Conference Program

“History dissolves into images, not into stories,” Walter Benjamin (1983, 596) writes in the Passagen-Werk — a formulation that helps explain why our remembrance of the Holocaust is so powerfully visual. These visual representations appear as photographs, films and, increasingly, as comics. Long viewed with skepticism as an inadequate mode for representing the Holocaust, the comic today nonetheless offers distinctive affordances and poses characteristic risks (Grünewald 2014; Frenzel, 2014; Merten 2021).

This contribution explores the possibilities and pitfalls of depicting the Holocaust through comics, arguing that they can encourage critical reflection rather than documentary literalism. Their multimodal grammar — sequential panels, juxtaposed image and text, deliberate omission — can generate concrete yet pluralistic images that resist the abstraction of universal remembrance while simultaneously pointing to their constructed nature. (Frahm 2006). This duality enables comics to bring to light the perspectives of marginalized victims, to interrupt perpetrator-centered gazes that prevails in historic photography with few exceptions (e.g. Didi-Huberman 2012), to juxtapose past and present, and to invite readerly reflection through deliberate artifice. At the same time, comics carry specific hazards: they can simplify causalities, aestheticize suffering, instrumentalize survivor testimony for broader moralizing narratives, or reproduce voyeuristic framings that occlude complexity (Köppen/Scherpe 1997). They have the potential to reproduce harmful visual tropes that resonate with antisemitic and dehumanizing iconography, and the creation of retrospective narratives that impose spurious causal coherence onto acts whose brutality and irrationality resist explanation (McLaughlin 2021; Brink 1998).

The considerations are based on debates about photography that have shaped our view of the Holocaust and are conducted mainly from the perspective of the perpetrators or liberators, trapping the people who suffered during the Holocaust in the position of victims, e.g. in photo collections such as The Yellow Star (Schoenberner 1978) and on pictures drawn by prisoners, which reflect the perspective of the survivors but are mostly neglected in the debate because they are accused of lacking objectivity. The contribution develops four analytical categories – (1) perspective, (2) authenticity, (3) ‘the unthinkable’ and (4) narrative – and applies them to four selected works: MAUS, Yossel, Auschwitz and Der Boxer (Spiegelman 1986/1991; Kubert 2003; Croci 2005; Kleist 2012). The contribution examines how comics can shed light on (historical) epistemic injustice and on the role of Holocaust victims as witnesses, which is central for epistemic agency (Fricker 2007): What perspectives do comics enable or interrupt, how do they signal constructedness as opposed to documentary claims, and how can they bring neglected victim groups to the fore? The contribution concludes with concise, practice-oriented implications for historical-political education: selection criteria, contextualization imperatives and ethical guardrails to leverage comics’ pedagogical strengths while minimizing aestheticization and instrumentalization.