make the readers laugh. In addition, the narratives of common comics tend to be flat and have a predictable plot. Maus is different. One study men- tioned that the narrative of Maus is woven from the time before, during, and after the Holo- caust, so all of the events are intertwined in one single work. The pictures of this comic are juxtaposed in one panel, enabling readers to see various angles of history from the perspec- tives of the protagonists against a single backdrop, which depicts the Nazi-occupied Poland and Rego Park in New York.9 Such imagination is created because Spiegelman actually tells the experience of his own father, while he was a prisoner in a concentration camp during the Nazi regime. The stories of his father continued to haunt Spiegelman all the time, so he poured them out in the form of the comic Maus. One interesting highlight of the comic is the way the present time—that is, the time when Spiegelman wrote the comic and interviewed his father in New York—is intertwined with the past during his father’s imprisonment in a concentration camp. Below is a picture of Book 2 of Maus, which shows an allegory of the concentration camp prisoners who are depicted as rats. In the middle of the swastika, there is a cat with characteristics typical of Hitler: the bangs on his forehead and the legendary moustache.

In addition, Spiegelman’s comics attracted the attention of the academia who considered them to be quality comics. Thus, various studies of the comics began to proliferate in the academic world because they are not seen as trivial comics but as literary works and a form of

9. The reader moves through several different “historical subject-positions” and narrated events; there are the preholocaust, the Holocaust, and the postholocaust events. However, within one time frame, one can also find other times and places coexisting as well. Maus thus juxtaposes and intertwines past and present, the different histories of each protagonist, and the very different cultural contexts of Nazi- occupied Poland and Rego Park, New York. Spiegelman’s Maus: The Intentional Subversion of Genre and Cultural Norm, http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/holocaust/spiegelman.html.

170 serious art using pictorial metaphors such as those seen on the cover image of the book.10 The Holocaust is a serious part of German history, which has been immortalized in the work of Spiegelman through the narratives of his father who was one of its victims. However, with his ability to use the metaphor of rats to represent the prisoners and the metaphors of cats and dogs to represent the Nazis, he managed to narrate the gloomy history of Germany very well. Spiegelman’s comics have proved that the themes previously avoided or considered taboo can be discussed thoroughly in comics. It is possible that this triggered Walter Moers to create comics about Hitler in Germany. In this case, the German people tend to consider it taboo to trivialize11 the dark history of Germany, let alone make fun of it, so some people consider the work of Moers as a failing attempt to create a Holocaust-themed comic. However, Moers was not deterred and continued to put together a collection of comic strips about Hitler, which was published in a German comic magazine. There are two works about Hitler by Moers: (1) Ächbinwieder da (Hey, I’m back) in two series, both of which were published in 1988, and (2) Adolf der Bonker (Adolf the Bunker), published 7 years later. From the titles, it can be assumed that the contents of Moers’ comics are highly cynical toward Hitler, while parody is being used as an instrument of humor at the same time. On the cover image of Ächbinwieder da (see the image below), it can be seen that the historical fact that Hitler hid in an underground bunker must have been the inspiration for Moers’ parody. After hiding underground for 50 years, Hitler finally resurfaces, and very funny and absurd things begin to occur.

Parody can be a very effective weapon, especially when a controversial historical figure with myths attached, such as Hitler, is turned into a funny or even ridiculous character in a comic.12 Like Spiegelman, Moers’ main character displays the typical characteristics of Hitler, namely his bangs and moustache, but to that he added an extremely big nose. In the world of comics, the super big nose brings about humor and silliness of the character to provoke the readers’ laughter. In the second book, the parody is increasingly sharpened by Moers, who was inspired by the movie Der Untergang or Downfall (2006) on the history of Hitler. He created a parody with a different narrative from that, which he used in his first two series. The book is structured like a drama made up of Hitler’s dialogues with the people around him. It was this feature of the third comic that encouraged Felix Gönnert to adapt the comic into a comedy movie.

10. The key to Spiegelman’s success in avoiding charges of trivialization may possibly lie in his artistic choice to treat the Holocaust through metaphor. Timothy Sexton, http://voices.yahoo.com/the-holocaust-as-comic-book-metaphor-maus-ii-and-174164.html?cat=37. 11. An dem Buch scheiden sich die Geister: witzige Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit oder flache Verharmlosung Hitlers? (The content of this book displays two important characteristics: a humoristic manipulation of the past and a recreation of Hitler into a harmless and flat character?) http://archiv. rhein-zeitung.de/on/98/07/24/topnews/moers.html. 12. Doch die ultimative Schrumpfkur für einen Mythos ist es, ihn ins Lächerliche zu ziehen.(The ultimate way to heal a myth is by making it ludicrous.) Wiebke Brauer. http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/gesellschaft/ moers-parodie-schrumpfkur-fuer-hitler-a-424980.html.

171 2 CONCLUSION

Germans have a partly dark and shameful history when the Nazi regime was in power under the leadership of Hitler, a man who turned out to have a mental disorder. This topic has often been talked about and discussed, but more important than this fact is how Hitler has become a myth that gave rise to a large number of texts or discourses both in and outside Germany, and even in Indonesia. The strong influence of the Nazi regime’s racist ideology had spread to various countries, including Indonesia. When the Nazis won the election in 1933, a right- wing party, Nederlandsche Indische Fascisten Organisatie (NIFO), was also established in the Dutch East Indies. A group of people in Java Island was also influenced by fascism and later founded the Fascist Party of Indonesia (PFI) under the leadership of Dr Notonindito in Bandung. In fact, this was a Javanese chauvinist party that it did not last long. After World War II, many younger generations in Germany have been trying very hard to address this situation in an effort to demystify Hitler. Throughout the history, they have the burden of reconciling with their dark past, and those collective memories are still haunting them, which are shown in their art and literature. Fortunately, with the medium of popular culture in hand, the younger generation can use it to reconcile with their nation’s past. This task was undertaken by several comic writers such as Art Spiegelman and Walter Moers. Together they have shown that history is part of the present and should be continuously discussed so that the postwar generations, who did not personally experience the war, may understand their country’s past in a much better way. Moreover, history must not be considered as a frightening taboo, something that must not be discussed seriously even in comic books, which are generally treated as a fun and entertaining reading material. The use of metaphors to describe the characters in Spiegelman’s comics allows the readers to capture the seriousness of his comics and even the bitterness experienced by Jewish prisoners in concentration camps. The parody of Hitler is used by Moers not only to produce laughter but also to bring enlightenment13, especially when he unhesitatingly destroyed the myths surrounding the legendary figure. Comics have therefore become a serious reading material and not merely a means of eliciting laughter. Our analysis of several samples of pictorial metaphors in Moers’ and Spiegelman’s comic books clearly shows that both comic writers have been successful in their effort to demystify Hitler through their creative works.

REFERENCES

Brauer, W. Moers-Parodie, Schrumpfkur für Hitler. http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/gesellschaft/moers- parodie-schrumpfkur-fuer-hitler-a-424980.html. Matussek, P. (2007) Affirming Psychosis. The Mass Appeal of Adolf Hitler. Peter Lang. Moers, W. (2005) Äch bin wieder da!. Piper. Moers, W. (2005) Adolf der Bonker. Piper. Prietze, N. An dem Buch scheiden sich die Geister: witzige Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit oder flache Ver harmlosung Hitlers? http://archiv.rhein-zeitung.de/on/98/07/24/topnews/moers.html. Sexton, T. The Holocaust as a Comic Book Metaphor: Maus II and Art Spiegelman, 30th January 2007. http://voices.yahoo.com/the-holocaust-as-comic-book-metaphor-maus-ii-and−174164. html?cat = 37. Spiegelmann, A. (1999) Maus. Die Geschichte eines Überlebenden. Rowohlt Taschenbuchvlg. Spiegelman’sMaus: The Intentional Subversion of Genre and Cultural Norm http://www2.iath.virginia. edu/holocaust/spiegelman.html. Storey, J. (2007) Inventing Popular Culture. From Folklore to Globalization. Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

13. Dieses Lächerlichmachen hat auch etwas Aufklärerisches”, glaubt er. “Wir waren uns klar, daß das Produkt gut und richtig ist.” Moers zerschlage Symbole und Ikonen “auf eine sehr bösartige Weise”. (This humor is at the same time an enlightenment, he thought. We have no doubt that this product is good and right. Moers has destroyed all symbols and icons.) Nicola Prietze, http://archiv.rhein-zeitung. de/on/98/07/24/topnews/moers.html.

172