Passing under separation: comics representations of the Holocaust and the Berlin Wall.

This article analyses two comics works – Art Spiegelman’sMausand Flix’sDa war Mal was– and their employment of the comics form in portraying the horror behind cultural separationalism at the heart of two of the most extreme separational regimes in history: the Nazi regime and the GDR. This is demonstrated through a focus on scenes depicting attempts to defy imposed separation mainly through what is defined, following the Fanonean term, as different acts of ‘passing’. The juxtaposition of these works through this prism shows that while both differ from the medium’s comical genesisandfrom the sex-drugs-violence satirical approach of underground comix, they nevertheless remain loyal to the comics traditions in their depiction of the Holocaust and the Berlin Wall era. Hence, they explore separationalism at its extreme through a literary form that defies the fundamental dichotomy between the textual and the visual. By doing so they allow a discussion that examines the human experience under any separating ideological system thus echoing Arendt’s historical approach, termed here as a ‘counter-oblivion’ approach, applied in her study of totalitarianism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]