Review of the comedian “Madeleine, the Resistant” | EUROtoday

Vor zwei Jahren erschien auf Deutsch der erste Band von Madeleine Riffauds Memoiren – als Comic, aufgeschrieben von Jean-David Morvan und gezeichnet von Dominique Bertail, unter dem Titel „Madeleine, die Widerständige“. Wie man den Namen der Beteiligten ablesen wird, geht es um französische Erlebnisse. Und um was für welche!

Riffaud ist eine der letzten heute noch lebenden Résistance-Kämpferinnen. Als junge Frau trat sie in Paris dem Widerstand gegen die deutschen Besatzer bei. Vor einem Monat wurde sie hundert, und dass der zweite Band jetzt so knapp danach auf Deutsch erscheint, ist also nur passend. Es war aber auch ein Hazardspiel mit der alten Dame, denn auch die französische Originalausgabe war nur ein Jahr früher erschienen – zum neunundneunzigsten Geburtstag. Und die Albenreihe war da ja noch nicht zu Ende. Wie sehr aber hat man sich gewünscht, dass Mme Riffaud deren Abschluss noch erlebt!

In Frankreich ist das tatsächlich geglückt. Pünktlich am 23. August, dem hundertsten Geburtstag der Widerstandskämpferin, ist dort kürzlich der dritte Band erschienen (wie die ersten beiden bei Dupuis). Mutmaßlich hatte Jean-David Morvan seine Gespräche mit Riffaud zwar schon lange vorher vollständig geführt. Aber das unschätzbare Privileg bei einem Comic (oder auch bei jeder anderen Erzählform) über den Zweiten Weltkrieg, noch Zeitzeugen als unmittelbare Mitarbeiter daran zu haben, ja in diesem Fall sogar die Protagonistin selbst, betrifft natürlich auch die Kontrolle von Bertails Zeichnungen durch Riffaud. Wie wirklichkeitsgetreu stellt er das dar, an was sie sich erinnert? Niemand außer ihr könnte es sagen. Das, was „Madeleine, die Widerständige“ herausragen lässt, ist also weniger die graphische oder erzählerische Qualität als die Authentizität.

Am Ende von Band 2, der den Untertitel „Das rote Federbett“ trägt (der Abschlussband wird dann „Nudeln mit Tomaten“ heißen; diese etwas geschmäcklerischen Titel verdanken sich Bildern, die Riffaud in den Gedichten geprägt hat, die sie seit den siebziger Jahren in Frankreich publiziert hat), ist das passiert, was schon im ersten Teil angekündigt wurde: Die damals noch nicht zwanzigjährige Madeleine wird kurz vor Beginn der Invasion von den Deutschen festgenommen und hat das Todesurteil zu erwarten. Die Folter bei den Verhören beginnt. Auf der letzten der 125 neuen Comicseiten wird es dunkel um die entstellte Madeleine. Ein Cliffhanger, der seine Wirkung tut, auch wenn wir alle wissen, dass sie überlebt hat.

So it's not necessary to offer away the ending of the second half – we knew about it. What we didn't know is how the resistance labored, and that’s the central plot component of this center a part of the trilogy. There are complicated buildings that had been designed to forestall particular person fighters from figuring out greater than two or three comrades, in order that they might not reveal names within the occasion of arrest below duress. Or the hierarchies that had been intentionally opaque for a similar purpose, and the unusual undeniable fact that individuals who you’d hardly have thought had been able to doing so (for instance as a result of they had been bodily impaired) had been typically on the high of the resistance. We knew all of this from different resistance tales, particularly Jean-Pierre Melville's magnificent 1969 function movie “Army in the Shadows”, however in “Madeleine, the Resistant” it’s taken to the intense, as a result of a complete panorama unfolds right here, whereas in Melville's movie the main focus is on a handful of fighters. Morvan has researched far past Riffaud's tales and thus created a sound image of the Resistance.

Only as a comic book, which is why it would sadly hardly appeal to the identical consideration as Anne Weber's verse novel “Annette, ein Heldinnenepos”, which gained the German Book Prize in 2020. Morvan and Bertail's collaboration with Riffaud, nevertheless, was no much less intense and intimate than Weber's with the résistante Anne Beuamanoir, who was ninety-eight when she died in 2022. The urgency for these fascinating ladies to inform their tales as soon as once more on the finish of their respective lives is palpable in each verse and each picture of the respective books.

As I mentioned, the volumes of “Madeleine, the Resistant” will not be notably authentic (Weber's novel has extra to supply as a consequence of its uncommon verse kind). Rather, the illustrated trilogy follows the sample of historic comics concerning the Second World War which are extraordinarily well-liked in France: realistically drawn figures, meticulously designed backgrounds, muted colours (every little thing is bathed in blue, solely often vibrant pink stands out to set an accent). Bertail is a stable however not elegant illustrator; Madeleine's left foot on the duvet of the second quantity is a physiognomic impossibility, however that didn't damage Tischbein's Goethe. More necessary are the depth and the authenticity – which is additional enhanced by the resistance fighter's interspersed poems, that are thankfully printed bilingually, though the translator Marcel Le Comte, who’s acquainted from many comics and who changed Annika Wisniewski within the second quantity, does his job very effectively.

But Morvan deserves true admiration, as a result of even when his Muhammad Ali comedian state of affairs from 2021, which was additionally revealed in Germany (“Kinshasa 1974”, by Bahoe Books), was already glorious, he has surpassed himself as soon as once more with “Madeleine, the Resistant” (or reasonably: 3 times over). But it’s also a couple of time that’s notably expensive to the screenwriter, who was born in 1968; in 2016 he already impressed with a quantity on Cartier-Bresson's work as a warfare photographer (“Germany 1945”, additionally by Bahoe). Who would have ever thought that the previous writer for the “Spirou and Fantasio” sequence may write so professionally and but so personally transferring?

It is barely becoming that he ended up at Avant Verlag, undoubtedly probably the most political of the established German comedian publishers. This “Madeleine” is an evocation of a misplaced time from which we will be taught quite a bit for the current. Not by way of the unconventional nature of the technique of resistance – on the climax of the second quantity, Madeleine shoots a Wehrmacht soldier regardless of her scruples, and the image during which this occurs is stripped of all ornament, with solely a white space across the shooter and the sufferer, as if the entire world had been worn out in that second – however by way of the inflexibility within the face of authoritarian politics.

There is not any sugarcoating of something – this comedian trilogy, which has a complete of greater than 300 and fifty pages, is just not a heroine epic, however a downright brutal chronicle of the pathos of resistance within the face of the superior energy of the occupiers, particularly on this second half. But ultimately, issues turned out effectively for the oppressed as a result of they didn't let themselves be intimidated. That greater than deserves such a big comedian cycle. And if the work on it has stored Madeleine Riffaud alive just a little bit to this point, that alone would have been value it.