I’ve purchased two comics in the last month. Both were written and drawn by Dave Sim– glamourpuss #1 and Judenhass. glamourpuss is a series of photorealist images– sourced from fashion magazines and early, classic comics– combined with a Parody of the Fashion Industry and a long essay in dialogue ballons and captions about the history of the book’s style. Judenhass (a German word meaning Jew Hatred) is a series of photorealist images sourced from historical photographs and presented in a style similar to Sequential Storytelling.

How much did I like glamourpuss #1? Enough that I wonder how there’s an audience for the book other than myself– if you cracked open my head and looked inside, there’s a very good chance you’d find a fashionable woman drawn in a retro-50s/early 60s art style talking about Process and Method.

But. Given Sim’s notorious Statements on Ladies and Their Brains, an unacknowledged tension runs throughout the book: does one accept Sim’s parody at face value because the Fashion Industry and its Publications are vile things, or does one go further and try to deduce if this satire runs darker than its surface? To wit: is the scorn directed at the Industry’s customers? One constantly wonders whether a pass needs to be issued– and to whom or what. The reader has two options: saying either, “Okay, supposed misogynist, your parody, with all its potentially unpleasant implications, is justified JUST THIS ONCE,” or, “Okay, Fashion Industry, you are the ten percent bloodsucker of the poor, but I’m siding with YOU!”

This tension makes the book. But I prefer my entertainments murky.

Murky is a pretty good word to describe Judenhass. There’s no question as to the nobility of the project– and I think that Sim has an excellent point when he observes that people working in comics, an industry built almost solely by Jews, do have a very real and substantial connection to the Holocaust and the plague of anti-Semitism.

But. Sim suggests, on a double-page spread depicting the road gates to Auschwitz (“Abreit Macht Frei”), that the Holocaust was an inevitable occurrence. This is followed by pages and pages of quotations from Famous Personages– Martin Luther, Mark Twain, Voltaire, Truman, Roosevelt’s lady cousin– about their discomfort or repulsion or disgust or dislike for the Jews. Judenhass. The inference of the book is that the levels of hatred for the Jews throughout Christian (and perhaps pre-Christian) civilization culminated in the Holocaust; that this hatred was fueled and encouraged by intellectuals and public figures, and that the opinions of these public figures bear a direct trace on the events that followed.

There are two major problems with this thesis: most obviously, the Holocaust was in no way inevitable. Without getting into the incredibly complex question of Who Could Have Done What, I think it’s safe to say that had the Allied powers not botched the Treaty of Versailles, it is highly unlikely that the Nazis would have come to power. Might there have been some kind of horrifically violent treatment of the Jews? Anything’s possible– but I think the final lesson of the rise of the Nazis is clear: fascism is less a political philosophy than a political fantasy in which one accepts a series of falsehoods out of resentment for one’s position in the world, or out of fear that one might lose one’s current position. Thus, it is best not to create an entire underclass of people through your global-political machinations. If anyone doubts the basic truth of this idea, I’ve got one word: al-Qaeda.

The second issue concerns the use of quotations. With at least one– that of Mark Twain– Sim is playing loose and fast. The article in question is linked from Sim’s site, and a reading of it shows that Sim has provided the reader (the ellipses should be the first hint) with a small part of a very long piece. In this essay, Twain explicitly does not condemn the Jews. If anything, he is attempting an even-handed defense. The quotation– to the effect that Christians hate Jews because Jews are better at making money than Christians– is, in its own benignly stereotyping context, more or less praising Jews at the expense of Christians.

Does Twain acknowledge the full humanity of the Jewish people rather than treat them as a monolithic people? Certainly not. Is the article a piece of rabid Jew Hatred along the lines of Himmler or Goebbels? Emphatically no! The article in question is a piece of late 19th Century journalism by one of America’s foremost racial and ethnic progressives– to judge it from the context of the 21st Century and find it, as I do, complicated is one matter. To classify it as Jew Hatred is ridiculous. [More on Twain and the Jews here.]

While this could be construed as nitpicking, it points to a bigger problem with Judenhass. (I’m ignoring Sim’s inclusion of H.L. Mencken.) I’m completely unable– with the exception of contemporary statements by the Nazi leadership and apathetic Allied politicans– to see what any of the quotations have to do with the Holocaust. Sim’s method is inference through juxtaposition; in the most shocking pages, we see passages from Martin Luther’s truly reprehensible On the Jews and Their Lies placed over a spread of a photorealistically depicted mound of bodies. But this placement does not mean, implicitly or inherently, that Luther himself, nor his writing, bear a responsibility for the Holocaust or the prevalence of Jew Hatred throughout the Christian World.

Martin Luther was a disgusting, superstitious little man with bad table habits and a belief in gnomes. The people of 20th Century Berlin used forks and knives and didn’t think that the forest was rank with pixies and sprites, so either Luther’s continuing influence on the ideas and practices of Germany society is significantly overrated or there is a choice inherent in people’s horrible, hateful beliefs.

A voice missing in Judenhass is one that, upon reflection, could undermine the text-image-juxtaposition-inference structure. Not one quotation, not one jot or tittle of the writings of Frederich Nietzsche? The Philosopher-King of the Nazi Party? Wasn’t it Thus Spoke Zarathustra that was distributed throughout the military? But here’s the rub: Nietzsche hated Nationalism and wasn’t an anti-Semite. His legacy was sold out by a jealous sister, and Hitler saw what he wanted. Which demonstrates the fate of all writers: you can’t control what people do with your work, nor how they act on it. Especially if you’re dead.

If one takes Sim’s almost-argument to its most logical extreme, there’s a way to read Judenhass in which the responsibility of the average German citizen– the people who, after all, voted the Nazis into power– is abnegated. The “inevitability” which Sim sees emanating from a culture of Jew Hatred strikes me as almost ignorant of the true horror: the complicity and willingness of vast swaths of German (and Austrian, and French, and Polish, and etc.) society to believe lies willingly and to support, and often participate in, the abuse, murder and exploitation of their fellow citizens. A full manifestation of Sim’s argument removes any individual choice in the matter, and if there is no choice, then there is no responsibility.

–

Update: This review by Bob Mitchell is about the only other writing that questions Sim’s methods in Judenhass. It’s a fascinating, and justifiable, indicator of the lingering sensitivity of the subject that Sim– a creator whose every jotting and utterance is generally subject to profound scrunity– has had Judenhass largely taken at face value.

Comments:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING, expecting T_VARIABLE or '$' in /home/d3a13a/content/theme/comments.php on line 22

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING, expecting T_VARIABLE or '$' in /home/d3a13a/content/theme/comments.php on line 22