Negotiating the Dichotomies of Memory Culture in a Post‐Unification Graphic Narrative about the GDR: Simon Schwartz'sDrüben!

Abstract

Two distinguishing features of the graphic narrative as a medium—its use of frames and its hybrid combination of words with images—inform a reading of Simon Schwartz's 2009 Drüben!, a work that thematizes his family's experiences in the German Democratic Republic. In popular culture, the memory of the GDR tends to be structured around binary oppositions; characters, for instance, are regularly depicted as either perpetrators or victims while the historical period as a whole is often approached either nostalgically or critically. While binary categories may bring clarity to complicated phenomena, they also discount marginal voices and discourses. The dichotomies of GDR memory culture are unsettled by Schwartz's graphic narrative, whose formal features help readers to reconsider the lived experiences of people then and fraught choices that they faced.