Nijdam's paper parses graphic narratives that examine the fraught history and often traumatic experience of living in the German Democratic Republic. Nijdam examines how contemporary German-language graphic narratives thematize the oppressive politics and strict censorship in the former East Germany and how they portray its citizens’ attempts to flee. In particular, Nijdam focuses on Simon Schwartz’s drüben!. Drawing on her book project on the topic, Nijdam highlights the comics medium’s ability to impart historical experience and thereby advocate for the position of German graphic narrative in larger discourses of East German memory culture.

Preuss analyzes the graphic novels Huck Finn (2013), Antoinette kehrt zurück (Antoinette Returns, 2014), and EndZeit (EverAfter, 2018) by Olivia Vieweg who grew up in East Germany in the years immediately following the Cold War. Preuss argues that the FRG’s memory politics suppressed East Germans’ ability to come to their own terms with their past. The stress that political and socio-economic changes put on relationships tore the social fabric. The stratification of society along with the treatment of East Germans as second-class citizens even in their own homeland stood in stark contrast to the egalitarian conviviality, which Vieweg cherished in her childhood home of Jena-Neulobeda, a vestige of the GDR’s socialist vision turned, in its prefab developments, concrete. Silence and the vanishing of housing bloc after housing bloc, playground after playground, compounded the trauma. Vieweg’s novels explicitly stage a return of the repressed. She sets her stories in the East German province. Drawing on Michelle Balaev's insight that “[t]he primacy of place in the representation of trauma anchors the individual experience within a larger cultural context, and, in fact, organizes the memory and meaning of trauma,” Preuss argues that Vieweg uses place to question and challenge the organization that causes the trauma in the first place. Finally, Vieweg's adaptation of a specifically Eastern aesthetic also shapes her narrative through her focus on the quotidian, her palimpsest of references, her implicit rendering rather than graphic foregrounding of violence, and her sense of aperture that leaves conflicts unresolved. Hence, Vieweg’s return to the local within a globalized narrative not only exposes as such the colonial trauma on which globalization depends, but also allows the audience to overcome the colonial trauma and insert itself into the narrative.

Wolff's paper asks how graphic narratives relate to a visual archive of trauma. Many German graphic artists inscribe specific “Holocaust icons” (Oren Stier) in their works, while drawing from broader visual archives of trauma. Examining how such icons of trauma function in relation to the text, reveals a form of “image exploitation” that risks epistemological complacency on the side of the reader. My interrogation of this iconic imagery is not aimed at discounting these graphic narratives, but rather seeks to challenge what we as readers ‘know’ (or presume to know) of experiences of trauma when confronted with such imagery. My analysis then redirects our attention to the illegible and the abstract in these works, for this is potentially how graphic narratives can most productively address the representation of trauma. Abstract images are furthermore the site where trauma intersects with gender and race in these works. My approach is inspired in part by Johanna Drucker’s observation that graphic narratives present a “scene of engagement” as opposed to a mere story to be read, and it is further informed by Horst Bredekamp’s fundamental notion of “image acts” that asserts the power of images to “construct” and “bring forth” rather than merely illustrate. The broader context of my presentation is a book project that explores how graphic narratives do more than represent reality or invent imaginary situations: they have the power to create an aesthetic experience in which the reader moves between empathy and critical distance.