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Approaching History as Cultural Memory Through Humour, Satire, Comics and Graphic Novels

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RoyDouglas, Between the Wars 1919–1939: The Cartoonists’ Vision (London: Routledge, 1992, reprinted in paperback2013), 368 pp. (pb), $48.95, ISBN 978-0-415-86757-3.

RoyDouglas, Great Nations Still Enchained: The Cartoonists’ Vision of Empire 1848–1914 (London: Routledge, 1993; reprinted in paperback2013), 232 pp. (pb), $48.95, ISBN 978-0-415-86215-8.

F. K. M.Hillenbrand, Underground Humour in Nazi Germany, 1933–1945 (London: Routledge, 1994; reprinted in paperback2014), 297 pp. (pb), $54.95, ISBN 978-1-13-800672-0.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 September 2016

JILL E. TWARK*
Affiliation:
Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, East Carolina University, 3316 Bate Building, Mailstop 556, Greenville, NC 27858, USA; twarkj@ecu.edu

Extract

Recent empirical research into humour and memory attests to the fact that people remember better when they perceive a word, phrase or image to be humorous. When the proximity of multiple ethnic groups engenders jokes displaying diverse perspectives and what Henri Bergson described as ‘corrective’ satire, such jokes can help remedy racism and fear of the other. Taking a humorous or satirical stance allows artists and writers to explore alternatives to contemporary reality and to uncover truths overlooked or consciously elided by government and mass media discourse. Such is the case with the recent publications on humour discussed here. Although they vary widely by topic and time period, all focus on how power struggles, oppression and violence are represented by means of humour and satire, as well as by the not necessarily jocular but nevertheless related genres of comics and the graphic novel. Recent historical research demonstrates how these creative genres not only critique political events and figures but also preserve, in a sophisticated cultural format, their readers’ short-term everyday working memory and long-term cultural memory of prejudice, subjugation and mass murder. In these texts the authors spotlight how the primary source creators commented on historical events, incorporated historical artefacts in their works and generated countercultural memories that fill gaps in historical narratives from other sources.

Type
Review Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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References

1 See Carlson, Keith A., ‘The Impact of Humor on Memory: Is the Humor Effect about Humor?Humor, 24, 1 (2011), 2141 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schmidt, Stephen R., ‘Effects of Humor on Sentence Memory’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 20 (1994), 953–67Google ScholarPubMed; and Schmidt, Stephen R. and Williams, Alan R., ‘Memory for Humorous Cartoons’, Memory and Cognition, 29 (2001), 305–11CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

2 Bergson, Henri, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic [1911], Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell, trans. (London: MacMillan and Green Integer, 1999)Google Scholar, 21.

3 The popular Turkish-German satirist Osman Engin stated in a 1994 interview that satire has ‘a socially critical aim. Satire serves to point out matters that are not right, that are inhumane or contemptuous of mankind. It points out sore spots in society, so that people reflect on them. Satire alone cannot improve the situation. [But] people who have read my satires sometimes tell me, for example, “After some of your satires I noticed how I actually act toward foreigners”, and they tried to remedy the negative. They had not been aware of that before.’ Interview with Osman Engin, Die tageszeitung, 13 Dec. 1994, available at http://www.osmanengin.de/ [my translation].

4 See Champfleury, , Histoire de la caricature antique (Paris: E. Dentu, 1867)Google Scholar and Wright, Thomas, A History of Grotesque and Caricature in Literature and Art (London: Chatto and Windus, 1875)Google Scholar.

5 See Coupe, W. A., German Political Satires from the Reformation to the Second World War, 6 vols. (White Plains, NY: Kraus International Publications, 1985–1993)Google Scholar and Delporte, Christian, Chancel, l’œil et la griffe, Images de la caricature (Paris: Épinal, 1993)Google Scholar; ibid. Les Crayons de la propagande. Dessinateurs et dessin politique sous l'Occupation (Paris: French National Centre for Scientific Research Éditions, 1993); ibid. Images et politique en France au XXème siècle (Paris: Nouveau Monde Éditions, 2006).

6 See, for example, Marga Buchele, ‘Der politische Witz als Meinungsäußerung gegen den totalitären Staat. Ein Beitrag zur Phänomenologie und Geschichte des inneren Widerstandes im Dritten Reich’, Diss., University of Munich, 1955; Gamm, Hans-Jochen, Der Flüsterwitz im dritten Reich. Mündliche Dokumente zur Lage der Deutschen während des Nationalsozialismus [1963] (Munich and Zurich: Piper Verlag, 1993)Google Scholar; Brandlmeier, Thomas and Schöning, Jörg, Die deutsche Filmkomödie vor 1945: Kaiserreich, Weimarer Republik und Nationalsozialismus (Hamburg: CineGraph, 2005)Google Scholar and Dörfler, Sebastian, ‘Kabarett während des Nationalsozialismus’, in Glodek, Tobias et al., eds., Politisches Kabarett und Satire (Berlin: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Berlin, 2007)Google Scholar, as well as the other studies of individual caricaturists, cabaret artists and authors in Merziger's extensive bibliography in Nationalsozialistische Satire.

7 Recent publications include Wiener, Ralph, Hinter vorgehaltener Hand. Der politische Witz in Deutschland. (Leipzig: Militzke, 2003)Google Scholar; and Hanisch, Ernst, ‘Der Flüsterwitz im Nationalsozialismus’, in Panagl, Oswald, ed., Stachel wider den Zeitgeist. Politisches Kabarett, Flüsterwitz und subversive Textsorten, Schriftenreihe des Forschungsinstitutes für politisch-historische Studien der Dr.-Wilfried-Haslauer-Bibliothek, 20 (Vienna: Böhlau, 2004)Google Scholar. Both continue to support this misconception (see Merziger, Nationalsozialistische Satire, 13 and fn 18; 11 and fn 9).

8 The 2012 paperback by Herzog, Rudolph, Dead Funny: Telling Jokes in Hitler's Germany, Chase, Jefferson, trans. (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2011)Google Scholar perpetuates the ‘whisper joke’ myth by showing on its cover a woman presumably whispering a joke in another woman's ear. The French edition, Rire et Résistance: Humour sous le IIIe Reich (2013), features a chimpanzee wearing a Nazi swastika armband performing the Hitler salute, thus insulting all Germans who supported the Nazi regime. The German cover, by contrast, with its cartoon of Hitler bearing a pig's snout as the ‘o’ in ‘tot’ (dead), as well as the 2011 US edition with its upside-down photograph of Hitler, marks the Führer as the jokes’ target, thereby deflecting criticism from the German people.

9 Merziger collaborated with Martina Kessel on an edited volume in English, Merziger, Patrick and Kessel, Martina, eds., The Politics of Humour: Laughter, Inclusion and Exclusion in the Twentieth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011)Google Scholar and a related edited volume, Susanne Kaul and Oliver Kohns, eds., Politik und Ethik der Komik (Politics and Ethics of Humour) (Munich: Fink, 2012), also unites new research on humour in literature and politics.

10 Boym, Svetlana, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001)Google Scholar.

11 Yurchak, Alexei, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

12 Several of Etkind's publications appeared after Ryan's book, but his 2004 article, ‘Hard and Soft in Cultural Memory: Political Mourning in Russia and Germany’, already laid out differences between de-Stalinising and de-Nazifying efforts in these respective countries. Etkind, ‘Hard and Soft in Cultural Memory’, Grey Room, 16 (Summer 2004), 36–59.

13 Baetens, Jan and Frey, Hugo, The Graphic Novel: An Introduction, Cambridge Introductions to Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rosenbaum, Roman, Manga and the Representation of Japanese History, Routledge Contemporary Japan Series (London: Routledge, 2012)Google Scholar.

14 Harbeck, Matthias, ‘Comics in deutschen Bibliotheken – Ressourcen für Forschung und Fans’, Bibliothek Forschung und Praxis, 34 (2010), 283–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Patricia Cohen, ‘Yale Press Bans Images of Muhammad in New Book’, The New York Times, 12 Aug. 2009, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/13/books/13book.html (last visited 21 Jan. 2015).

16 Hull, Gary, Muhammad: The ‘Banned’ Images (Durham, NC: Voltaire Press, 2009)Google Scholar. Klausen, Like, the Swiss scholar Monika Glavac also examines the Danish cartoon controversy by embedding it in the wider history of images of Muhammad in ‘Der Fremde’ in der europäischen Karikatur: Eine religionswissenschaftliche Studie über das Spannungsfeld zwischen Belustigung, Beleidigung und Kritik (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013)Google Scholar.