“Zukunft braucht Erinnerung: Judenhass, Shoah und Israel im Comic.“

26.10 Time: 15.30 Location: Städtische Galerie Bremen as part of the Bremen Zine Festival.

A lecture by Martin Frenzel. The lecture is dedicated to the triad of past, present and future and shows how well suited the comic is as a vehicle for an active, democratic culture of remembrance of 'never again'. In the spirit of Michel Friedman: "Hatred of Jews is hatred of mankind". Building a bridge to the present in times of rapidly growing, unrestrained hatred of Jews in Europe and especially in the country of the perpetrators, Germany. For example, the works of the Belgian-Israeli illustrator Michel Kichka, who comes from a family of Holocaust survivors, with "Second Generation. What I Never Told My Father" and his two successful Israel comic stories "Falafel Sauce Piquante" and "The Other Jerusalem", which show one thing above all: The diversity and multifaceted nature of the only democracy in the Middle East, Israel. It is not enough just to read Joe Sacco to understand Israel's colorful diversity and the situation in the Middle East. In the meantime, there is also a comic anthology published in France in September 2024, but graphically rather unconvincing except for Kichka, on the deep trauma of the Hamas massacre of October 7, 2023, "Au coeurs du 7 octobre" (In the Heart of October 7), in which the Islamist terrorists murdered, burned, raped, scourged and tortured to death almost 1,200 people - men, women, children, babies. This was the largest mass murder of Jews since the Shoah. A German comic anthology, on the other hand, stands out due to its rather diffuse perspective: It asks the rather ego-related question "How are you? A question of solidarity and empathy, however, should have been: "How are the victims of October 7 and their relatives doing?".

Sponsors and cooperation partners:

Deutsch-Israelische Gesellschaft Bremen/ Junges Forum der DIG, Landeszentrale für politische Bildung, Monom Stiftung, Sebastian Cobler Stiftung, Senator für Kultur Bremen, Städtische Galerie Bremen, Menora Gemeinde HB/BHV, Literaturkontor e.V. Associatione Delle Talpe