Historische Forschung im Comic

No era in German history has been as well researched as the 'Third Reich'; no historical topic has been the subject of more specialist and non-fiction books, fiction, films or television series. However, the fact that not everything has been researched and that new formats of communication also allow a new look at the Nazi era and its aftermath is impressively demonstrated by the book Oberbrechen. A German Village Confronts Its Nazi Past.

Oberbrechen examines the complexity of the relationships between Jewish and non-Jewish members of the village of the same name in Hesse in comic format. Conceived as a graphic history, it explores the microcosm of a village society and shows how the village's "own" history of violence during National Socialism was negotiated and how the local people dealt with the omnipresent yet mostly unspoken presence of the Shoah. At the center of this is the question that the village of Oberbrechen poses paradigmatically for many other places in Germany: How did the different levels of participation in anti-Jewish exclusion and thus the different local experiences of violence affect the reunions after 1945 between those who were expelled and those who remained, as well as their relatives? The authors Stefanie Fischer and Kim Wünschmann will discuss this and the opportunities offered by comics as a medium for communicating these issues with Andrea Löw (Center for Holocaust Studies at the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich).

Stefanie Fischer is a research associate at the Center for Research on Anti-Semitism at the Technical University of Berlin. She has published numerous studies in the field of German-Jewish history and the history of the Holocaust. Her most recent publications include Jewish Cattle Traders in the German Countryside (2024) and Jewish Mourning in the Aftermath of the Holocaust: Tending Individual Graves in Occupied Germany, 1945-1949 (in: Aya Elyada, Kerry Wallach (eds.), German Jewish Studies: Next Generations, 2022). Since 2024 she is co-editor of the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book.

Kim Wünschmann is Director of the Institute for the History of German Jews in Hamburg and teaches at the University of Hamburg. Her research focuses on German-Jewish history, Holocaust studies, legal and diplomatic history and comic research. Her publications include Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps (Harvard University Press, 2015),Gezeichnete Erinnerung: Zeitzeugenschaft und Geschichte in Comics und Graphic Novels (in: Matthias Bahr et al. (eds.) and Aus der Erinnerung für die Gegenwart leben (Wallstein, 2022).

Andrea Löw is the director of the Center for Holocaust Studies at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich and teaches at the University of Mannheim. She has published extensively on the history of the Holocaust, particularly in Eastern Europe, and is part of the project team for Narrative Art and Visual Storytelling in Holocaust Human Rights Education. Her publications include Deported. 'Immer mit einem Fuß im Grab' - Erfahrungen deutscher Juden (S. Fischer, 2024); Das Warschauer Getto. Everyday Life and Resistance in the Face of Extermination (with Markus Roth, C.H. Beck, 2013) and Jews in the Litzmannstadt Ghetto. Living conditions, self-perception, behavior (Wallstein, 2006).

The event is a cooperation between the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism and the Center for Holocaust Studies at the Institute of Contemporary History.