Lincoln Snyder

Lincoln Snyder

December 18, 2025

Memory and Counter-Archives: Dismantling the Communicative Silence in Nora Krug’s Heimatand Bianca Schaalburg’s Der Duft der Kiefern

For some families, silence is the loudest sound in the home. In the living rooms of post-war West Germany, silence filled the spaces amidst the colorful noise of the Wirtschaftswunder, functioning not as a passive forgetfulness, but rather as an active construct designed to hold back overwhelming shame. To understand the weight of this silence, one must understand the conflict that defined West German memory culture: the tension between political necessity and moral failure. German philosopher Hermann Lübbe famously defined this atmosphere as a “communicative silence,” arguing it constituted a necessary social pact to integrate former perpetrators into the new democracy. Conversely, writer Ralph Giordano condemned this same phenomenon as a “Second Guilt,” a moral failure to confront the Holocaust that weighed as heavily as the crimes themselves. For the generation that rebuilt Germany, silence was a survival strategy; for their children and grandchildren, however, it became a gap in the family narrative that demanded attention.

Contemporary engagement with this gap has found a potent medium in the graphic novel. Nora Krug’s Heimat (2018) and Bianca Schaalburg’s Der Duft der Kiefern (2021) use the unique intermedial capacity of graphic novels to excavate these family silences, acting as detectives in their own archives. In this essay, I argue that Krug and Schaalburg utilize the graphic novel to construct their own subjective counter-archives that dismantle Lübbe’s “communicative silence.” Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of “counter-memory,” I will show that these authors do not merely document the past, but physically reconstruct it. By engaging in a process of subjective forensic reconstruction, using art to fill the voids left by the official histories, Krug and Schaalburg transform their books into therapeutic interventions. Through the intermedial friction between manipulable images and unyielding text, they expose the labor required to maintain the silence and transform the abstract “Second Guilt” into legible, tangible historical evidence.

Theoretical Framework: The Architecture of Silence

The silence encountered by Krug and Schaalburg was as a structural force which formed the foundation upon which the Federal Republic of Germany built itself, and to help understand the authors’ interventions we must first define the “archive” they seek to dismantle. Michel Foucault defines an archive not merely as a physical repository of documents, but as “the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events” (145), functioning as the invisible system that determines which stories society preserves and which it discards. In the context of 1950s West Germany, this Foucaultian archive, the law of what can be said, was a social pact in which Germans agreed to say nothing. In his influential 1983 analysis, Hermann Lübbe argued that a „kommunikatives Beschweigen“ (Lübbe, 1983, 594) regarding the specific biographical involvement of individuals in the Third Reich was necessary for the „Integration der vielen Täter“ into the Federal Republic (Lübbe, 1983, 585). According to Lübbe, the fledgling democracy could not have survived a purge of the millions of citizens who carried political and moral burdens: “Diese gewisse Stille war das sozialpsychologisch und politisch nötige Medium der Verwandlung unserer Nachkriegsbevölkerung in die Bürgerschaft der Bundesrepublik Deutschland” (Lübbe, quoted in Schildt, 2013, 150). To transform a population of Nazi followers into democratic citizens, society reached a tacit agreement: the public would treat the past as a collective catastrophe, but they would suspend individual accountability, thereby allowing for the stabilization of the new state.

While this silence may have proved politically expedient, it acted as a moral corrosive. Ralph Giordano, writing in 1987, attacked this “großen Frieden mit den Tätern,” coining the term “die zweite Schuld” to describe the repression and denial of the crimes: „Die zweite Schuld ist die Verdrängung und Verleugnung der ersten nach 1945“ (11). For Giordano, the “Second Guilt” represented the continuation of National Socialism by other means, not in the form of ongoing violence, but rather in the form of continued denial. This guilt did not remain abstract; it permeated the domestic sphere and poisoned the trust between the war generation and their children. The fathers who rebuilt the cities were the same men who had burned others or been burned themselves, and their refusal to speak created a psychological vacuum in the postwar German home. This vacuum was not merely an absence of noise, but a space actively policed by family loyalty, where asking questions was framed as a betrayal of the father’s labor. By maintaining this silence, the war generation transformed the home from a safe space into a place of ongoing moral compromise.

As a medium, the graphic novel has a unique capacity to confront this silence and guilt through the simultaneous presentation of text and image. As Lynn Wolff argues, comics have the power to “resurrect and materialize” lost histories (137). A text-only history allows for rhetorical evasion; a writer can use passive voice or vague language to hide culpability. A photo-only album allows for a facade; the smiling faces in a family portrait assert harmlessness. The combination of both, however, destroys these defenses: by placing image next to text, or by laying text over image, the graphic novel forces the reader to inhabit the gap between Lübbe’s silence and Giordano’s guilt. In this intermedial space, Krug and Schaalburg use their books to build their counter-archive, positioning their narratives against this cultural architecture of silence. Because the graphic novel requires the reader to negotiate between the visual evidence and the textual narration, it mimics the cognitive dissonance of the author. By physically layering handwritten doubts over official typewritten documents, the authors do not just describe the “Second Guilt”; they force the reader to re-enact the forensic process of uncovering it.

Synopses: The Incomplete Archives

In both texts, the authors position themselves as forensic investigators. Both graphic novels function as quests for missing information, driven by the third generation’s need to uncover what lies beneath the “fresh plaster” of their family history, yet struggling to gain a full picture because the previous generations maintained their silence so effectively. Nora Krug’s Heimat documents her search for the truth about her grandfather Willi and her uncle Franz-Karl, and the narrative gains traction through the discovery of gaps in these family stories. She investigates the ambiguity of her grandfather Willi’s status as a “Mitläufer” as well as the romanticized, yet unprocessed, death of her uncle Franz-Karl, who fell in combat in Italy. Regarding Willi, Krug scours archives, flea markets, and family attics, attempting to determine if her grandfather hid his Jewish employer or merely profited from his dispossession. Parallel to this archival work, she tells the story of learning more about her fallen uncle, including a family trip to Italy culminating in the family’s discovery of Franz-Karl’s grave. Despite her exhaustive forensic work, she never finds the “smoking gun” that would either condemn or exonerate her family completely. The archive remains partial—a collection of fragments that she must glue together with her own artistic interpretation.

Bianca Schaalburg’s Der Duft der Kiefern follows a similarly investigative trajectory but focuses on the domestic space of Berlin. Schaalburg interrogates the history of her grandfather Heinrich, who served in Riga during the war, and the history of the house she grew up in at Zehlendorf. The central mystery revolves around the three Jewish neighbors, Clara Hipp, Carl Loewensohn, and Margarethe Silbermann (Schallburg 35), who lived in her house before the war and subsequently disappeared. It also tackles the pervasive silence regarding her grandfather Heinrich’s activities in the Wehrmacht. Paralleling this historical investigation is a domestic secret: the discovery of a half-sister fathered by Heinrich but kept secret from the family for decades. Schaalburg’s intertwining of these threads shows how the habit of secrecy covers all aspects of life once established, and like Krug, she faces an incomplete official record. Both authors engage in a forensic reconstruction of the record, one that is ultimately personal.

Nora Krug: The Subjective Counter-Archive

In Heimat, Nora Krug confronts the silence not by analyzing history from a distance, but by surfacing the archive and then altering it. Her visual style, a dense collage of illustration, handwriting, and photography, acts as a direct intervention into the “communicative silence.” By pasting archival documents next to personal drawings, she creates a dialogue between the objective historical record (which often conceals guilt) and subjective memory (which seeks to reveal it). In particular, the third chapter, “Giftpilz” (Krug Ch.3)¹, serves as a poignant case study of how intermediality exposes the labor of forgetting. The chapter details the family’s yearly vacations to Italy, a common destination for West Germans seeking the sun and escapism of the south. One year, the recreation is interrupted by the discovery of the grave of her uncle Franz-Karl, buried in a military cemetery. Krug’s description of her father’s behavior shows a strange avoidance; the father bears his brother’s name and must know, or at least suspect, where he is buried, yet somehow waits years before visiting the grave, and the discovery surprises the rest of the family. As disassociated as this behavior is, it may also be common; in the same chapter, Krug uses the term “Sanierungswut” to describe the German postwar impulse to tear down the old and build the new. She goes on to illustrate the tension with text that describes this anxiety, but with images that depict leisurely beach scenes and ice cream. This intermedial dissonance gives voice to the “communicative silence”, with the images performing the lie of the happy vacation, and the text revealing the “renovation” required to maintain that happiness.

In Krug’s hands, family photographs also become instruments of dissonance. At the end of “Giftpilz,” she presents a composite picture, overlaying an image of father onto the one of the fallen uncle, both in their sunday best and holding candles, posed identically for their first communion portraits (Krug Ch. 3). This visual strategy confronts Susan Sontag’s observation in On Photography that the family album functions as a “portrait-chronicle” designed to prove connectedness (8); by manipulating the images, Krug forces the “connectedness” that her father avoided. As Wolff notes, Krug creates “hybrid figures” in her family trees and collages to visualize the entanglement of generations (Wolff 142). The visual evidence of the shared features of the living father and his dead brother collapses the distance between the past and the present, forcing the reader to see the continuity that the “communicative silence” tried to sever.

Krug is attempting to rebuild a record, and draws on multiple media to do so. One intermedial strategy that Krug uses is showing her handwriting over archival documents, creating a layer of subjective forensic reconstruction. Krug is not just operating as a historian; by adding a personal note to an archival document, she distinguishes the mere finding of facts from the act of doing something with those facts. This appears most evident in her investigation of her grandfather Willi’s Nazi Party membership. In Chapter 12, she reproduces the American military questionnaire (“Fragebogen”) Willi filled out in 1946 (Krug, Ch. 12). In the original document, Willi checks “Ja” to the question of party membership, but he frames this admission within a narrative of necessity, later striving to be classified merely as a “Mitläufer”. Krug reproduces the document but surrounds it with her own handwritten narrative of discovery, describing how she found his name in the party registry and realized the extent of his involvement. Krug does not simply present this bureaucratic confession; she draws over it (Krug, Ch. 12), and in so doing transforms the official archive (the questionnaire) into her own “counter-archive.” The typed answers represent the objective historical record of what Willi claimed; the handwritten commentary represents the beginning of Krug’s reconstruction of the archive. Indeed, her investigation of Willi’s defense of “Mitläufer” status becomes a central conflict of the narrative. By layering her own hand over her grandfather’s, Krug performs a Foucauldian act of resistance, creating a new record where the “subjugated knowledge” of her grandfather’s true culpability finally becomes visible. Moreover, her handwriting marks her as an implicated subject; she does not simply observe the history, but, by redefining the boundaries of what may be surfaced on her own terms, places herself in the role of counter-archivist.

Bianca Schaalburg: Deconstructing the “Ligne Claire”

If Krug’s work functions as a private excavation of the scrapbook, Bianca Schaalburg’s Der Duft der Kiefern functions as a deconstruction of the public facade. Schaalburg engages directly with the visual language of the 1950s and 1960s to show how the “Drang nach Vergessen” manifested in the aesthetics of the Federal Republic, employing a clean, “Ligne Claire” drawing style (Gehrig) and a saturated color palette to evoke the glamour of the Wirtschaftswunder. In the chapter “1955: Petticoat and Bluejeans” (Schaalburg 135-139), the panels burst with the iconography of the new era: youth fashion, motorcars, and Ludwig Erhard. This aesthetic choice operates as a critical reproduction of the bargain described by Lübbe, with the brightness of the 1950s reflecting the social conditions needed to restore civic status to the postwar population. By adopting this style, Schaalburg seduces the reader with the nostalgia of the era, mimicking the visual language that made the silence so attractive. As Wolff argues, Schaalburg uses such “iconic imagery” to connect her personal memory to the collective memory of the nation (Wolff 158). The glamor does not contradict the silence, but rather empowers it.

The intermedial power of Der Duft der Kiefern therefore lies in the dissonance between this cheerful style and the traumatic substance it conceals. A devastating example occurs in the during a chess game between Heinrich and his son Hein. Visually, the scene depicts a domestic idyll: warm lighting, a ticking clock, father and son bonding over a game; yet the addition of text reveals a rupture and inserts a sense of dread. When Heinrich asks if the chess pieces were carved in Dachau, the father’s reaction is immediate and total: “Es langt. Schluss! Wir zwei spielen nie wieder Schach!” (Schaalburg 138). Schaalburg is thus visualizing the enforcement of Lübbe’s “communicative silence.” The integration of the survivor into the domestic sphere depends entirely on the exclusion of the past, and the graphic novel shows us the violence of this silence. The chess board is not just a game; it represents the social contract of the family, and maintenance of the archive comes at a severe price. The moment the past is mentioned, the game ends, the relationship severs, and the “tick-tock” of the grandfather clock acts as a metronome of repression, counting down the time until a final silence inevitably fails.

Because the official silence also extended to the Jewish victims erased from her childhood home, Schaalburg chooses to construct a counter-archive to make them visible. She accomplishes this through an intermedial sequence in which she depicts the lives of her former Jewish neighbors, Clara Hipp, Carl Loewensohn, and Margarethe Silbermann, as puzzle pieces (Schaalburg 60-61). Since no photographs of them exist, she draws them as blank silhouettes against the background of the cobblestone street that has become their monument. By placing these white, empty shapes into the narrative, she visualizes the void left by the Holocaust. This serves as a perfect example of Foucault’s “counter-memory”—it does not claim to restore the lost lives (which remains impossible), but it gives shape to their absence. Schaalburg does not shy from facts in filling those voids – she includes an Appendix at the end of the book, which turns the graphic novel into a literal archive of sources (Wolff 152). The book does, however, separate the “facts” (the Appendix) from the “doing with facts” (the narrative), thereby acknowledging that while the history is objective, the reconstruction is a subjective act of artistic will. By filling the pages with the puzzle pieces of the victims, Schaalburg forces the reader to engage in the forensic work of assembly, transforming the passive act of reading into an active act of remembrance.

Synthesis & Critique: The Limits of the Counter-Archive

Krug and Schaalburg demonstrate that the graphic novel uniquely suits the creation of a tribunal for the Second Guilt. But does this tribunal heal? Or does it merely shift the burden? The visit to Yad Vashem in Schaalburg’s final chapter serves as the ultimate external validation of her “Subjective Counter-Archive.” Throughout the book, a reproduced photograph of Heinrich sitting on a horse in front of wooden structures in Riga (Schaalburg 76) remains ambiguous; her mother preferred to believe he was merely an administrator organizing supplies. However, at Yad Vashem, Schaalburg visits the institutional archive in the “Hall of Names,” and she explicitly notes: “Wir erkennen die gleichen Holzhäuser in den Ghettos wie auf dem Foto meines Großvaters zu Pferde” (Schaalburg 176). In this moment, the institutional archive captions the family archive – the museum photo forces the family photo to speak. This discovery shifts the memory from the private sphere of “communicative silence” to the fixed, public sphere of historical fact; what it says is disturbing, but also not surprising. The graphic novel format is key to this moment because it allows Schaalburg to overlay her drawings of the museum visit with a reproduction of the actual photo, cementing the discovery as fact. This intermedial layering forces the private family memory to submit to the authority of the institutional archive, closing the loop of her investigation not with a word, but with a confirmed image.

Schaalburg then acts to physically bridge the gap between the perpetrators’ home and the victims’ exile. In a subsequent scene at a cemetery in Tel Aviv, she places three stones she brought from the shores of the “Krumme Lanke” onto an unknown grave (Schaalburg 175). She dedicates this act to her former neighbors: “Für Euch, lieber Carl, liebe Margarete, liebe Clara” (Schaalburg 175). This is a profound intermedial and performative gesture: by moving physical matter (the stones) from the site of the “Second Guilt” (Berlin) to the site of remembrance (Israel), she constructs a “counter-archive” that is not just textual, but geological. She cannot bring the neighbors back to Berlin, so she brings a piece of Berlin to them, attempting to symbolically close the circle that her grandfather’s generation broke. Schaalburg is not merely recording the absence of her neighbors; she is actively attempting to repair the “Second Guilt” by using stones from the land of the perpetrators to honor those lost.

For all the graphic novels’ strengths, a critical reading also reveals the limitations of this “therapeutic intervention.” While both authors successfully dismantle the political silence regarding the Holocaust, they struggle to unearth and resolve the private silences of their own living families. Hein’s hidden half-sister, Gudrun , whose existence the family uncovers in the “1957” chapter (Schaalburg 141), remains a marginal footnote in the narrative compared to the immense forensic energy spent on other things. Similarly, Krug merges her father with his dead brother visually, but she cannot bridge the verbal silence between her father and his living sister, Annemarie. The rift remains unhealed. This simultaneous presentation of facts and feelings, of some truths unearthed and others ignored, shows how the authors are substituting one archive for another. Crucially, the authors align themselves with the “sanctioned discourse” of Holocaust remembrance, which offers absolute moral clarity, yet they avoid the messier, unresolved dynamics of their own families. Schaalburg goes so far as to include an appendix at the end of the book, turning the graphic novel into an archive of sources—but in that archive says nothing of what happened to the half-sister. Neither Schaalburg nor Krug is making a claim to historical research in a scientific sense, and Schaalburg even separates the Appendix from the narrative, illustrating that while the history is objective, its reconstruction can also support a subjective act of artistic will. The counter-archive functions as a technology of the self that allows the third generation to curate an identity, prioritizing a confrontation with the past that offers moral redemption over the domestic confrontations that may offer only pain. The research remains incomplete because the living family members resist the counter-archive in a way the dead cannot.

Conclusion

The “Drang nach Vergessen” defined the psychological project of West Germany in the mid-twentieth century. Politics supported it (Lübbe), and the repression of guilt executed it (Giordano). Nora Krug and Bianca Schaalburg demonstrate through intermediality that this project never constituted a successful erasure, but rather a temporary suspension of history that has now expired. By constructing subjective counter-archives through the medium of the graphic novel, these authors show that they do not accept the “communicative silence” as a necessary peace; they expose it as a wound that never healed. Through the intermedial friction of text and image, they transform the toxic silence into a visible record. While this forensic reconstruction may not fully heal the fractured families of the present, it ensures that the “Second Guilt” no longer operates as an invisible poison. The urge to forget has succumbed to the urge to know.

Bibliography

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Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith, Routledge, 2002.

Gehrig, Anette. Cartoonmuseum Basel – Zentrum für Narrative Kunst, cartoonmuseum.ch/en/ausstellungen/die-abenteuer-der-ligne-claire-der-fall-herr-g-co. Accessed 18 Dec. 2025.

Giordano, Ralph. Die zweite Schuld oder von der Last, Deutscher zu sein. Rasch und Röhring, 1987.

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Lübbe, Hermann. “Der Nationalsozialismus im deutschen Nachkriegsbewußtsein.” Historische Zeitschrift, vol. 236, no. 3, 1983, pp. 579-599.

Schaalburg, Bianca. Der Duft der Kiefern. Avant-Verlag, 2021.

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1 Krug’s Heimat has no page numbers; all citations in this paper will therefore refer to the appropriate chapter.