Reinhard Kleist' s graphic novel The Boxer tells the story of Holocaust survivor Harry Haft and his participation in forced boxing matches in Nazi concentration camps. Throughout the work, Kleist works against clear delineations of right and wrong by offering what I term 'nuancing gestures'. Haft is a morally complex protagonist who works against the image of the heroic and sanctimonious survivor, and Kleist identifies other characters that challenge comforting notions of good and bad. The work uses visual correspondences between panels to highlight cycles of interpersonal violence, showing how issues of complicity are carried forward later in life. Furthermore, the graphic novel depicts in vivid detail how traumatic intrusions disrupt Haft' s daily life. This article explores how The Boxer' s particular stylistic rendering of moral ambiguity, complicity, and the longer lasting effects of trauma raises new insights about how the medium of comics can navigate a sensitive and complex Holocaust narrative.
In Joe Kubert's Fax from Sarajevo, the chapter 'The Rape Camp' deals with the mass rape of women by Serb troops during the Bosnian War. Kubert's rape narrative displays a tension between presence and absence that is analysed on different (extra)textual levels. Formally, the two incentives interact when Kubert inscribes the sexual violence on the page but acknowledges its visual limitations by constructing it as an act that can be read from the faces of the people involved and through the use of language. On a narrative level, the chapter's disconnect from the rest of the story marginalises its content and does not explore the longlasting effects of rape, though Kubert briefly refers to genocidal rape at other points in the graphic novel. Furthermore, the tension between presence and absence in Kubert's rape narrative is informed by a cultural backdrop of excessive images of sexual violence. The article argues that this oscillation between inscription and elision in Fax from Sarajevo works productively, as it demonstrates a reflexive awareness of the risks of visualising rape.
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