B1 History Reimagined in German Comics

Abstract

Side B tracks (chapters also referred to as ‘tracks’) focus on alternative educational and artistic spaces and forms of expression. I begin with an inquiry into German comic artists engagement with German history and memory. In recent decades, a rising number of longer comics authored by Germans have provided remarkable engagement with this topic. Comics has, since Art Spiegelman’s classic Maus and so-called graphic novels, established comics as an art form that, in its own ways, engages with history and autobiography and as an art form that uniquely probes intertwined forms of image and text. This chapter will focus on a couple of German albums working through and transforming youth memories and East–West relations in the late 1980s. The chosen authors here are Flix and Mawil. Their work introduces imaginary German memory and ways of depicting the crossing of reformative years for Germany as well as their own childhood and adult transition.