Educating to Remember: The Public Use of Comics in Germany and Italy

This article presents different public uses of comics in representing difficult pasts on the basis of four case studies: the National Socialist and the German democratic Republic pasts in the German memory field, and the Fascist past and the terrorist/mafia massacres in the Italian memory field. The comparative analysis focus on three factors of influence: 1. the narratives and aesthetic forms culturally legitimated in the two national public memory spaces; 2. the cultural frames which define a specific past; 3. the cultural paradigms hegemonic in the transnational memory comics field. In the final analysis, the article contemplates not only the graphic representations of the past, but also the social actors (artists, publishers, political institutions, public intellectuals) involved in this process of collectively working memory, their symbolic and cultural resources, and their power relationships