Adolf (Manga)

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Adolf ( Japanese ア ド ル フ に 告 ぐ , Adorufu ni Tsugu , translated “Message to Adolf”) is a manga series by the well-known illustrator Osamu Tezuka . The crime series appeared from 1983 to 1985 in about 1,250 pages and was drawn for an adult readership. In the work, Tezuka combines fictional characters and storylines with historical events about Adolf Hitler during World War II .

action

The corpus delicti of Adolf is a secret document that the Jewish ancestry of Adolf Hitler to occupy. It appeared in Berlin during the 1936 Summer Olympics and later found its way to Japan. The main characters Sohei Toge (Japanese sports reporter), Adolf Kamil (German Jew in Japanese exile ) and Adolf Kaufmann (German-Japanese) are involved in a dangerous hunt for this document in the course of history.

In 1936 the Japanese sports journalist Sohei Toge came to Berlin to report on the Olympic Games. When he goes to his brother Isao about an important message, he finds his apartment in a mess and his brother dead in a tree by the road. His body disappears with the police and nobody wants to see Isao in Germany. When Sohei investigates, the Gestapo arrests, interrogates and tortures him himself . People want to know what information he has received from his brother. After fainting, he wakes up in young Renate's room. Together with her, he goes on a search for clues, including the Gestapo officer who tortured him. If he is still looking for him in vain at the Nazi party rally in Nuremberg, Sohei happens to find him in his hotel. He learns that Renate's real name is Rosa Lampe, that she is the daughter of the Gestapo officer and that he was supposed to take certain documents from him. He then questions her, but can only find out that Isao had documents that were dangerous for Hitler. After spending a night with Sohei, Rosa falls from the hotel window to her death.

At the same time, the Jewish baker's son of German descent Adolf Kamil and the younger German-Japanese Adolf Kaufmann befriended in Kobe , Japan. Kaufmann cannot understand that his father, who works at the German consulate, forbids him to deal with Kamil. On the same day, Mr. Kaufmann was questioned by an investigator from the Hyōgo Police Prefecture about the murder of a geisha . Six months earlier she was found strangled in a wood. Mr. Kaufmann denies any connection to the incident, but is actually the culprit. His wife Yukie also suspects him.

One day when Kamil overheard his father's meeting with other Jews, he learns of a document that proves that Adolf Hitler is of Jewish descent. Since he is not allowed to tell anyone, but wants to calm his restlessness, he writes it on a piece of paper that he hides in a tree. At this time, Kaufmann learned that he should go to the Adolf Hitler School (AHS) in Germany . However, he refuses and prefers to stay in Japan. Mr. Kaufmann is informed by the Gestapo that the documents, which are contained in one of five Wagner busts and because of which he murdered the geisha, are probably in the hands of the Jews in Kobe. He went to look for the documents, but fell seriously ill in a storm with floods. During the same storm, Kaufmann found out about the secret of Hitler's ancestry from the note in the tree that he accidentally found. When he tells his father, he wants Adolf to tell him who wrote the note, but dies shortly afterwards. Before his death he informed his colleague Gerhard Mische, but even he could not find out who wrote the note and sends Adolf Kaufmann to Germany to the AHS.

Meanwhile, Isao’s documents are mailed to a group of Japanese opposition activists, including Isao's former teacher, Ms. Ogi. During a raid, she has to flee with the documents and meets Sohei in her apartment. He reads the documents and recognizes their explosiveness. They are left to him, but he is now being followed by the Japanese secret police, who believe he has received information about the opposition. On the run he meets Frau Kaufmann and borrows money from her for the train journey. After giving her the money back, he is arrested by the secret police and tortured by Inspector Akabane. However, he is released because Colonel Honda has vouched for him at Frau Kaufmann's insistence. However, he is now being pressured by several foreign agents to hand over the documents to them. He also loses his job at the kyogo news agency and hardly finds work, so he has to live on the street. When he meets Superintendent Akabane again, a fight ensues in which Akabane manages to usurp the documents. However, he falls on a nail that digs into his head and falls into a heap of rubbish that he set himself on fire. Toge is arrested for arson.

At this time, Adolf Kaufmann settled in at the Adolf Hitler School. He is such a good student that when Hitler visits him he is given a medal.

In Japan, a police inspector believes Tye's statements and wants to help him find the documents and lets him live with himself and his daughter Mieko. The search for Akabane leads her first to Ms. Ogi's apartment and then to her hometown. But Lampe also comes to Japan from the Gestapo to personally look for the documents. He visits Frau Kaufmann, who admits she loves Toge but has nothing else to do with him. On an island in the sea where Mrs. Ogi's brother took her and Inspector Akabane to, they now meet Lampe. During the fight the papers are apparently lost and everyone except Toge dies.

In the following period Toge is nursed back to health by the owner of a bar on the coast. But soon Lampe appears again, who has also survived the events on the island and now wants to kill Toge. When he is arrested after a fight with him and taken to the police as a witness, he meets Ms. Ogi again, who was able to save the documents. In the following period Sohei Toge lived with Mieko, the daughter of the deceased inspector.

Meanwhile, Ms. Ogi passes the documents on to Adolf Kamil, as he is not monitored as a German. He then wants to show them to his father, but he leaves for Lithuania on the same day to help Jews there to flee to Kobe. In Lithuania, however, his ID was stolen, so that he was arrested and deported to Germany. At this time Adolf Kaufmann fell in love with a Jewish girl, Elisa, and had to shoot two Jews from the concentration camp, including Adolf Kamil's father, as proof of his loyalty to the Nazis. Soon after, however, he helps the girl to escape to Kobe. After Adolf Kamil later catches a Chinese spy during a train ride, he is honored by Hitler and is now to be trained as his personal secretary at the Berghof. As a result, he is in the vicinity of Hitler a lot and one day he learns that Hitler is of Jewish descent.

At this time Elisa arrives in Kobe and lives with the Kamils. Soon after, their apartment was searched by Germans for the documents, whereupon Adolf Kamil and Ms. Ogi decided to hand them over to the communist resistance. However, they find their contact hanged and the only other evidence points to the geisha Kinuko, who was murdered in 1936.

Investigations then lead the two to the young Yoshio Honda, who is a member of the spy ring around Richard Sorge and the son of a Japanese colonel. After an argument and the attack of a drunken soldier on Adolf, Yoshio brings him to his home. There, too, Yoshio denies any connection to the underground.

In Kobe, Adolf Kamil becomes a member of the bakery association and is responsible for rescue operations in the event of air raids in the district. Despite the rationalization, the bakery is doing well and Adolf and Elisa want to get married soon. Suddenly Yoshio Honda shows up and admits his connection to the underground, so that Adolf gives him the documents for publication. At a meeting with Toge, Toge also agrees to hand over the documents to the communists. To be on the safe side, Yoshio buries them in the garden for now.

Soon after, however, Richard Sorge is arrested and the spy ring is blown. Thereupon Yoshio is shot by his father and the murder is portrayed as suicide, since the family's honor should be preserved. Isao Toge and Mrs. Kaufmann meet again at Yoshio's funeral and decide to run a German restaurant together. In the meantime, they get closer and closer personally. But they have problems with the authorities, as luxury is frowned upon in war.

At the same time, Adolf Kaufmann made a career in Germany and was already a lieutenant in the SD at the age of 20 . Now Lampe wants to send him to Japan to get the documents. But then he is suspected of having been involved in the Stauffenberg conspiracy. After Lampe helped him escape the suspicions, he is involved in the hunt for the conspirators. But after he refused to shoot General Field Marshal Rommel for participating in the conspiracy, he was transferred to transport the Jews to Warsaw. There he experienced the cruel treatment of the deportees and learned of Rommel's death. When Lampe again made him the offer to travel to Japan and take the documents from Sohei Toge there, he agreed and traveled in a submarine across the Arctic to Japan.

Once there, he is confronted with the engagement of his mother and Toge, as well as Adolf Kamil and Elisa. He does not succeed in taking the documents off Toge by force. Later he raped Elisa, believing that this would dissuade Adolf Kamil from marrying. In a subsequent dispute between the two Adolfs, Kamil also speaks of the document, and both fight. When Frau Kaufmann intervenes, Adolf Kaufmann breaks away from his mother and leaves.

Soon afterwards, however, merchant kidnapped Ms. Ogi and Kamil as well as Sohei Toge in order to blackmail them into the whereabouts of the documents. During the torture, Kamil said he passed the documents on to Colonel Honda's son. Shortly after Kaufmann left the house, a bomb fell there and Toge, Kamil and Mrs. Ogi were able to escape. Kamil's mother is also killed in the bombing and Sohei becomes deaf.

When one day the house of Sohei and Mrs. Kaufmann was bombed, she was seriously injured in the bunker. Toge takes her to the hospital quickly, especially since she is pregnant. When he wants to ask Colonel Honda for help so that Frau Kaufmann can get better care, he meets Adolf Kaufmann in front of his house. After the Hondas' property has been examined, the documents are found, but news of Germany's surrender is brought to Adolf a moment later. After this incident, Toge was able to have Ms. Kaufmann taken to a military hospital. There she holds out the pregnancy and gives birth to the child, but she dies after giving birth.

Years later, Adolf Kaufmann wanders around Palestine. There he joins the Palestinians who are fighting against Israel. Ten years later he is married to a Palestinian woman and has one child. But these are killed in an attack by the Israeli army, which was under the orders of Adolf Kamil. Soon the two Adolfs meet again and Kamil kills Adolf Kaufmann in a duel.

Emergence

Osamu Tezuka got the idea to write a manga about Hitler's possible Jewish ancestry after reading a newspaper article about this theory. He was also inspired by the biography of Richard Sorges , a Soviet spy in Japan during World War II. There is a scene in the manga in which Sorge is supposed to bring the secret documents to Moscow; Sorge's espionage is discovered beforehand by the Japanese secret police.

Publications

The manga was published in Japan from January 6, 1983 to May 30, 1985 as a series in the weekly Shūkan Bunshun . At this time Tezuka had health problems and was often unable to draw the ten-page episodes published in Shūkan Bunshun as he had actually wanted. He later improved it for book publication. The publisher Bungei Shunjū brought out the episodes published in the magazine in the form of four hardcover volumes. The series was later published in paperback and bunkoban formats. In these new editions, the episodes were not divided into four, but into five volumes.

Adolf was translated into several languages. From 1995 to 1997 a five-volume English translation was published in North America by Viz ; 1998 a four-volume version in France at Tonkam . This was followed by publications in Taiwan, Italy, Spain, Brazil and Germany.

The latter was published between November 2005 and March 2007 in five volumes by Carlsen Verlag . In order to be able to read the manga from left to right according to western habits, the pages in the German edition have been mirrored. However, in order to correctly reproduce historical accuracy, such as the Hitler salute with the right hand or armbands, individual images were not mirrored. Similarly, it was already at Barefoot Gen by Keiji Nakazawa procedure, which is also published in Carlsen. According to the publisher, it was advisable to adjust the reading direction, as many older readers who are not familiar with the Japanese reading direction should be won over to the work. In contrast, most of the mangas at Carlsen now appear in the Japanese reading direction.

style

In the 1980s, Osamu Tezuka dealt a lot with biographies and documentaries about historical figures and incidents. Among other things, he drew a biography of Ludwig van Beethoven in comic form. With Adolf he took up National Socialism in World War II and placed fictional characters in this historical framework. Compared to the rest of Tezuka's work, the work is more serious, less caricatured and drawn more realistically. This was done on the advice of the editor-in-chief of Shūkan Bunshun magazine , in which Adolf appeared.

In his work Hi no Tori, for example, Tezuka experimented heavily with the division of the panels , but here he did without it. Since the manga was published in only ten-page episodes, the artist decided on a conventional page division. This division makes reading easier for a non-Japanese, according to Frederik L. Schodt .

Depiction of Hitler and National Socialism

Tezuka did not portray the person of Hitler for the first time in Adolf . In early works such as Astro Boy he often drew figures that have an obvious resemblance to Adolf Hitler, mainly because of their beard. These characters were leaders of villains. Tezuka also featured people wearing a swastika badge in comics such as Big X. The swastika did not stand here for a political conviction, but, according to Susanne Phillipps, "for evil par excellence."

Hitler, who is a minor character in the comic, is shown as both a public person and a moody private person. His public appearances, which are based on the propaganda of the time of National Socialism and the films by Leni Riefenstahl , serve to caricature the figure of Hitler, based on Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940). Susanne Phillipps explains : "How the figure hynkel moves in the film twitching and uncontrolled, Tezuka shows Hitler parodistically exaggerated in initially sweeping gestures, then in distorted body proportions." Hitler is often drawn from the perspective of Adolf Kaufmann. Kaufmann respects him, is fascinated by his power and so influenced by propaganda that he adores him. Later on, Kaufmann became worried about Hitler's rapidly fluctuating moods and doubts some of his views and decisions. After the assassination attempt on July 20, 1944 , he regards Hitler as paranoid.

The draftsman portrays the National Socialist way of thinking negatively. Susanne Phillipps on this: "Tezuka describes the Nazi ideology - in general all ideologies - as incomprehensible to children and thus underlines that they lack any logically justifiable basis."

reception

In Japan, Adolf was less valued by contemporary critics than other works by Tezuka (such as Hi no Tori ) and was not an outstanding success. However, the manga was one of the first comics to be sold in many bookstores in Japan, not in the comic section, but in the fiction section. In addition, Tezuka won the Kōdansha Manga Prize in the "General" category for this work in 1986 .

Many European critics highlighted the manga positively. Jens Balzer spoke of Tezuka's most ambitious and best work in the Berliner Zeitung . It is “a story of growing up, of disappointed love and lost friendship, and a carefully researched historical comic in which the catastrophe of World War II appears from both a Japanese and a German perspective.” In the Netzeitung , it was written that Adolf was a “ extremely exciting espionage thriller ” .

In contrast, Christian Gasser said in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung that the “pacifist manga epic” was not entirely convincing. Because of the large number of figures, especially the negatively drawn people are depicted in a clichéd manner and the fate of the documents about Hitler's descent is not credible in the long run. In addition, "the linking of the various storylines [...] is sometimes forced and dependent on coincidences that are too great" . Susanne Phillipps criticized the work in a similar way. It is "very unbalanced" and slips "in some places - especially in scenes of the hunt for secret documents - to the level of a simple adventure story."

Phillipps also criticized the fact that Tezuka did not completely do without funny insertions. These appeared appropriate in his other historical works, but were "inappropriate for the difficult and complex subject of National Socialism in its inexperienced way [...]." Frederik L. Schodt also took up the point of criticism and said that the occasional use of gags may confuse some readers, but: "However, when the story is read in its entirety, it becomes clear that Tezuka only used the manga medium to create a complex Dostoevsky novel with a truly global perspective."

While the manga in Japan has often been praised for its historical accuracy, some European critics were particularly offended by the historical background of the story. Gasser comments: “It is understandable that it was impossible to make Hitler's true ancestry public in Japan - but that until Hitler's end there was no possibility of handing the papers over to a foreign reporter or diplomat is questionable. “In Zuender , an online magazine of the time , Jan-Frederik Bandel generally criticized the theory about Hitler's Jewish ancestry. "The idea of ​​asking about historical plausibility here, or of suspecting some form of literary-political intent to enlightenment, will hardly come up."

Radio play

In the spring of 1993, a radio station for the Tokyo Broadcasting System broadcast a dramatized, three-hour radio play version of the story.

literature

  • Frederik L. Schodt: Dreamland Japan. Writings On Modern Manga . 3. Edition. Stone Bridge Press, Berkeley 2002, ISBN 1-880656-23-X , pp. 248-252.
  • Susanne Phillipps: Osamu Tezuka. Figures, themes and narrative structures in the entire Manga work . iudicum, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-89129-810-2 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Susanne Phillipps, p. 369.
  2. ↑ a b Frederik L. Schodt, p. 249.
  3. ↑ a b Adolf on the official website of Tezuka Productions ( Memento from September 30, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  4. ↑ Susanne Phillipps, p. 366.
  5. ↑ a b Susanne Phillipps, p. 286.
  6. ↑ Susanne Phillipps, p. 296.
  7. ↑ Susanne Phillipps, p. 297.
  8. ↑ Susanne Phillipps, p. 291.
  9. ^ Bettina Gildenhard: Hitler as a comic figure . In: STRAPAZIN, issue 81
  10. ↑ Osamu Tezuka: Adolf . Volume 1. Carlsen Verlag, 2005, p. 265.
  11. ↑ a b Susanne Phillipps, p. 288.
  12. ↑ Jens Balzer: Three times Adolf . In: Berliner Zeitung, November 30, 2005 (accessed June 8, 2007)
  13. ↑ Article at Netzeitung.de ( Memento from November 19, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) (accessed on June 8, 2007)
  14. ^ A b Christian Gasser: German-Japanese entanglements . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, June 22, 2006 ( Memento from September 29, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) (accessed on June 8, 2007)
  15. ↑ a b Susanne Phillipps, p. 292.
  16. ↑ a b Frederik L. Schodt, p. 252.
  17. ↑ Jan-Frederik Bandel: Five times Adolf . In: Zuender, 18/2007 (accessed June 24, 2007)