The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

How we forgive our fathers…

In 1978 Joseph Pollmann, writer, journalist, and father of underground cartoonist Peter Pontiac, disappeared from the face of the earth on a beach in Curaçao.  He left a rented Volkswagen, with the keys in the ignition, along with some personal objects, but was never seen again.  Pollmann’s life at that time was in ruins: his marriage had ended in a divorce due to his incessant womanising, and he had been fired from his job once more after people had objected to his past.  During World War II, Pollmann had been a member of the collaborationist NSB and he had acted as a war correspondent for the German propaganda machine.  After the war, he had to kiss his dreams of becoming a serious journalist goodbye, and was forced to work for ladies magazines, gossip magazines and other, “lower” forms of journalism.  And every time the war caught up with him, and forced him to leave.

(cover to Kraut by and (c) Peter Pontiac, published by  Podium)

In “Kraut”, his father’s “biographic”, Peter Pontiac, who is probably best known for his underground comic work in a style that reads like a crossbreed between Robert Crumb and Spain Rodriguez, tries to find out what happened on that fateful day, and especially how events took him to that point.  He sketches the history of the Pollmanns, German Catholics who were forced to emigrate to Leiden in the Netherlands, and reconstructs his father’s childhood, based on the many notes and drawings he left behind.  It’s a quite tragic story of a hard-working, God-fearing, romantic boy who writes passionate poems and plays of great national history, and who gradually descends into the fascist ideology of collaborative movements like the National Front and NSB, until he enlists in the Waffen SS as a war correspondent.  All in the name of protecting the motherland against godless bolsjewism.

After the war, he meets his future wife Tiny and tries to eek out a life of some sort, writing for magazines and generally keeping a low profile, until his disappearance in 1978.  Pontiac discusses a few scenarios of what could have happened in Curaçao, but in the end he can only conclude that the most logical one is the fact that his father simply committed suicide by walking into the water, in an act of final despair.  His brother had done it before him, and in his own poems he had often referred to the sea as a last resort.

(a frame from Kraut by and (c) Peter Pontiac, published Podium)

As the result of quite intensive research, this may be a bit disappointing, but the true beauty and value of “Kraut” is not in the story itself, but rather in the way in which it is told.  Pontiac writes a letter to his father, with a ballpoint pen in his own, quite remarkable form of printed shorthand.  This letter is illustrated with poems, drawings and quotations from the documents that he has found in his father’s files (official and otherwise), and with numerous examples of typical Pontiac cartooning, combining tableaux-like panels with painfully beautiful typography and often quite nasty details.  Pontiac is at times poetic, sensible even, and, as in any good cabaret, can turn vicious, vitriolic satirical and even bordering on the scabrous.  But his art is always perfect, and executed with a seemingly effortless flair that reminds of that other great book of a father and a son and a war between them : Art Spiegelman’s Maus (which, incidentally, inspired Pontiac to doing this book, after being involved as a letterer in its Yiddish translation).

Translating this book will be a tough cookie, since it contains a lot of text, and also many, many documents, all in Dutch.  But, as Pontiac hints himself, it would be a good Anti-Maus, showing how the next generation of the “other side” tries to cope with their parents’ legacy.

Peter Pontiac: Kraut, 168 pages.

Will appeal to fans of: Robert Crumb, Joe Sacco, Harvey Pekar

Wim Lockefeer lives in Belgium; you can read more of his work on his own Ephemerist blog.