Schiller Reading Comics: The Aesthetics of Nostalgia and the Wende-Narrative in Contemporary Graphic Novels Elizabeth Bridges Rhodes College Abstract: Utilizing Schiller’s early medical writings that propose a cure for nostalgia, which was conceptualized as an illness in his time, this article explores the ways in which nostalgia - both in the modern aesthetic sense and in its original medical sense - can be used as a lens through which to examine history. Schiller’s cure involved a “rehearsal of return” to the ill patient’s place of origin. Comics, likewise, serve as a site for Schiller’s rehearsal of return, in this case to contentious points in the past. By analyzing two 2014 graphic novels dealing with the time surrounding the end of the GDR , Kinderland (Mawil) and Treibsand (Max Mönch, Alexander Lahl, and Kitty Kahane), this article posits a visual historiography of nostalgia-as-illness. This type of historical vision is especially productive in the autobiographical mode, where authors frequently use the medium of comics to carve out spaces for subjectivity against a backdrop of seemingly implacable historical forces. This article uncovers what it is specifically about the medium of comics, particularly in a German context, that makes the genre so suitable for precisely this sort of historical introspection. Keywords: Friedrich Schiller, comics, nostalgia, Ostalgie, Wende, graphic novels In Nostalgia in Transition, Linda M. Austin presents a history of nostalgia, first identified in the eighteenth century as a disease of soldiers and sailors serving for long years far away from their home country or region, a psychosomatic disease with real symptoms such as stomach pains, insomnia, and constipation (7—10). Austin credits Friedrich Schiller, author and physician, as author of the historical transition between an understanding of nostalgia as a medical condition and a mode of aesthetic perception (11). As a physician, Schiller provided 344 Elizabeth Bridges a “cure” for nostalgia not through the more mechanical medical treatments of his time, but rather through therapeutic experience - in the case of his patient Grammont, for example, he prescribes several visits to a countryside locale similar to the patient’s childhood home - and through this brief outing, the chance to reconstruct and relive those memories in simulation. Austin explains how Schiller would “rework this treatment in aesthetic terms” in his influential theories of art as naïve versus sentimental. She refers to this therapy as a “rehearsal of return,” which served to “illustrate the cathartic function of representation” (14); as “a substitution of (physiological) remembering for (cerebral) memory, the patient released blocked and obsessive thoughts of home by rehearsing the return in a representative space” (14). This is what most nostalgic texts do in aesthetic form. This is why we enjoy them. In the pages to follow, I will use this dual medical and aesthetic framework for nostalgia, derived from Schiller, as a lens through which to view German comics, particularly those dealing with the GDR. As we know, the GDR has been a notorious site of nostalgia, sometimes to the point of nostalgic indulgence, especially in German visual and literary culture around 2000, epitomized in the tragicomic family melodrama film Good Bye Lenin! (2003). In recent graphic novels, this trend appears to be changing. Indeed, several significant GDR -related graphic novels have appeared in the last few years ( Grenzfall ; Berlin - geteilte Stadt: Zeitgeschichten ; Gleisdreieck. Berlin 1981 ; and others). Two of these works, Treibsand by Max Mönch, Alexander Lahl, and Kitty Kahane, and Kinderland by Markus “Mawil” Witzel (both 2014), attempt to negotiate the legacy of November 9, 1989 and the end of the GDR in part through, but also against, the now well-worn aesthetic reminders of GDR nostalgia. These include in particular the familiar iconography of everyday life in the GDR (e.g., commercial products, FDJ uniforms) and the images of celebratory crowds in Berlin on the night of November 9. Despite their resistance against easy nostalgic tropes, these graphic novels nevertheless serve as a site for the Schillerian “rehearsal of return,” in this case to contentious points in the past (Austin 14). They offer the reader a way of negotiating historical narratives in a larger sense, but also in the more personal sense of the subjective experiences that compel the stories. These two comics accomplish this end through their (auto)biographical perspectives and personal narratives played out against the backdrop of history in the late GDR . What is it specifically about the medium of comics, particularly in a German context, that make the genre so suitable for this sort of historical introspection? As literary critic Holger Englerth puts it, Nun haben gerade Comics (oder, wenn man so will: Graphic Novels) ein zuweilen sehr inniges Verhältnis zur Geschichte - die Kombination von Erzählung, Text und Schiller Reading Comics: The Aesthetics of Nostalgia and the Wende -Narrative 345 Bild kann eine Unmittelbarkeit erzeugen, die sich einem der Ziele der Historiographie nähert: Vergangenheit erlebbar und nachvollziehbar zu machen. (Englerth n. pag.) What he refers to here relates to Schiller’s prescription for nostalgia, namely the simulation of a return to one’s homeland, in order to soothe feelings of loss of time. In the case of a textual or image-based rehearsal of this return, we move into nostalgic texts as not just a cure for illness but as an aesthetic response to that nostalgia. In the case of the GDR this has been referred to, as we all have heard and read ad nauseum, as “Ostalgie,” a particular type of nostalgia that has proven not a little problematic in historical hindsight. As Hillary Chute points out in her analysis of Art Spiegelman’s Maus , “[G] raphic narrative is a contemporary form that is helping to expand the cultural map of historical representation. Its expansive visual-verbal grammar can offer a space for ethical representation without problematic closure” (214). The word “closure” proves an interesting choice of terms by Chute here because closure is also a concept related to the experience of reading comics, as described by Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. In visual narrative terms, he defines “closure” as “the phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving the whole” (63). As readers of comics and observers of the world at large, we rely on closure to fill in missing parts of a visual image to ascribe meaning to it. This includes any visual image that we perceive, right down to our perception of two dots and a line as an iconic human face (☺) or a sun in one comic frame and a moon in the next as the passage of a day (McCloud 64). In comics, “a medium where the audience is a willing and conscious collaborator and closure is the agent of change, time and motion,” readers use the space between comic frames (the gutter) as a space of possibility for linking one image to the next in space and time (65). We, as readers, close the gap between images with our visual memory, experience, extrapolation, and deduction. Images create a different form of closure than words, one that leaves open the possibility of more fluid interpretation. For this reason, as Chute suggests above, the ability of images to convey meaning without “problematic closure” leaves that meaning open-ended, unlike more conventional historical narrative, which invites readers to draw distinct conclusions through the imposition of a prescribed, conclusive narrative framework (Chute 214). If, as Adorno asserted, it is barbaric to try to represent something like the unfathomable trauma of the Holocaust in words, perhaps images can offer a more appropriate narrative strategy with which to represent the otherwise unrepresentable without leading the reader to draw facile conclusions (30). The 2014 graphic novel Treibsand provides what Englerth calls “nahezu ein Lehrbeispiel” (n. pag.), illustrating the kind of historiography of which comics 346 Elizabeth Bridges are uniquely capable by simultaneously engaging in and refusing to accept the typical tropes of “Ostalgie.” In this comic, Tom Sandman, a German-speaking American journalist, is sent as a correspondent to Berlin during the period of protest leading up to the 1989 opening of the Berlin Wall. The reader experiences these events through Tom’s outsider perspective and through the perspectives of people he meets and becomes increasingly personally involved with in the course of his investigations. Tom’s boss back in New York, Mr. Burnes 1 , is a staunch anti-communist and presses Tom to find individual “heroes” on whom to focus his research, much like Tom has done previously with an award-winning story on the person he calls “Tank Man” in the Tiananmen Square protests on assignment in China earlier that year. Tom meets a young woman named Ingrid, a former GDR champion swimmer who had spent five years in prison after an attempt to flee the GDR by swimming a 24-mile stretch of the Baltic Sea to West Germany. She blames her friend Barbara for betraying her to the Stasi. As Tom gets to know Ingrid and her family, he eventually falls in love with her and can no longer bring himself to turn them into a story for his own gain. The two marry and return to New York after the events surrounding November 9, but they eventually split when Tom convinces Ingrid to return and investigate her own Stasi file. Ingrid discovers that her brother Jens had in fact betrayed her in order to advance his military career in the GDR . She blames Tom for convincing her to open the file that in turn destroys her already strained family relationships. This comic in particular continually and thoroughly subverts any possible indulgence in the kind of GDR nostalgia we know from various media texts from the past couple of decades. Instead, it focuses on the brutalities of the GDR , both visually and in its words. The closest we get to some of the more typical images of this era is a half panel featuring a Montagsdemonstration , partly blocked by Tom and Ingrid’s father and mitigated by the double framing device of a windowpane. In fact, the reader misses the otherwise ubiquitous celebratory scenes associated with November 9 because Tom passes out while on the phone with Burnes while trying to report the opening of the border. He has had a longstanding toothache with flare-ups that seem to happen around important historical events, and Tom has a pathological fear of dentists. Instead, he has attempted to ignore it or medicate it away the best he can since China. Like the mom in Good Bye Lenin! , Tom spends the heady days of border celebrations unconscious in a hospital and wakes up to find that the award-winning stories have all been written. With Tom as the point-of-view character, the reader is denied any visual access to the typical jubilant scenes associated with that time. The nostalgic impulse is cut off. In fact, the only tiny moment of GDR nostalgia anywhere in the book stands out in both its uniqueness and innocuousness: a container of Schiller Reading Comics: The Aesthetics of Nostalgia and the Wende -Narrative 347 the GDR version of Nutella called “Nudossi” that Ingrid’s mother sends to her daughter via Tom. Near the end of the book readers are left with this one image when the entire family finally gets together, and we see the forced nature of their own GDR nostalgia in the form of Ingrid’s pre- Republikflucht swimming career. 348 Elizabeth Bridges Treibsand very much equates nostalgia with illness, and indeed in the original Schillerian sense, in that every time a potentially “historic moment” starts to happen, Tom’s tooth starts to flare up, and his physical pain continually undercuts the reader’s desire to see a happy, unmitigated historical narrative that we can relate to as a purely nostalgic text. Closure - both in the narrative sense and in the visual sense described by Mc- Cloud - is denied to us as readers (McCloud 63). The artist does this at the level of image by giving us only partial bits of familiar tableaus that we have to work to relate to the larger historical narrative, but also in the narrative sense of barring us from drawing tidy conclusions. Therefore, both at the level of text and visually we are constantly blocked from nostalgic indulgence. In a more typical nostalgic text we would expect the ubiquitous tropes of a triumphal historical Schiller Reading Comics: The Aesthetics of Nostalgia and the Wende -Narrative 349 narrative and a non-messy family reunion, but by tying the story intimately to illness and to tragic personal events connected inescapably to the historical backdrop of the Wende , the reader is forced out of that nostalgic mode. Kinderland by Markus “Mawil” Witzel is a study of GDR politics in miniature via the story of two seventh-grade boys who wish to organize a ping-pong tournament to celebrate the anniversary of the Pioniere circa November 1989. Mirco is a nerdy child, small for his age. Indeed, his name, Mirco, almost looks like the diminutive “micro-.” He constantly tries to fit in with the older, bigger boys but never quite succeeds. Meanwhile his new friend Torsten just has moved to the school under somewhat mysterious circumstances. Rumors fly about Torsten because he refuses to join the FDJ , and his mother is a single, unemployed alcoholic. Because both boys are outsiders, they form a friendship, which leads to a violent fist fight when Torsten jumps to Mirco’s defense during a ping-pong match gone wrong. Because the FDJ sponsor in their school, Frau Kranz, believes that a pingpong tournament is not worthy of the solemn Pioniere event, the boys appeal to other authorities in the school. Eventually one day when Frau Kranz is out sick, the kids convince their FDJ peer leader “Angela Werkel” 2 to let them vote on whether or not to hold the ping-pong tournament in Frau Kranz’s absence. They do, and they decide to make Mirco the organizer because Torsten isn’t an official member of the FDJ . This quasi-political drama creates a rift in the boys’ friendship and an insider-outsider conflict. Then, on the night of the tournament, Mirco’s parents suddenly drag their son off to the opened border to visit the West, such that he can’t participate, meaning that he abandons Torsten once again. Mirco acquires a new ping-pong paddle at a West Berlin Woolworth’s to give to Torsten as a peace offering. The other boy refuses it at first, but then to show the seriousness of his offer, Mirco suggests they become blood brothers like they have seen in a Winnetou movie. Torsten cuts himself too deeply on the wrist and has to be rushed to the hospital. As Torsten’s mother’s boyfriend drives Mirco back home, he says “Was habt ihr dabei gedacht? Ihr seid doch keine Kinder mehr” (294). The final full-page panel, the last in the book, shows the car on Berlin’s Karl-Marx-Allee, heading in the direction of Alexanderplatz (296). The Berlin cityscape in the background of the image shows much more detail and is much more representational than most other images in the book. Significantly, the car is headed westward. This is evident because we can see the Bauhaus lines of Kino International to the right of the frame, and it suggests the ultimate fate of the GDR after the Wende . The declaration that Mirco and Torsten are no longer children describes their evolving relationship to each other, their loss of innocence in relation to the politics of their country, and it alludes to the growing pains of a united Germany soon to follow. 350 Elizabeth Bridges This graphic novel also in part refuses clear visual representation of Berlin Wall celebrations. Instead, the reader sees it mostly in the disjointed glimpses Mirco gets while surrounded by an impenetrable wall of adult legs as they all wait to cross the border. The bureaucratic realities and party affiliations of the GDR Schiller Reading Comics: The Aesthetics of Nostalgia and the Wende -Narrative 351 even affect childhood friendships, and instead of a sense of celebration of the end of the GDR , we feel the bitter sting of young people forever changed by the realities of life in a dictatorial state. The victory of the Wende , if any can be said to exist in this text, goes to consumerism. The crowds that shuffle Mirco un- 352 Elizabeth Bridges seeingly across the border lead to Berliner Bank, Woolworths, and C&A rather than to any sense of relief or freedom. It bears mentioning that both graphic novels employ nonor semi-representational artistic styles towards their respective narrative ends. Mawil’s aesthetic tends towards a more typically humorous, tongue-in-cheek German comic style similar to Ralf König or Flix, featuring characters with moderate physical detail and an emphasis on certain sometimes grotesquely exaggerated features, such as Torsten’s oddly discolored nose and Mirco’s exaggeratedly short and round stature. The panels are full-color, albeit in muted, often warm tones, which corresponds to the would-be nostalgic subject matter. While this visual style harmonizes with the book’s more humorous moments of childhood hijinks, and its conventional humor-comic styling coincides with the youthful exploits of its protagonists, this style delivers a distinct aesthetic contrast to its actual grotesque moments such as the cutting scene. And as with the last page, the artist sometimes gives more realistic detail to certain elements in his panels than others, thus drawing attention to distinct memories of everyday GDR life. By contrast, the art in Treibsand tends towards the truly grotesque in a way that reminds the reader vaguely of the strained, sometimes distorted figures of Egon Schiele. These images, accompanied by a stark but limited color palate, correspond more readily with the often traumatic instances that are recounted in this more somber personal-historical narrative. Despite the lack of great detail in most panels, the distorted images emphasize the strained nature of the relationships. Meanwhile, the use of the color red in the depiction of Tom’s dental issues create a visceral sense of distress in the reader. Both of these comics use these two forms of grotesquerie to different effect - Kinderland in its more comic mode that contrasts its sometimes painful subject matter and Treibsand in a more recognizably distressed and stark visual style that complements its often distressing depictions. With Kinderland’ s more conventional style we expect a more typically nostalgic November 1989 to conclude the book, which is jarringly circumvented both visually and narratively in the end. Treibsand circumvents the reader’s expectations of triumphal Wende nostalgia throughout via its less representational, but more visceral imagery. Susan Stewart writes in On Longing : “By the narrative process of nostalgic reconstruction, the present is denied and the past takes on an authenticity of being, an authenticity which, ironically, it can only achieve through narrative” (23). She explains nostalgia as a wish to reach a constantly receding horizon of originary experience, or “authenticity,” which can only be relayed in narrative form. But the narrative reconstruction that rehearses the nostalgic experience serves as a border between past and present, so to some extent a blockaded border. It demarcates an impenetrable boundary in that it only provides a sim- Schiller Reading Comics: The Aesthetics of Nostalgia and the Wende -Narrative 353 ulation of that experience, never the “real thing”; an idea both of these comics embrace in their non-representational visual styles. Remarkably, both of these comics deal with the matter of borders and boundaries - between east and west, past and present - through stunningly effective visual and narrative strategies, showing cognizance of the fact that nostalgia can be a hollow solace and indeed a kind of illness. Regarding Schiller’s plan of “recreational therapy” for a severely nostalgic patient, Linda Austin writes: “As Schiller represented his treatment of the patient, the obsessive and intense state of the tortured nostalgic mind shifted to the recreational nostalgic body, one that replaced obsessive and uncontrolled mental functions with free and pleasurable sensuous activity” (15). Do these contemporary graphic novels offer a “cure” for the problematic GDR nostalgia that pervaded German media in the late 1990s and early 2000s? I suggest that they certainly provide a potential course correction, in that they continually preclude our indulgence in nostalgia by visually disrupting the reader’s wish to see the tropes we have grown so used to through years of exposure to them: celebratory crowds, people hugging, champagne corks popping, hammers chipping away at the wall, and celebrations at the Brandenburger Tor. Yet, these works deliver this disrupted version of the Wende through inherently nostalgic means, namely comics. I call comics a nostalgic art form because, despite the ubiquity of graphic novels in today’s bestseller lists, they remain a medium many of us associate with childhood reading pleasure, with heroes and daring feats. In Treibsand , Tom the journalist protagonist refuses to make overblown “heroes” out of people just trying to live their lives in an oppressive system. This dynamic is duplicated in the book at large - and in Kinderland as well - in that both texts also refuse heroic, triumphal historical narratives in a larger sense. Although we no longer use the term “nostalgia” as the name of a disease, the familiar sense of longing that characterizes the modern aesthetic usage nevertheless carries with it something of the home sickness from the original meaning. The cathartic function of representation is therefore also tied up in our modern understanding of nostalgia. We find nostalgic texts attractive because they bring back pleasurable feelings and memories associated with a particular time, place or experience - if not from our own “home” or time per se, then from a past context that holds some specific personal or cultural meaning. Yet, in the case of these recent depictions of GDR life in comics, the pleasure is not so much in revisiting and reliving the past as they serve as a reminder that the past was precisely not the cozy homeland some artists and writers have highlighted previously. In Treibsand , there is that moment near the end of the book where Ingrid’s mother attempts to bring the family together through shared nostalgia by look- 354 Elizabeth Bridges ing at old photos. This description corresponds particularly well to the strained visual style of the comic as a whole and of the particular panel featuring the family gathering: Die Familie versuchte, mit aller Kraft das Glück der Vergangenheit in die Gegenwart zu holen. Doch es war vergebens. Auch wenn an diesem Abend viel gelacht wurde, die Vergangenheit war nicht vergangen. Sie hatten Angst vor der Wahrheit, die nur dann keinen Schaden anrichten konnte, wenn sie verschwiegen wurde. (156) In this panel in particular, with its strained pretense of family joy, we see the limits of nostalgia on display, and we see nostalgia as both an illness and an ever-receding horizon that cannot be reached, much as Stewart describes. With nostalgia understood in this context as a quasi-illness, Stewart’s characterization of “nostalgic reconstruction” through narrative posits only a partial or temporary cure. As a relief from the tension created by longing for a particular time, place, or experience, the narrative reconstruction or experiential simulation of that “authentic” experience can provide only glimpses of the originary moment. We might wish to view the naïve depictions of an idealized GDR homeland versus these more mature, albeit intentionally artificial in their nonrepresentational visual styles, in the context of Schiller’s naïve versus sentimental poetry. Schiller suggests that naïve art is not an imitation of nature or originary experience, but rather an attempt to duplicate it, contrasting it to the artificiality of the sentimental depiction of the nostalgic: If one could give to an artificial flower by means of the most perfect deception, the appearance of nature, if one could carry the imitation of the naive in morals up to the highest illusion, so would the discovery, that it be imitation, completely destroy the feeling of which we are speaking. (549) Our comics destroy this illusion on purpose in favor of a more reflective historical narrative. If we follow that the nostalgic text can only ever create an illusion, which marks a solid boundary, not merely a border - between now and then, here and there - then even Schiller’s beloved naïve poets can only ever imitate. All of the “flowers” are artificial, and regardless of how effective the illusion, representation remains representation. Nostalgia and Schiller’s would-be cure requires a denial of the present in favor of a golden time and place that may never have existed. Accepting the impossibility of duplicating the original experience, Stewart describes nostalgia as a disease of memory, one that we willingly contract in anticipation of a pleasurable albeit always incomplete cure. Schiller’s description of the disconnected modern subject and our continual state of nostalgia certainly still applies, but recreation of nature (originary experience) through Schiller Reading Comics: The Aesthetics of Nostalgia and the Wende -Narrative 355 text falls short as a substitute for the direct pastoral experience that provided relief to his patients. But of course, you can never go home again. Of Treibsand ’s historical narrative, Holger Englerth writes that it is “in der Groteske vielsagender, als in der puren Dokumentation” (n. pag.). I would also say that both of these comics, in their grotesque aesthetics, are also vielsagender than the typical, more naïve nostalgic indulgence we have sometimes seen in texts dealing with the Wende . They embrace their artificiality, using it as a means to circumvent naïve historical constructions. Thus, although these comics take the reader back to an imagined GDR “homeland,” by continually refusing to lapse into triumphal tropes, they posit a potential cure for “Ostalgie”. Notes 1 This is undoubtedly a reference to the irascible boss Mr. Burns on the TV show The Simpsons. 2 Angela sports a familiar, iconic hairstyle similar to that of Chancellor Angela Merkel. Works Cited Adorno, Theodor. “Prismen. Ohne Leitbild.” Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft I . Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 10. Trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977. Austin, Linda Marilyn. Nostalgia in Transition: 1780—1917 . Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2007. Chute, Hillary. “‘The Shadow of a Past Time’: History and Graphic Representation in ‘Maus.’” Twentieth-Century Literature 52.2 (2006): 199—230. Englerth, Holger. “Die Didaktik der Groteske - Eine Graphic Novel von Max Mönch, Alexander Lahl und Kitty Kahane zum Ende der DDR .” literaturkritik.de 18 Feb. 2015. Web. 10 Mar. 2016. Good Bye Lenin! Dir. Wolfgang Becker. X-Filme Creative Pool, 2003. Henseler, Thomas, and Susanne Buddenberg. Berlin - Geteilte Stadt: Zeitgeschichten . Berlin: avant-verlag, 2012. Mawil [Markus Witzel]. Kinderland . Berlin: Reprodukt, 2014. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics . New York: Harper Collins, 1994. Mönch, Max, Alexander Lahl, and Kitty Kahane. Treibsand . Eine Graphic Novel aus den letzten Tagen der DDR . Berlin: WALDE + GRAF bei Metrolit, 2014. Schiller, Friedrich. “On Naive and Sentimental Poetry.” Complete Works . Vol. 2. Philadelphia: I. Kohler, 1861. 549—80. Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP , 1984. 356 Elizabeth Bridges Ulbert, Jörg, and Jörg Mailliet. Gleisdreieck. Berlin 1981 . Berlin: Berlin Story Verlag, 2014. Ulrich, Johann, Thomas Henseler, and Susanne Buddenberg. Grenzfall . Berlin: avant-verlag, 2011. Images Fig. 1. Mönch et al. 101. © Metrolit Verlag GmbH & Co. KG. Fig. 2. Mönch et al. 156. © Metrolit Verlag GmbH & Co. KG. Fig. 3. Mönch et al. 6. © Metrolit Verlag GmbH & Co. KG. Fig. 4. Mawil 234—35. © Markus Mawil Witzel and Reprodukt. Fig. 5. Mawil 292. © Markus Mawil Witzel and Reprodukt.