Graphic novel “Deux filles nues” by Luz edited by Albin Michel.
German painter Otto Mueller created the painting “Deux filles nues (Two nude girls)” in 1919. Through an artwork which survived turbulent times, the reader follows a changing Germany. He also gets to know the different art dealers.
At the beginning of the book, the author uses a great deal of imagination to introduce us to the life of the Mueller couple. The painter died in 1930 and the painting changed hands for the first time three years later. At that time, inflation was raging in Germany, and the dissatisfaction of the population led to the appointment of Adolf Hitler to the chancellorship by Hindenburg.
Between 1933 and 1946, the painting miraculously survived censorship and the destruction of works deemed degenerate by the Nazis. Thousands of works of modern German art were set on fire by the authorities.
Pogroms spread across Germany. Jewish-owned paintings were seized. When the Gestapo forced part of Ismar Littmann’s (German link, English link) collection to be auctioned off , it selected 64 works, 53 of which were immediately burned.
During the same period, a traveling exhibition entitled “Entartete Kunst” (“Degenerate Art”) was commissioned by Joseph Goebbels, and 730 works traveled between Munich and other major German cities. Ironically, this degenerate art ended up attracting three times as many visitors as acceptable German craftsmanship, whose works were displayed in nearby buildings.
A page from the graphic novel “Deux filles nues” by Luz edited by Albin Michel.
Until 1946, the painting “Deux filles nues” changed ownership several times, and continued to survive the bombings, organized destruction and art thefts carried out by the Nazis.
After the war, the painting’s name was changed from Zwei Mädchenakte (“Two Nude Girls”) to Zwei weibliche Halbakte (“Two Female Half-Nudes”) and toured Germany and the world. In 1976, it was exhibited at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne. Former owners Ruth and Chaim Haller were finally reunited with their painting in 1999. Ruth is the daughter of Ismar Littmann, mentioned at the beginning of this article.
The museum officially returned the work to the owners, but in the same year made an offer to buy it back, which was accepted by the Hallers. Today, the painting can be found in the Expressionist section of Cologne’s Ludwig Museum.
Through his considerable research and the publication of his graphic novel, the author underlines the importance of remaining alert to the political and cultural censorship that regularly resurfaces.
The book ends with a chronology of events and biographies of the main characters. The author goes to great lengths not to show us what the painting “Two Naked Girls” looks like, until we’re practically at the end of the story! A very clever way of keeping our curiosity alive.
The graphic novel “La disparition de Josef Mengele” is a wonderful surprise for me, both in terms of the scenario and the graphics. Anyone interested in true stories will devour this book as it represents a goldmine of astonishing information on the life, or rather the survival, of the Nazi criminal in Latin America.
Who provides him with the money he needs? How does he protect himself? Does he lead the existence of a pasha? How does he behave abroad? Does his thinking on race show any sign of evolution, or is it still sclerotic? Why does Argentina encourage the arrival of these fugitive assassins?
For the general public, there are two categories of National Socialist criminals: the first concerns the names that received most media coverage at the Nuremberg Tribunal. The second involves Nazi criminals who fled abroad, thanks to political or family support. Josef Mengele belongs to both groups. He is holed up in Latin America and knows that several organizations are seriously looking for him, including Mossad.
How does he remain roaming for so long? It soon becomes clear that the Mossad is not only concentrating on Nazi criminals on the run. The book introduces us to some other priorities for the agency, one of which is very urgent: the elimination of former German scientists working in Egypt to create radioactive waste weapons designed to destroy Israel. The secret services must choose between Mengele, a past threat, or a more immediate danger. With limited resources, they have to adjust and deal with the most pressing situation.
Nazis were integrated into the new German government.
There is, however, a third category that the public has heard very little about, and which is also discussed in the graphic novel: these are Nazis who rejoined the new German government a few years after the end of the Second World War.
Indeed, the Allied powers of the time – the USA, Great Britain, France and the Soviet Union – administered the occupation zones of the German territory after the Second World War. But tensions between East and West grew rapidly. Each side accused the other of imperialist or communist expansionism.
To offer a better-organized resistance to the Soviet Union, Germany’s autonomy had to be quickly restored. The former Nazis had experience of governance that was immediately available.
If the Allies adopted the clear-cut position of preventing the Nazis from attaining essential functions in the public apparatus of the future Bonn Republic, then people with little or no knowledge had to be trained to carry out the more complex tasks. Time was short, as was the will to bring all possible war criminals to justice.
So, many Nazis found work in government agencies. One thing led to another, and some of these former Nazis recycled as government agents became part of the inner circle protecting the most prominent war criminals who had fled abroad. Josef Mengele benefited from this high-level support.
But several additional Germans, also in high places, acted in the opposite direction, striving to flush out the biggest criminals, at the risk of their own health and safety. One such person is introduced in the book: Fritz Bauer. This man contacted Mossad with information that eventually help to capture Adolf Eichmann. The latter went on trial in Israel and sentenced to hanging.
Eichmann and Mengele meet each other.
Mengele reads the newspapers and suspects that his end will resemble that of Eichmann. The graphic novel shows him as a hunted animal, talking to himself. His racist, backward-looking words drive away the individuals who could support him most in the last years of his life. He withered slowly and died on a beach in Brazil. But it was not officially known until 1985.
The book covers a period of several decades. It features a brief summary of Mengele’s actions as a doctor at Auschwitz. He is not alone, even if he remains very high-profile to the general public. A large number of scientific assistants carried out experiments on humans, including one who became rector of the University of Münster after the end of the Second World War.
The authors mention in passing the idea of a Fourth Reich pursued by Mengele and his ilk. In short, readers won’t get bored with this skilfully constructed graphic novel.
Cover page of the book Black Detroit by Herb Boyd.
As the author Herb Boyd writes, « this is the first book to consider black Detroit from a long view, in a full historical tableau. » (p.14). If you are looking for a significant black person that influenced Detroit’s history, he or she is in the book.
The author covers the arrival of Blacks in Detroit through the Underground Railroad the type of work they could find, the music they created, their need to have their own church to avoid racism, the work at Ford, the influence of trade unions, the poor housing conditions, etc.
Of course, there are several paragraphs on racism, police repression and useless violence, the problems caused by the KKK and how a few individuals dealt with it, the Smith Act, the American Civil War and the desire the end slavery, the presence of Rosa Parks in the city and Nelson Mandela’s visit in Detroit in 1990.
There is not only something on the past history and development of Detroit but also thoughts on the future of the city and how it will have to deal with the fact that there are so many people choosing to live in the suburbs instead of in Detroit itself.
Since the fight for equal rights, racism, police repression and the useless deaths of so many black individuals have continued to be an important problem in United States, I have chosen a few quotes from the book on those subjects.
I also chose a paragraph on Nelson Mandela’s visit in Detroit. When Nelson Mandela left United States to fly back to South Africa, his plane had to do a stopover in Iqaluit, in Canada’s Arctic. I was working as a flight service specialist (FSS) at Iqaluit in 1990, so I could see him and Winnie attending an official ceremony in the middle of the night at the airport’s terminal. You can read the real life stories in Iqaluit on my website.
Detroit and Canada.
« In 1795, Detroit was still under British jurisdiction, and the city was a de facto part of Upper Canada. » (p.22)
« Judge Woodward stipulated in a later ruling that if black Americans were to acquire freedom in Canada, they could not be returned to slavery in the United States. “Two of Denison’s children […] took advantage of this ruling by escaping to Canada for a few years and then returning to Detroit as free citizens”. Theirs was a landmark case and would be cited as a precedent in a number of appeals for emancipation by enslaved African Americans. (p.25)
The Smith Act
“The Smith Act, was written so that labor organization and agitation for equal rights could be construed as sedition and treason, the same as actually fighting to overthrow the government by force” (p.162)
Police repression and brutality
“[…] Twenty-five blacks had been killed in Detroit while in police custody in 1925, eight times the number killed under police supervision that year in New York City, whose black population was at least twice as large” (p.112)
“During STRESS’s (Stop the Robberies and Enjoy Safe Streets) first year as a death squad – cum – SWAT team [near 1970], the city’s police force had the highest number of civilian killings per capita of any American police department. During its three and a half years of existence, STRESS officers shot and killed 24 men, 22 of them African American.[…] Among the STRESS officers, none was as seemingly problematic as crew chief Raymond Peterson. Before he was assigned to STRESS, he had amassed a record number of complaints. During his first two years on the squad, he took part in nine killings and three nonfatal shootings. Bullets from Peterson’s gun killed five of the victims. No charges were brought in any of these cases.” (p.226-227)
The policeman Raymond Peterson and a murder charge in Detroit in the seventies.
“[Around 1999] gentrification was one thing to worry about, but police brutality was a far more menacing immediacy for young black Detroiters. They were keenly aware there was little mercy awaiting them from the police, nor from school conselors or employment agencies, and certainly not from the drug dealers” (p.292)
“[Around 2001] Detroit, according to reports from several local papers, had the highest number of fatal shootings among the nation’s largest cities” (p.300)
“Throughout the nation over the previous decade, from 1999 to 2009, gun violence had taken the lives of thousands of young black men and women, and hundreds of them were unarmed victims of unwarranted police violence. Few of these terrible tragedies were as heart-wrenching as the killing of seven-year-old Aiyana Jones by a police officer in May 2010. It was around midnight and Aiyana was asleep on the couch with her grandmother nearby watching television. Neither of them had time to react to the thud at the door nor the flash-bang grenade tossed into the living room by the police at the start of the raid.
Officer Joseph Weekley immediately began firing his MP5 submachine gun blindly through the window into the smoke and chaos. One of the bullets entered Aiyana’s head and exited through her neck. She was killed instantly. The SWAT team had come looking for a murder suspect who lived upstairs but left with only a dead child. […]. » (p.327-328).
Education
“Ethelene Crockett, having raised three children, earned a medical degree from Howard University in 1942. She completed her internship at Detroit Receiving Hospital, and because no Detroit hospital would accept an African American woman physician, she did her residency in New York City. Finally in 1952, she was accepted at a hospital in Detroit, becoming the first black woman in her field of obstetrics and gynecology to practice in the state.” (p.163)
No middle-class for young blacks.
“With the traditional routes to middle-class success closed, young black Detroiters sought other means of survival, mainly via the underground economy.” (p.254)
Nelson Mandela in Detroit
“In the summer of 1990, Nelson Mandela toured the United States after spending twenty-seven years in prison. […] When Mandela and his wife, Winnie, emerged from the plane [in Detroit], one of the first people they recognized was Rosa Parks. Nelson Mandela stated that Parks had been his inspiration during the long years he was jailed on Robben Island and that her story had inspired South African freedom fighters’” (p.268).
Detroit’s future
“Most Detroiters live in neighborhoods, and in these areas, development is uneven. There are some flashes of improvement, but by and large, communities are still struggling with unemployment, crime, and low-achieving schools. Detroit is a city with large expanses of uninhabited land and is sprinkled with thirty-one thousand vacant and dilapidated houses. In various pockets throughout town, community-based organizations have worked tirelessly to maintain their respective areas against a tide of neglect and disinvestment. The current mayoral administration has tried to use an assortment of methods to arrest the decline of the neighborhoods, with moderate success. This gargantuan task has been assisted with massive aid from the Obama administration, but the city still has major hurdles ahead with a large poor, unskilled, and semiliterate population.” (p.342).
Click on the link for other books on the history of cities on my blog.
US President Donald Trump is preparing for his Fall 2020 re-election by practicing a recipe used by the Chicago Daley machine. Father and son Daley ruled Chicago for decades using police repression.
Policeman Derek Chauvin, who killed African-American George Floyd, offers the President of the United States an opportunity to use this recipe. The murder being followed by protests and looting, Trump complained about the weakness of the leaders and suggested not only that law enforcement officials dominate the street, but that use of the military may be required against the population.
Here is a short excerpt from a summary of the book “Chicago“:
“The exploitation of racial fears was quite successful. Daley was defending his policies by saying that “ most people are more worried about a black uproar than of a mayor that orders the use of lethal force to put an end to it and they recognized themselves far less in pacific protesters than in policemen that hit them with truncheons” (p.319).”
Cover of the book “Histoire de Chicago” by Andrew Diamond and Pap Ndiaye
The high social tensions and unnecessary violence that follow the police repression generate ever more fear, and it is this fear that some politicians take advantage of.
The most conservative politicians have long understood that installing fear in the population pays off politically. It is an easy and expeditious method. The government is responsible for “dominating” real and more often fictitious enemies and, in doing so, reassures the population while diminishing the rights and freedom of the American population so that it can act as it pleases later on other matters.
Even the usually silent American generals have made public appearances in an attempt to save American values. According to several observers, there is a gradual shift towards a seriously worrisome authoritarian political control.
Respect for the African-American population was the main factor at stake in the American Civil War, which lasted four years, between 1861 and 1865 and killed 750,000 people. It also cost President Lincoln his life. The problem of respect for African-Americans is still an issue.
All these people seen in protest at the death of George Floyd represent the non-racist side of the United States. It should not be forgotten that there is a large part of the American population who still dreams of retaining traditional white power: a population that cannot accept that the United States is changing and whose wealth comes from the mix of cultures and races. The solid base of American voters who support Donald Trump, this pathological liar who can say everything and its opposite in a single sentence, is not ready to give up on him.
Other non-negligible factors favor Trump during the American presidential elections in the fall of 2020: 1) a well-stocked election fund (pressure groups such as the NRA are big donors and influencers, 2) candidates from the Republican Party who approve of the Trump method or choose silence when they do not agree, 3) a hesitant Joe Biden who will not be able to stand up for confrontation during televised political debates, 4) an economy which will recover quickly with unemployment which has already started to decline, just in time for the election campaign. The right-wing media will ignore the appalling initial mismanagement of COVID-19 until the elections are over.
If I am wrong with my prediction, I will never have been so happy with my mistake!
The 2016 televised political debates on CNN between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump put forward the topic of racism in the United States. Chicago was specifically mentioned as it detains the national record for violent deaths. The book “Histoire de Chicago” allows, among other subjects, to better understand what feeds social inequalities between Blacks and Whites since the creation of Chicago.
The reader understands that it is not the cultural deficiencies that are at the base of the problems but an institutionalized racism and the economic choices of the different municipal administrations.
The city grew set against a background in which the color of a person’s skin determined the type of work that he or she was allowed to occupy. Eventually, even urban planning was designed so that Blacks and Whites would be separated: the artificial walls created by the construction of the Dan Ryan Expressway or the Dearborn Park are in themselves good examples.
In 2016, the polls show a strong support for the Unites States republican candidate Donald Trump. Trump knows Chicago very well and he had his “Trump Tower” built there.
The republican candidate takes over in his political platform some of the elements that have made the popularity and success of the Daley family who ruled over Chicago for decades: the exploitation of fear between ethnical groups to build and maintain a political power, the idea of building a wall and the use of torture as a simplistic solution to complex problems.
This populism attracts a certain class of American electors who are easily scared by the differences between people and cultures.
The book “Histoire de Chicago” is very much a reflection of what is happening today and the authors do no fear to raise delicate political subjects.
Cover of the book “Histoire de Chicago” by Andrew Diamond and Pap Ndiaye
Chicago
Chicago became a territory of the United States with the Treaty of Paris in 1783. Subsequently, natives progressively lost their lands through different manoeuvers, among them the signature of contracts while they were drunk. Around 1830, when the Indians were definitely gone, the speculative fever started.
Railways
Starting around 1860, Chicago organized itself to become the main hub for the most important railway companies of the United States. The city grew very quickly. Passengers, livestock, cereals and other merchandise had to transit through Chicago. The city depended on the train to grow, and the railway companies depended on Chicago to be profitable.
The rapid growth of Chicago’s population was essentially the driver of migration from Europe (Irish, Germans, Polish and Italians). The evolving and often violent relationships between Chicago’s ethnic groups is well explained in the book.
Retail stores
Just before 1900, the Chicago population witnessed the creation of the first retail stores in which a customer could order through a catalogue and use credit. New categories of employees and managers were added to the working population and helped shape the middle class.
Black immigration in Chicago
Around 1910, there was an important increase in the Black immigration coming from southern United States. Chicago was an abolitionist city. This does not mean that it was favoring racial equality but that it was against slavery. In fact, Chicago progressively became the most segregated city in the United States.
Blacks were massively arriving from southern United States, not only for economic reasons but also to get away from the slavery, racial violence and segregation that was the norm in multiple states. Although far from ideal, the situation in Chicago was better than in the south of the country.
The First World War considerably reduced the number of immigrants coming from Europe. This created a serious problem for a city that was benefiting from numerous military contracts and needed a very high number of employees in its manufacturing companies. This also favored the “great migration”, which is to say “the spectacular intensification of the Afro-American migration towards the North-East and Middle West major urban centers […]” (p.143)
Chicago’s slaughterhouses
Chicago was renowned for the very high number of its slaughterhouses, in particular its pork slaughterhouses. The smell and pollution created by this activity was terrible. Chemical laboratories allowed for the commercial use of all parts of an animal. The writer Georges Duhamel wrote in his book that in Chicago “nothing leaves the slaughterhouse but the squeal” (p.63).
Black workers did not have the right to work in the Chicago steel industry and had to limit themselves to slaughterhouses where they were hired as manual workers. They had no access to qualified jobs.
The Second World War
During the Second World War, Chicago was competing with other major American cities to obtain huge military contracts. The city did not manage its efforts to show it supported the American government. Chicago eventually received billions of dollars for the construction of tanks, tractors, torpedoes, bombs and aircrafts (among them the B-29 bomber aircraft).
To compensate for the lack of manpower, since a lot of men enrolled as volunteers and had gone to war, women massively entered the workforce. Employers saw an opportunity to maximize their profits by reducing the salaries of working women, which corresponded only to 65% of the men’s salary for the same work. This represents the way women were thanked for their effort and collaboration.
Transformation of the Chicago economy
A United Airlines Boeing B747 is taxiing over the expressway at the Chicago O’Hare international airport (on aviation postcard)
Chicago experienced a profound transformation during the ‘70 s. The closure of the slaughterhouses in 1971, and the diminishing demand for steel mills products signalled the end of the industrial era. It was followed by an opening on the international and the development of a new economy based on specialized services like finance, real estate, insurance, marketing, publicity and legal services.
The Chicago mayor, Richard M. Daley, fostered the establishment of a new socio-professional class of creators in the city (design, arts, music, etc.) by considering it like another “ethnic group” who needed privileged space to express itself.
The development of housing estates and complexes during the ‘60s and ‘70 s
During the ‘60s and ‘70s, the Chicago landscape was profoundly modified. Huge housing estates and complexes were built (Magnificent Mile, Sandburgh Village, Marina City, Lake Point Tower, Dearborn Park) where the White population lived, in the north part of the city. The Chicago Tribune said of Dearborn Park that it was “a fortress reserved for Whites and aimed at protecting the financial district against the Blacks”.
The Daley administration had to fight against urban sprawling and consequently favored the construction of skyscrapers to maintain the presence of Whites in the central area while receiving more property taxes. Two stock exchange institutions were created, the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME). The creation of those two institutions as well as of the complexes did not do anything to change the dynamic between the Whites and the Blacks.
The racial segregation
Although Martin Luther King was a dominant figure in the fight for the civil rights of the Blacks in the United States, the authors underline that the black population of Chicago had not waited for a leader to promote their rights as they had already started to mobilize themselves years before.
Martin Luther King’s ideas on the integration of Blacks did not receive the support of everyone in the black community, especially the Chicago black politicians who benefited from a special treatment from the Daley machine, which favored the status quo.
Chicago’s mayor Richard M. Daley experienced much success. To stay in power, the Daley Machine “rested squarely on the continued separation and competition between communities”. (p.322-323) The separation between Blacks and Whites was planned and maintained. There was and there are still two Chicagos.
A highway, the Dan Ryan Expressway, was even positioned in such a way that it would create an artificial wall between the Daley’ s district, Bridgeport and the Black Belt: “This was the most massive obstacle that the city could build, other than a wall, to separate the white South Side from the Black Belt” (p.259).
The Daley Machine
We cannot talk about Chicago without underlining the importance of the Daley family and its political machine: “Through an authoritarian control of the “machine”, Richard J. Daley and his son Richard M. Daley, each one in his own style, dominated the Chicago political scene for forty-three years, between 1955 and 2011.
During that period which saw the development and the subsequent decline of modern civil rights, the ghettoization of huge parts of the West Side and South Side, a massive immigration wave from Latin America and the transformation of the city from an industrial giant to a world-class global services economy center, Chicago barely knew one legitimate municipal election or one real debate at the municipal council” (p.16)
There was rampant corruption and secret budgets in the Daley administration. In total opaqueness, the City Hall diverted the funds reserved to disadvantaged neighbourhood and distributed it to the privileged ones.
“[…] While important businessmen, Mafiosi and others who had links with the Daley machine were getting richer, Blacks and Latinos in need were shot in the street or tortured in the precinct’s’ back rooms” (p.394)
Law firms and entrepreneurs gave huge sums of money in exchange for important contracts. The Daley Machine was never short of money.
Beechcraft N35 Bonanza N545T in flight during the years when the Daley family was reigning over Chicago (on aviation postcard)
Racial tensions and repression policies under Mayor Daley
“By the 1930s, Chicago had become, according to the historian Frank Donner “the national capital for police repression” (p.321)
The black migration that took place during the 1940s and 1950s scared the Chicago population that felt besieged. This increased racial tensions that were already present and maintained. It was easier to accept more policemen than social housing.
The muscled tactics of Mayor Daley were the most obvious during the 1968 Democrat Convention, when policemen and 7000 National Guard soldiers “went down hard on the [crowd of 10,000 young protesters] in an explosion of mindless violence” (p.315)
The exploitation of racial fears was quite successful. Daley was defending his policies by saying that “ most people are more worried about a black uproar than of a mayor that orders the use of lethal force to put an end to it and they recognized themselves far less in pacific protesters than in policemen that hit them with truncheons” (p.319).
Media propaganda and the Daley Machine’s police were efficient in convincing the Blacks to respect the established order. Torture was common in the zone 2’s precinct, in the South Side, between 1972 and 1991.
The expected arrival of a new black mayor, Harold Washington, during the 1980’s, increased the fear that everything would change in Chicago. Everything was done to undermine Washington’s candidacy, but he eventually won helped by the black vote.
There were several left-wing political movements which all had their own objectives and were unable to unite under the same progressist banner. This provided the necessary margin of manoeuver to the Daley Machine, who worked in cooperation with the federal authorities to organize the state repression.
Back cover of the book “Histoire de Chicago”
Social problems in disadvantaged neighbourhoods
During the 1995 heat wave, 739 persons died in Chicago. The social precarity helped increase the number of deaths, but it was easier to determine that the victims were responsible of their fate.
The Blacks and Latinos believed, and still do, that the problems related to their school system and neighbourhoods come from some cultural deficiencies, but in trying to understand the real nature of their problems, they overlook the ongoing racism and economic choices of the different city administrations since the creation of the city.
“The 1980 census showed that ten out of sixteen of the poorest neighbourhoods in United States were in Chicago, in the Black Belt, of course”(p.334)
In 2002, Chicago was the American murder capital, with 647 victims. In 2008-2009, the city held the record of students killed in public schools which were gang related.
Today, there are two Chicagos
Today, Chicago benefits from well-defined ethnic neighbourhoods that attract tourists in search of diversity. However, the sustained racial segregation policies have isolated the black neighbourhoods and in 2016 Chicago still has the sad reputation of being the murder capital of the United States.
“The Chicago situation looks more and more like a science-fiction scenario. While part of the city has an economic capacity that sets it among the five first in the world, the other part is frozen in an austerity situation that could very well become irreversible” (p.443)
