Dave Sim has a preview of Judenhass – literally meaning ‘Jew hatred’ – online. I know this will doubtless stir up a fair bit of comment when it comes out in May, but that’s as it should be, because its a subject matter which shouldn’t be forgotten and as more recent events have shown – ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the Balkans, the Lipstadt case of Holocaust denial against David Irving, politicians demonising ‘immigrants’ – the spectre of one group deciding another group of people are ‘untermenschen’ is not one confined to the pages of history. Such odious events prefer to occur behind the screen of walls, razor wire and bureaucracy; one thing they really can’t tolerate is being out in the open, they have to be hidden away to happen, where others can be blamed and people can say “we didn’t know what was happening behind those gates”.
(the cover to Dave Sim’s Judenhass, which reminds me a little of the opening titles to the seminal documentary The World at War; (c) Dave Sim)
Obviously you can only glean so much from a preview, but if it makes people aware of a shameful part of history and so more determined not to see such events repeated then good. I’ll be interested to see the finished one-shot come May, but for right now the faces from this stark image from the online preview are haunting me. And I suppose that’s part of the point of it.
Wed, Feb 27, 2008
Comics and cartoons