Ink on Silence: Dealing with the past through images, objects and music in "Love looks away" and "Belonging: a German Reckons with History and Home"

Writing about the Holocaust means negotiating with silence and investigating the repercussions of a trauma that never stopped affecting our present. The process of historical recognition from the perspective of a third-generation artist implies the reconstruction of the past through objects, photographs and documents, written and visual evidence. Through the analysis of two contemporary German graphic novels – Love looks away(2008) by Line Hoven and Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home (2018) by Nora Krug – this essay will identify the multiple compositional techniques and aesthetic strategies in order to understand how drawing, text and photography converge in a single effort to untangle History, either micro or macro, in order to understand what came before and after significant historical events – and perhaps even explain why those events occurred.