`Drawing for me means communication': Anke Feuchtenberger and German Art Comics after 1989

Abstract

My dissertation, “‘Drawing for me means communication’: Anke Feuchtenberger and German Art Comics after 1989,” investigates the art of East German graphic artist Anke Feuchtenberger, one of the most important individuals and teachers working in German comics today. Trained during the GDR’s most experimental decade of artistic production, Feuchtenberger brought elements of the East German avant-garde, traditional printmaking techniques, the legacy of German expressionism, and politics of German unification to bear on art comics after 1989. She thereby pushed German graphic novels into a new realm, redefining the medium in cultural, political and aesthetic terms. My dissertation analyzes the content and visual language of her work as it engaged the politics of unification and transnational discourses on feminism, reflects the aesthetic legacy of the East German avant-garde and contributed to the development of an independent German art comics scene. Chapter One provides historical contexts for the dissertation’s investigation, outlining the history of German comics and the process of East Germany’s adoption of German expressionism into official aesthetic policy before examining the sources of Feuchtenberger’s German expressionist visual rhetoric. Integrating the influence of Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly’s RAW magazine (1980-1991) as an important factor in the development of Feuchtenberger aesthetics, I explore how her expressionist visual rhetoric connects a number of art historical periods, including early twentieth century expressionism, East German neo-expressionism and poster art, and the visual language of American alternative comics. Chapter Two situates Feuchtenberger’s comics within the politics of German unification to investigate how her activism and her poster work for the East German Women’s Movement informed the content, atmosphere and aesthetics of the her graphic art between 1989 and 1995. Chapter Three applies the previous chapter’s understanding of Feuchtenberger’s feminist politics to a formal analysis of her comics and their intertexts. I identify the visual, verbal and narratological language that she engages in Mutterkuchen (1995) as part of a project to develop a feminine form of graphic expression that undermines patriarchal master narratives formally and in terms of content. Chapter Four examines Feuchtenberger and Katrin de Vries’s Hure H triology as it deconstructs the cultural nexus of the whore figure through an abstracted and highly symbolic representation of female experience. The analysis focuses on how Feuchtenberger engages commonly occurring literary and rhetorical tropes to draw out a more potent understanding of female sexuality, one that is defined by the agency of the women themselves, that differs in every individual, and that is in conversation with Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae (1990). My conclusion considers the larger impact of Feuchtenberger, investigating her role in contemporary German comics as both a practitioner and teacher. As one of the most prevalent artists working in graphic art after 1989, who contributed fundamentally to the forming of a German comics avant-garde by developing a new visual and narratological grammar of political art comics, I argue that the history of German comics – and specifically the graphic art of this artist – is an important and heretofore underestimated chapter in the larger art history of united Germany.