Review - Judenhass by Dave Sim
For the uninitiated, Canadian comic book creator Dave Sim is renowned for his 30-year project “Cerebus,” an epic that was a personal odyssey, part-fantasy, part-satire, sprawling and depthful. One of his follow-ups to this massive project is a book that may, in presentation, seem far more humble, but given its subject matter — the Holocaust — might possibly be of more importance than all the thousands of pages of “Cerebus” gathered together.
“Judenhass” is the title of Sim’s work and a phrase that he encountered in his research — it literally means “Jew Hatred” in German. Sim’s assertion is that the term “anti-Semitism” doesn’t even begin to describe what lead to the Nazis and their rape of mankind — Sim points to the fact that Arabs are, in fact, Semites as one part of his argument of this. More important than any semantics, though, is the history that clings to the idea of “Judenhass,” and it is in this area that Sim travels in order for this graphic novel — or more precisely, graphic historical essay — to unfold
“Judenhass” begins as a personal essay about Sim’s response to the Holocaust — the Shoah — and, indeed, these are the sorts of graphic realizations he explored over the decades in “Cerebus” and perfected to a point that no one else in the comics field has ever really mastered. At a certain point, however, Sim hands over the narrative reigns to the historical voices themselves, following the paper trail of “Judenhass” as it manifests itself in voices both likely and not, including varying degrees of commentary.
It is a surprise to see Mark Twain used in such a way, but Sim’s point is to not so much brand Twain a racist as illustrate the way casual remarks about “the Jews” weaved their way through educated society as an acceptable stereotype. Excreble attitudes are more pronounced from the pens of luminaries such as H.L. Mencken, who flatly states that Jews “could be put down very plausibly as the most unpleasant race ever heard of” because “they lack many of the qualities that mark the civilized man.” It’s common knowledge that Martin Luther, father of Protestantism, was a notorious hater of Jews, but it’s alarming to be faced with quotes from his book “On the Jews and Their Lies,” where Luther advises that “their synagogues be burned down, and that all how are able to toss sulphur and pitch; it would be good if someone could also throw in some hellfire.”
It’s easy to say things like “Well, those were the times,” but that is exactly Sim’s point — Nazi Germany was not a blip in the radar, not a surprise at all, but the culmination of centuries of acceptable disdain for a race of people. Sim brings the point home when he relates Luther’s comments and they are framed with realistic portraits of the horrible work done by the Nazis on the Jewish prisoners in concentration camps. It’s a powerful presentation that directly puts the march of acceptable attitude into the context of their final fruition — a building of pathetic, little statements that directed energy into creating something horrible beyond most of our understanding of the condition.
Sim renders the book in a cartoon, photo-realistic style, in which he labors over the horror with exacting precision. It’s with great discomfort that I describe the book as beautiful, given what it portrays, but that’s the only way I can qualify the work within it. It’s a collage of intricate power.
In the beginning of the book, Sim devotes a page to the luminaries of comic book history — people like Jack Kirby and Stan Lee and Will Eisner and Bob Kane — all Jews, all men who created comic books as our society knows them, many of them doing this as the Holocaust unfolded in Europe. In this way, Sim sees a heritage of his own that is caught up in the evil, making it an almost personal battle. And yet he never veers from his calculated and artful path, he never makes it too personal, and, in the end, creates a brief but jarring document of a nasty little secret far too many of us hold in our family trees.
“Judenhass” is a remarkable work, both scholarly and passionate.
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