German Graphic Narratives and Trauma

Erscheinungsjahr 2025
ISBN: 978-1-64014-202-2
Verlag: Boydell & Brewer

Buch, Englisch, Band 252, 230 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 476 g

Reihe: Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture

This volume explores the representation of political, racial, sexual, and environmental trauma in German-language graphic narratives, which has thus far received little scholarly attention.

In recent decades, as graphic novels have exploded in popularity and have increasingly been engaged with by scholarship, there has been a marked increase in comics that deal with traumatic experiences. These experiences arise variously from warfare, genocide, terrorism, racism, sexual violence, domestic violence, illness, disability, migration, natural disasters, or climate-change, among other causes. Indeed, scholars including Hillary Chute and Gillian Whitlock have argued that graphic narratives are particularly well-suited to portraying traumatic experiences through the lens of individual memories.

This edited volume builds on the emergent body of work on the representation of trauma in graphic narratives, but focuses exclusively on German-language graphic narratives, whose exploration of trauma has so far received little scholarly attention. Essays dealing with theoretical and conceptual concerns are joined by analyses of individual creators of graphic narratives, including Olivia Vieweg and Volker Reiche. In addition, there are transcribed conversations among the contributors to the graphic story compilation But I Live, Miriam Libicki, Gilad Seliktar, and Barbara Yelin, and between Birgit Weyhe, creator of the graphic narratives Madgermanes and Rude Girl, and the Germanist Priscilla Layne, who is the model for the main character in the latter book. A final essay looks back further with a critical appraisal of the poet Rolf-Dieter Brinkmann's sampling of comics in his late 1960s Popliteratur works.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Krimmer, Elisabeth

Burdock, Maureen

Weitere Mitwirkende

Bademsoy, Aylin

Benjamin, John D

Herges, Katja

Kraenzle, Christina

Nijdam, Elizabeth “Biz”

Preuss, Evelyn

Rauchenbacher, Marina

Schallie, Charlotte

Sullivan, Heather I.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Gattungen
• Sozialwissenschaften Psychologie Psychotherapie / Klinische Psychologie Psychopathologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Deutsche Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: Graphic Narratives and Trauma
Elisabeth Krimmer

Part I: Traversing Spaces and Species
1. Landscapes of Trauma: Relational Aesthetics and Politics in Contemporary Transnational German Comics - Katja Herges
2. Going Home: East German Trauma in Olivia Vieweg's Graphic Novels - Evelyn Preuss
3. Olivia Vieweg's Endzeit: The Trauma of Climate Change, Disease, and Plants Run Amok - Heather I. Sullivan

Part II: Rethinking Race
4. Born into Trauma? The Interplay of Biologism and Social Paradigms in Trauma Theory and Graphic Novels - Aylin Bademsoy
5. Birgit Weyhe's Rude Girl (2022): Comics, Blackness, and Transnational Dialogue: A Conversation with Priscilla Layne, Birgit Weyhe, and Elizabeth "Biz" Nijdam - Elizabeth "Biz" Nijdam

Part III: Countering Violence
6. On the Making of But I Live: A Conversation between Miriam Libicki, Gilad Seliktar, and Barbara Yelin - Charlotte Schallie
7. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Perpetrators, Postmemory, and Implicated Subjects in Volker Reiche's Kiesgrubennacht - Christina Kraenzle
8. Comics on Display: Conceptual Remarks on Gewalt erzählen: Eine Comic-Ausstellung / Narrating Violence: A Comic Exhibition (Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna) - Marina Rauchenbacher
9. Normative Counterculture: Representational Injustice in Rolf Dieter Brinkmann's Sampling of Comics - John D. Benjamin

Notes on Contributors
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Krimmer, Elisabeth
ELISABETH KRIMMER is Professor of German at the University of California, Davis.

Herges, Katja
KATJA HERGES is a physician and holds a PhD in German from the University of California, Davis.

Bademsoy, Aylin
Aylin Bademsoy is a PhD candidate in the German Department at UC Davis.

Preuss, Evelyn
Evelyn Preuss is finishing her dissertation on East German cinema at Yale University. In addition, she is pursuing a project on neoliberalism and globalization(s) that examines the political effects of globalized media and culture and asks to what extent art can provide alternative, inclusive
platforms for building political and social consensus. Currently, she is coediting a volume, Through the Wall(s), examining the GDR's transnationalism in relation to informal networking and Eigensinn. She has published on East German Cinema, the intersection of media, architecture and politics, as well as on the disparity between Eastern and Western perspectives in a number of journals and anthologies.

Burdock, Maureen
MAUREEN BURDOCK is a graphic storyteller, writer, and illustrator with dual master's degrees from the California School of the Arts and a PhD in Cultural Studies from the University of California, Davis.