Superman is Jewish? The intersection of history, religion, and popular culture in comics

I have blogged previously about Art Spiegelman’s Maus.  The books were an eye opener for me, seeing the powerful emotions, a storyline that personalizes history while not minimizing it, and a format that invites in reluctant readers.  Graphic novels (books in comic book format, with illustrations, and often dealing with topics that align more with adult themes) are a great entry point for both strong readers and reluctant readers.  The art form of comics allows two media to be conjoined and to deepen the experience of the audience.  Comic books have traditionally been in the realm of pre-teen and teenage boys.  The simplicity of the illustration can fool many in to believing that there is little worth between the covers.  Surprisingly - thankfully - there is so much more going on inside of these books.  Seemingly because of their innocuous nature, they are able to convey adult themes, open doors to history, and deal with current events in a way that can be both profound and easily overlooked at the same time.

 

In 1941, Jack Kirby and Joe Simon created the character Captain America.  On the cover, Cap has infiltrated a Nazi bunker, and is punching Adolf Hitler.  A great image from today’s standard, and nothing less than we would expect from the stories we are taught in our textbooks.  But, the comic came out in March 1941, before the US was committed to the war.  The war was "over there," and Americans wanted nothing to do with it.  Kirby and Simon were young Jewish artists and decided to turn current events into their story.  Their work did not start the war, or increase patriotism.  It took current events and pushed them to the forefront.  It demanded attention and erased ignorance.  It piqued interest and awoke a younger generation.  (Very much in the same vein as Comedy Central’s Daily Show and Colbert Report, today.)

The Holocaust would come up again in popular culture in the 1950s.  Several different stories would deal with the history in different ways.  Stories would continue, ideas would be shared.  And in the 1960s, Stan Lee would create the story of the X-Men, a group of humans that are different, and therefore feared.  I began reading the series in the 1980s, and was immediately drawn to the storyline of exclusion.  While not overtly mentioning antisemitism, it would be hard to deny, even as a boy, the historical basis.  Seeing America’s transformations throughout the 90s - the cultural acceptance of interracial dating, homosexuality, and other minority communities - the X-Men storylines reflected society, and built empathy. 

At some point, I stumbled upon the graphic novel, X-Men:  God Loves, Man Kills.  My eyes were opened.  A part of the story deals with violence aimed at those considered different, and therefore, considered unworthy of life by some (an arching theme in the X-Men universe).  Two young children are hung from a swing set.  They are found by the arch-enemy Magneto (created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, both Jews).  This sets up the backstory.  Magneto will become a complex character that several writers will work to flush out.  Ultimately, in Magneto: Testament, published in 2008, we discover that Magneto is raised Jewish in a German home. His family flees the Nazis and are caught in Poland.  Long story short, his past helps shape his views, and quite possibly reflects the nature of the creators. Magneto’s complexity will be reflected in the movie series, but will not be as effective at generating the empathy and complexity of the character.  The films, though, do provide a decent entry in to the comic world. 

Most recently, Disney has paired up with several creators to develop a film and online graphic novel set entitled, “They Spoke Up:  American Voices Against the Holocaust."  This is an interesting series, and I am just breaking in to it as I write this, but looks to be a promising resource.   I will blog about that in the coming weeks.  There are other great works available out there including a great story entitled 2nd Generation: Things I Never Told My Father, in graphic novel form, dealing with the complexity of the Holocaust that allows entry and absorption at multiple levels.  They just aren’t available in the United States. 

As I was researching for this post, I came across a recently published book (2012) entitled Superman is Jewish? that relates similarities in Jewish culture with the comic book storylines.  The author makes a wonderful comparison of the alien that would become Clark Kent being rocketed to safety by his parents before their destruction:  An interstellar “Kindertransport.”  Comic books are much more complex than we can even imagine. 

Sadly, there has been little new in the way of Holocaust graphic literature.  The stories of the 1950s provided shock and awe at a time when it was still fairly new in the cultural psyche.  The Holocaust is rarely invoked as a teaching tool in modern mainstream culture.  It has been moved to the shelf of distant history.  We must be careful to not lose the lessons learned in such a hard fashion.  We must follow the lead of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, use the media of comics and graphic novels to shape the future generations in a less blunt fashion.  Truly, it is often those that need the lesson the most that will be most likely to pick up this form of literature.  Rather than just re-illustrating Anne Frank, let us seek to build on the exploration of humanity by find new avenues and new stories to tell in different formats. 

Marian Kolodziej - art and reflection

As I was brainstorming about what to write for my next blog, I kept coming back to the haunting images I saw in the basement of a Polish monastery one dreary October day.  It is in the St. Maximilian Kolbe Franciscan Center where the moving works of Marian Kolodziej permanently reside.  Kolodziej, who was a 17 year old Polish Catholic resistance fighter, was on the first transport to the newly established Auschwitz camp.  As a Polish Catholic, he was not imprisoned in Birkenau- the death camp.  But the suffering he endured as a prisoner of the Nazi regime and the pain he saw inflicted on others left its mark.  Kolodziej suppressed the memories until he suffered a stroke at age 71.  At that point, he used these memories in his recovery process and began drawing moving and symbolic images based on his experiences in Auschwitz, Gross-Rosen, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen-Gusen.

Because I viewed Marian Kolodziej’s work four years ago, I did a little Googling to view some of his works and get some details of this amazing artists.  Apparently, unbeknownst to me, there was a documentary produced in 2010 (a year after my visit) called “The Labyrinth”.  The makers of this short documentary interviewed Kolodziej before his death.  He allowed his words (not his voice) and profile to be seen but stressed that he wanted his story and his art to be about the memory of those who were lost.  By watching the trailer for the movie (and certainly the movie in its entirety), you can not only see some of his work, but the space in which it is housed.  You can also hear the moving words of Kolodziej.  His story and his work is a powerful way to use a very personal testimony with our students.

Witness to Fate: The Auschwitz Album

In an incredibly chilling way, The Auschwitz Album, which is among the several choices of documents to be used as resources for this year’s White Rose Essay Contest, is one of the most concrete forms of evidence we have of the Third Reich’s attempted genocide of all of European Jewry. The album was used during testimonies at the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt, in the 1960’s. The images bear witness to the deportation of Hungarian Jews from the Berehova Ghetto, some wearing the Stars of David on their coats, to Auschwitz-Birkenau during the spring of 1944.  Also pictured is the “selection” process on the ramp off the newly built train track spur, designed to bring the rails inside the camp, enabling a more efficient movement of larger crowds of people closer to the crematoria in a shorter amount of time.  And perhaps most haunting is the evidence of groups of individuals who have just been sorted and are on the actual walk to the crematoria, some waiting outside the gas chambers, in a grove of birch trees which gave Birkenau its name. Included as well: documentation of imprisoned workers sorting through truckloads of clothing and personal items, confiscated after euphemistic “delousing showers.”

Little is known for certain about the album’s creation, but its re-discovery is an incredible story.  Lilly Jacob, one of the victims pictured on some of the 56 pages of over 190 black and white images still remaining, was liberated from Dora, a sub-camp of Nordhausen, after the war. At the time, she weighed no more than 80 pounds and had to be lifted on a stretcher.  Lilly stumbled upon the album in a deserted SS barracks where she was being temporarily detained 400 miles from Auschwitz. These photographs were around May 26, 1944.  When Lilly found the album months later and hundreds of miles away, she leafed through the photographs and recognized first, her rabbi; then she spotted family members and pictures of herself among the crowds of individuals taken from their community of Bilke, near the Carpathian mountains of Hungary. She kept the album for several years, and eventually sold some of the glass plate prints to the Jewish Museum in Prague, for passage to the United States. 

Once in Miami, news spread of the rare collection of photographs. Survivors began to arrive to examine the images, to see if, by chance, their loved ones were among those pictured on that day in May of 1944.  On the rare occasion that people would be able to identify themselves, or a family member, Lilly would give them the photo.  Recently, one of these has been donated back to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial museum in Israel.  Serge Klarsfeld, a famous Nazi-hunter, convinced Lilly to donate the album and all of the remaining prints to Yad Vashem in 1980.  A database of the information on each photograph was created and conservators at the museum restored the suite. Each image was digitally scanned in 1999.  These reproductions are considered to be in the public domain, and can be accessed on the Yad Vashem website and USHMM’s website.  A PowerPoint with select photos and information about the entire album is available on MCHE’s website.

As a photography teacher, I use a specific tool to engage students in an aesthetic scanning activity to analyze individual photographs.  There are 3 columns: what this gives me, what this is made with, and possible reasons for making this. When talking about these incredibly unique photos from the Auschwitz Album, I don’t have any concrete reasons for creating this collection of photographs.  There is speculation, and it is thought that they were made by one or both of the “staff” photographers at the camp, who typically spent their days taking “mug shots” of the prisoners as a record of the few individuals whose lives were prolonged through labor in the camp.  If that is the case, Ernst Hofmann and/or Bernhard Walter immortalized these several hundred souls. When using the images as a resource, feel free to use the attached tool, designed specifically for photos from this one-of-a-kind album, to assist students in talking about what they see.  Have them fill out the forms before a class discussion, or use this 2-sided analysis sheet as a guide for a DBQ based on a single image. Questioning strategies might begin with reading this Elie Wiesel’s quote based on his personal experience in deportation from Hungary: 

“Every yard or so an SS man held his gun trained on us.  Hand in hand we followed the crowd. ‘Men to the left. Women to the right.’ Eight words spoken, indifferently, without emotion.  Eight short simple words. For a part of a second I glimpsed my mother and my sister moving to the right. I saw them disappear in the distance while I walked on with my father and the other men. I did not know that at that place, at that moment, I was parting from my mother and my sister forever.”

Follow by asking –

• Do you think this image/these pictures from the Auschwitz album present(s) an ordinary day of unloading prisoners? 
•  Do these photos seem to be staged or planned, set up in any way?  What specific things do you see that make you believe that? 
•  What would be the advantage of taking so many different pictures, from so many angles? 
•  Did you see any of the same people more than once?  How did you recognize them?  Again, what would be the advantage of having multiple images of the same people at different times? 
•  Do you see any pictures that look like they were taken one right after the other?  Which one happened first?  How can you tell? 
• How long do you think the whole group of pictures took to shoot?  What clues do we have? 
•  What do YOU think would be the reason to make such a detailed, visual record of this day?

When viewing the pictures, taken individually, or in a series, I am always a little hesitant to look for very long; but simultaneously, I want to pore over them. There is at once a pull and an instinct to leave these people alone, for the last few moments of privacy they will ever have with their loved ones.  There is an inherent intimacy here. I don’t belong. I have information they do not.  I know what will happen to most of their bodies soon after these pictures are taken.  And I don’t want this information. Not while I am looking into their eyes. Yet, in some inexplicable way, I am drawn in, against my will by some vestige of hope that by participating, by receiving the likeness, I will assist in perpetuating a potentially unending chain of witness. I experience an emotion I don’t have while viewing any other photographs. I want the power in the photo to stop time. I feel, in every sense of the word, a new definition of the verb we often use for creating photographs - they were taken: from the then present, in a very mater-of-fact way, as witness; taken as slices of time, from life; taken from families; taken from what in a few minutes will be this existence; taken from culture and the promise future brings.  And this robbing changes everything. As we peer into the past and lost futures, simultaneously, we are taken, transported, away from a time of being civilized.

While I am reluctant to speculate about the reasons these photos were taken, at the same time, I am incredibly grateful that they were, to bear witness.  In an age of easy photo enhancement and photo shopping, I know the incalculable value of these pictures to speak the truth about the depths our inhumanity can reach. A few years from now, no human being alive will have actually experienced these atrocities.   But will these photos be enough of a witness?  One hundred, two hundred years from now, will these prints still exist?  If someone still has possession of the glass negatives, from plates that would have been used in large format cameras placed on tripods, apertures often deliberately stopped down to keep everything in the picture plane in focus, we would have even stronger evidence, more credible testimony.  Hopefully, the glass plate negatives were not broken, like the storefronts windows of so many Jews on Kristallnacht, marking for many the beginning of the tragic end so clearly evidenced by these haunting documents.

Only weapons: Notebook and Leica

The contemporary photographer Monika Bulaj states her aim is “to give a voice to the silent people.” After watching her TED talk, I am at once humbled and invigorated.  I am struck by her courage and conviction.  She has been traveling for over 20 years, reportedly armed with only her notebook and Leica, a wonderful little camera that she uses like a nomadic paintbrush to painstakingly recreate the light and vitality from what so much of the rest of the world might be tempted to term darkness.

Addressing the TED audience, she begins “I was walking through the [Polish] forests of my grandmother’s tales, a land where every field hides a grave, where millions of people have been deported or killed in the 20th century.”  She goes on to capture, through word and image, the places and faces she met where she simply shared bread and prayer.  And, fortunately for us, she documented.  Her stunning portraits of both person and place remind me of Georges de la Tour’s evocations in oil paint with browns and ambers, where candlelight becomes almost personified: a silent character in an intimate scene, breathing life into our primal need for hope.  Similarly, Monika’s lovely images are like hand-written invitations, to a party celebrating our humanity, inviting us to a royal feast where stereotypes are smashed, and the most humble among us are exalted and lifted up to be honored and praised for the wonders they truly are.

After showing “Through Our Own Eyes,” the documentary created by the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education which features historic footage as well as still photographs and local Holocaust survivors’ testimony, from the Kansas City area, I always give my students an open-notes quiz and ask not only why, in their opinion, it is important to “remember” the Holocaust.  But I also ask them to list 3 things they can do, personally, to help make sure the Holocaust is remembered. Two of the most common responses to this last question are 1) to watch movies or read books about the history; and 2) to learn about places in the world where these atrocities might happen again, so we can speak out about them and  not become complacent bystanders.

Monika Bulaj’s art work does just that.  Her photographs are beacons.  They bears witness to her personal quest for a universal understanding of what it is to be fully human.  Like Rembrandt, she literally shines light on the everydayness of human life. After visiting a school in Afghanistan where 13,000 young women hide the fact that they are going to school, underground, among the scorpions,  Monkia recounts “their love of study was so big I cried.”  Her reportage is easily accessible, moving and excellent.  Through the clarity of her still images, we become party to both struggles and tendernesses.  We see our similarities and are presented with a portrait of not just community, but humanity.  Ms. Bulaj seeks out individuals and spotlights their personhood.  She enlightens by looking for commonalities and showcasing them. “I have been walking and traveling, by horses, by yak, by truck, by hitchhiking, from Iran’s border to the bottom, to the edge of the Wakhan Corridor. And in this way I could find ‘noor,’ the hidden light of Afghanistan.”  Her photographs are like personal, intimate offerings, luminous altars, celebrating all that we can be, and they are indeed inspiring.