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Mickey au Camp de Gurs

November 17, 2023

Mickey au Camp de Gurs (Mickey Mouse in the Gurs Internment Camp)[1] is a 1942 French comic booklet by German-born French cartoonist of Jewish descent Horst Rosenthal. It was created while Rosenthal was a prisoner at the Gurs internment camp in France during World War II. The comic features Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse, who is arrested on suspicion of being Jewish and is sent to Gurs. Rosenthal acknowledged the source of his protagonist by adding "Publié Sans Autorisation de Walt Disney" ("Published without Walt Disney's Permission")[1] to the front cover. Rosenthal was detained in Gurs for two years before being sent to Auschwitz in September 1942; he was murdered on the day of his arrival.[2][3]

Mickey au Camp de Gurs
(Mickey Mouse in the Gurs Internment Camp)
Cover of Mickey au Camp de Gurs
CreatorHorst Rosenthal
Date1942
Main charactersMickey Mouse
Page count15 pages
Original publication
Published inMickey à Gurs: Les Carnets de dessin de Horst Rosenthal
(Mickey in Gurs: The comic books of Horst Rosenthal)
Date of publication2014
LanguageFrench
ISBN978-27021-438-5-8

Mickey au Camp de Gurs was first published in 2014 in Paris by Calmann-Lévy and the Mémorial de la Shoah, 72 years after it was written. Mickey au Camp de Gurs has been called "one of the earliest surviving examples of a comic from the Holocaust",[4] and "perhaps the earliest sequential art narrative dealing with the Holocaust".[5]

Synopsis edit

Mickey au Camp de Gurs features, and is narrated by, Mickey Mouse of Walt Disney fame. Mickey is arrested in France by the Vichy gendarmerie for being unable to produce identity papers. He tells the judge he has no mother and that his father is Walt Disney. When asked if he is Jewish, Mickey replies that he has no idea about that. The judge concludes that Mickey must be Jewish, and he is sent to the Gurs internment camp. There he observes the camp's harsh living conditions with its oppressive rules. He needs a magnifying glass to see his food ration and meets several inmates who appear to be in collusion with the authorities. Mickey finally decides that this is not for him and, since he is a cartoon character, he erases himself from the camp and redraws himself walking to America:

Artwork and publication history edit

 
Panel 4 of Mickey au Camp de Gurs; in addition to the text and drawing, a photograph of camp Gurs was pasted onto the page.

Mickey au Camp de Gurs is a 15-page, 13-panel[4][7] comic strip written and illustrated by Rosenthal.[6] He created it using black ink and watercolour on A5 paper.[2][3] All the text is handwritten and the illustrations are black-and-white on some pages, and coloured on others. Hillary L. Chute suggested in her book, Disaster Drawn (2016) that the absence of colour in Rosenthal's work may have been due to the availability of materials at the time.[8]

The fourth panel (pictured) includes a photograph of the Gurs internment camp showing dozens of barracks in rows. It was pasted onto the comic book page alongside the text and a drawing of a startled Mickey staring at his first glimpse of the camp.[4][9]

In 1978 Mickey au Camp de Gurs was donated to the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine (Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation) in Paris by the Hansbacher family. How they acquired the book is not known. It reached a wider audience in 2011 when Art Spiegelman, creator of the 1991 graphic novel Maus, which also depicts Jews as mice, mentioned it in his book, MetaMaus. Spiegelman wrote that his discovery of Rosenthal's comic was "another validation that I'd stumbled onto a way of telling that had deep roots."[3][10]

Mickey au Camp de Gurs was first published in 2014, along with two of Rosenthal's other comic books he had created while interred in Gurs, by Calmann-Lévy and the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris. The collection, entitled Mickey à Gurs: Les Carnets de dessin de Horst Rosenthal (Mickey in Gurs: The comic books of Horst Rosenthal), was compiled and edited by Belgian political scientist and historian Joël Kotek [fr], and French journalist and curator Didier Pasamonik [fr].[2][3]

Critical analysis edit

Glyn Morgan described Mickey au Camp de Gurs as a blend of Walt Disney and Hergé that deploys "critique and darkly-comic parody".[4] Kjell Knudde characterised the comic as "a strange clash between childish innocence and the harsh reality of Nazi politics and war".[3] Bernard Marx called Rosenthal's work "an offbeat and very moving testimony of the horror lived".[2] Morgan said Mickey Mouse is both an American outsider and a Jewish inmate, making him a "metatextual being" able to transcend the reality of the situation and give Rosenthal an otherwise unobtainable point of view.[4] Morgan called the last page of the comic "[m]etafictional fantastika", and drew parallels between Mickey erasing himself and the Nazis erasing the Jews.[4]

Pnina Rosenberg wrote that the cover of Rosenthal's comic showing a smiling Mickey Mouse in a concentration camp creates an incongruity that grows as the story progresses.[11] The dissonance culminates when Mickey decides to escape his "absurd, Kafkaesque" predicament, and erases himself to flee to the land of "liberty, equality and fraternity".[12] But he makes it clear it is America he is going to, not France, which has abandoned its national motto, liberté, égalité, fraternité, turned its back on human rights and become anti-semitic.[12]

Alister Wedderburn suggested that by portraying a concentration camp in a comic, Rosenthal suspends reality and creates a "parallel camp space" which his cartoon character can investigate and question "with a latitude that would be impossible within the material camp itself".[13] Wedderburn explained that Mickey explores Gurs with "childlike naïveté". He is unable to understand the purpose of the camp and its rules of conduct, and is puzzled rather than shocked by it.[14] Rosenberg said Rosenthal uses Disney's mouse to convey the "surrealistic situation" the camp's inmates found themselves in, and "sharply criticizes" the French government for forsaking them.[15] Marx remarked that by making the protagonist a cartoon character, Rosenthal emphasises the absurdity of their situation.[2]

Comparisons have been made between Rosenthal's Mickey au Camp de Gurs and Spiegelman's Maus. Chute called Mickey in Gurs "a haunting precursor to Maus",[8] and stated that both works were instrumental in shaping the development of contemporary comics.[16] Lisa Naomi Mulman wrote that "the remarkable power" of the two books is in the graphics, which "integrates textual and illustrative materials, producing profoundly ironic and telling juxtapositions".[17] But she said that the most notable similarity is the depiction of the Jew as a mouse.[18] Robert G. Weiner and Lynne Fallwell noted that Rosenthal's use of Mickey Mouse "illustrates how Jews are made into 'the other'—something that is subhuman".[5] Richard Meran Barsam stated that in the 1940 Nazi propaganda film The Eternal Jew, "Jews are equated to rats",[19] and Hitler, who claimed that "[t]he Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human",[20] called mice a malignant species.[20] Mulman opined that by depicting Jews as mice, Rosenthal and Spiegelman "metaphorically engage[d] Hitler's malevolent racial allegations".[20]

Stephen Feinstein wrote that Rosenthal's statement "Published without Walt Disney's Permission" on the front cover of Mickey au Camp de Gurs illustrated the author's concern about infringing copyright.[21] Feinstein suggested that Rosenthal's unofficial comic highlighted the irony that "the legal protection afforded copyright something stronger, even in the present eras, than protection of people."[22] Knudde noted that the comic's optimistic ending suggested that Rosenthal believed that he too would be set free, and was oblivious of what the Nazis had planned for him and the other detainees. Knudde said that Rosenthal's fate "casts a wry and dark shadow over his writings".[3] Wedderburn emphasised the "obvious overtone" and "pathos" that clouds the comic: while Mickey can escape his cartoon world, his author remains captive in the material world.[23]

See also edit

Notes edit

  1. ^ Translated from the French by Alister Wedderburn; the ellipses are present in Rosenthal's original text.[6]

References edit

Citations edit

  1. ^ a b Rosenberg 2002, Abstract.
  2. ^ a b c d e Marx, Bernard (2014). "Mickey à Gurs: Les carnets de dessin de Horst Rosenthal". Amitié Judéo-Chrétienne de France (in French). Retrieved 1 May 2019.
  3. ^ a b c d e f Knudde, Kjell (7 July 2018). "Horst Rosenthal". Lambiek Comiclopedia. Lambiek. Retrieved 1 May 2019.
  4. ^ a b c d e f Morgan, Glyn (Summer 2015). "Speaking the Unspeakable and Seeing the Unseeable: The Role of Fantastika in Visualising the Holocaust, or, More Than Just Maus". The Luminary. Lancaster University (6). Retrieved 1 May 2019.
  5. ^ a b Weiner & Fallwell 2010, p. 464.
  6. ^ a b Wedderburn 2018, p. 13.
  7. ^ Menia, François (21 October 2014). "Mickey Mouse, une "figure de l'innocence" au camp de Gurs". Le Figaro (in French). Retrieved 1 May 2019.
  8. ^ a b Chute 2016, p. 174.
  9. ^ Wedderburn 2018, pp. 14–15.
  10. ^ Spiegelman 2011, p. 138.
  11. ^ Rosenberg 2002, pp. 275–276.
  12. ^ a b Rosenberg 2002, pp. 278–279.
  13. ^ Wedderburn 2018, p. 180.
  14. ^ Wedderburn 2018, p. 185.
  15. ^ Rosenberg 2002, p. 275.
  16. ^ Chute 2016, p. 176.
  17. ^ Mulman 2010, p. 87.
  18. ^ Mulman 2010, p. 86.
  19. ^ Barsam 1992, p. 204.
  20. ^ a b c Mulman 2010, p. 85.
  21. ^ Feinstein 2008, p. 71.
  22. ^ Feinstein 2008, p. 58.
  23. ^ Wedderburn 2018, p. 187.

Sources edit

Works cited
  • Barsam, Richard Meran (1992). Nonfiction Film: A Critical History. Indiana University Press. pp. 204–205. ISBN 0-253-20706-1.
  • Chute, Hillary L. (2016). "Maus's Archival Images and the Postwar Comics Field". Disaster Drawn. Harvard University Press. pp. 153–196. doi:10.4159/9780674495647-006. ISBN 9780674495647 – via De Gruyter.
  • Mulman, Lisa Naomi (2010). "A Tale of Two Mice: Graphic Representations of the Jew in Holocaust Narrative". In Baskind, Samantha; Omer-Sherman, Ranen (eds.). The Jewish Graphic Novel: Critical Approaches. Rutgers University Press. pp. 85–93. ISBN 978-0-8135-4775-6.
  • Feinstein, Stephen (2008). "Art from the Concentration Camps: Gallows Humor and Satirical Wit". Journal of Jewish Identities. 1 (2): 53–75. doi:10.1353/jji.0.0029. S2CID 161489868.
  • Rosenberg, Pnina (2002). "Mickey Mouse in Gurs – humour, irony and criticism in works of art produced in the Gurs internment camp". Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice. 6 (3): 273–292. doi:10.1080/13642520210164508. S2CID 143675622.
  • Spiegelman, Art (2011). MetaMAUS: A Look Inside a Modern Classic, MAUS. Pantheon Books. ISBN 978-0-375-42394-9.
  • Wedderburn, Alister (2018). "Cartooning the Camp: Aesthetic Interruption and the Limits of Political Possibility" (PDF). Millennium: Journal of International Studies. 47 (2): 169–189. doi:10.1177/0305829818799884. S2CID 149585148.
  • Weiner, Robert G.; Fallwell, Lynne (15 December 2010). "Sequential Art Narrative and the Holocaust". In Friedman, Jonathan C. (ed.). The Routledge History of the Holocaust. Taylor & Francis. pp. 464–469. ISBN 978-1-136-87060-6.

External links edit

 
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Mickey au Camp de Gurs.

November 17, 2023
mickey, camp, gurs, mickey, mouse, gurs, internment, camp, 1942, french, comic, booklet, german, born, french, cartoonist, jewish, descent, horst, rosenthal, created, while, rosenthal, prisoner, gurs, internment, camp, france, during, world, comic, features, w. Mickey au Camp de Gurs Mickey Mouse in the Gurs Internment Camp 1 is a 1942 French comic booklet by German born French cartoonist of Jewish descent Horst Rosenthal It was created while Rosenthal was a prisoner at the Gurs internment camp in France during World War II The comic features Walt Disney s Mickey Mouse who is arrested on suspicion of being Jewish and is sent to Gurs Rosenthal acknowledged the source of his protagonist by adding Publie Sans Autorisation de Walt Disney Published without Walt Disney s Permission 1 to the front cover Rosenthal was detained in Gurs for two years before being sent to Auschwitz in September 1942 he was murdered on the day of his arrival 2 3 Mickey au Camp de Gurs Mickey Mouse in the Gurs Internment Camp Cover of Mickey au Camp de GursCreatorHorst RosenthalDate1942Main charactersMickey MousePage count15 pagesOriginal publicationPublished inMickey a Gurs Les Carnets de dessin de Horst Rosenthal Mickey in Gurs The comic books of Horst Rosenthal Date of publication2014LanguageFrenchISBN978 27021 438 5 8Mickey au Camp de Gurs was first published in 2014 in Paris by Calmann Levy and the Memorial de la Shoah 72 years after it was written Mickey au Camp de Gurs has been called one of the earliest surviving examples of a comic from the Holocaust 4 and perhaps the earliest sequential art narrative dealing with the Holocaust 5 Contents 1 Synopsis 2 Artwork and publication history 3 Critical analysis 4 See also 5 Notes 6 References 6 1 Citations 6 2 Sources 7 External linksSynopsis editMickey au Camp de Gurs features and is narrated by Mickey Mouse of Walt Disney fame Mickey is arrested in France by the Vichy gendarmerie for being unable to produce identity papers He tells the judge he has no mother and that his father is Walt Disney When asked if he is Jewish Mickey replies that he has no idea about that The judge concludes that Mickey must be Jewish and he is sent to the Gurs internment camp There he observes the camp s harsh living conditions with its oppressive rules He needs a magnifying glass to see his food ration and meets several inmates who appear to be in collusion with the authorities Mickey finally decides that this is not for him and since he is a cartoon character he erases himself from the camp and redraws himself walking to America And so because I m nothing more than a drawing I rubbed myself out with a stroke of the eraser and ta da The police can always come and look for me in the land of lib ty eq ity and frat ity I m talking about America Last panel Mickey au Camp de Gurs a Artwork and publication history edit nbsp Panel 4 of Mickey au Camp de Gurs in addition to the text and drawing a photograph of camp Gurs was pasted onto the page Mickey au Camp de Gurs is a 15 page 13 panel 4 7 comic strip written and illustrated by Rosenthal 6 He created it using black ink and watercolour on A5 paper 2 3 All the text is handwritten and the illustrations are black and white on some pages and coloured on others Hillary L Chute suggested in her book Disaster Drawn 2016 that the absence of colour in Rosenthal s work may have been due to the availability of materials at the time 8 The fourth panel pictured includes a photograph of the Gurs internment camp showing dozens of barracks in rows It was pasted onto the comic book page alongside the text and a drawing of a startled Mickey staring at his first glimpse of the camp 4 9 In 1978 Mickey au Camp de Gurs was donated to the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation in Paris by the Hansbacher family How they acquired the book is not known It reached a wider audience in 2011 when Art Spiegelman creator of the 1991 graphic novel Maus which also depicts Jews as mice mentioned it in his book MetaMaus Spiegelman wrote that his discovery of Rosenthal s comic was another validation that I d stumbled onto a way of telling that had deep roots 3 10 Mickey au Camp de Gurs was first published in 2014 along with two of Rosenthal s other comic books he had created while interred in Gurs by Calmann Levy and the Memorial de la Shoah in Paris The collection entitled Mickey a Gurs Les Carnets de dessin de Horst Rosenthal Mickey in Gurs The comic books of Horst Rosenthal was compiled and edited by Belgian political scientist and historian Joel Kotek fr and French journalist and curator Didier Pasamonik fr 2 3 Critical analysis editGlyn Morgan described Mickey au Camp de Gurs as a blend of Walt Disney and Herge that deploys critique and darkly comic parody 4 Kjell Knudde characterised the comic as a strange clash between childish innocence and the harsh reality of Nazi politics and war 3 Bernard Marx called Rosenthal s work an offbeat and very moving testimony of the horror lived 2 Morgan said Mickey Mouse is both an American outsider and a Jewish inmate making him a metatextual being able to transcend the reality of the situation and give Rosenthal an otherwise unobtainable point of view 4 Morgan called the last page of the comic m etafictional fantastika and drew parallels between Mickey erasing himself and the Nazis erasing the Jews 4 Pnina Rosenberg wrote that the cover of Rosenthal s comic showing a smiling Mickey Mouse in a concentration camp creates an incongruity that grows as the story progresses 11 The dissonance culminates when Mickey decides to escape his absurd Kafkaesque predicament and erases himself to flee to the land of liberty equality and fraternity 12 But he makes it clear it is America he is going to not France which has abandoned its national motto liberte egalite fraternite turned its back on human rights and become anti semitic 12 Alister Wedderburn suggested that by portraying a concentration camp in a comic Rosenthal suspends reality and creates a parallel camp space which his cartoon character can investigate and question with a latitude that would be impossible within the material camp itself 13 Wedderburn explained that Mickey explores Gurs with childlike naivete He is unable to understand the purpose of the camp and its rules of conduct and is puzzled rather than shocked by it 14 Rosenberg said Rosenthal uses Disney s mouse to convey the surrealistic situation the camp s inmates found themselves in and sharply criticizes the French government for forsaking them 15 Marx remarked that by making the protagonist a cartoon character Rosenthal emphasises the absurdity of their situation 2 Comparisons have been made between Rosenthal s Mickey au Camp de Gurs and Spiegelman s Maus Chute called Mickey in Gurs a haunting precursor to Maus 8 and stated that both works were instrumental in shaping the development of contemporary comics 16 Lisa Naomi Mulman wrote that the remarkable power of the two books is in the graphics which integrates textual and illustrative materials producing profoundly ironic and telling juxtapositions 17 But she said that the most notable similarity is the depiction of the Jew as a mouse 18 Robert G Weiner and Lynne Fallwell noted that Rosenthal s use of Mickey Mouse illustrates how Jews are made into the other something that is subhuman 5 Richard Meran Barsam stated that in the 1940 Nazi propaganda film The Eternal Jew Jews are equated to rats 19 and Hitler who claimed that t he Jews are undoubtedly a race but they are not human 20 called mice a malignant species 20 Mulman opined that by depicting Jews as mice Rosenthal and Spiegelman metaphorically engage d Hitler s malevolent racial allegations 20 Stephen Feinstein wrote that Rosenthal s statement Published without Walt Disney s Permission on the front cover of Mickey au Camp de Gurs illustrated the author s concern about infringing copyright 21 Feinstein suggested that Rosenthal s unofficial comic highlighted the irony that the legal protection afforded copyright something stronger even in the present eras than protection of people 22 Knudde noted that the comic s optimistic ending suggested that Rosenthal believed that he too would be set free and was oblivious of what the Nazis had planned for him and the other detainees Knudde said that Rosenthal s fate casts a wry and dark shadow over his writings 3 Wedderburn emphasised the obvious overtone and pathos that clouds the comic while Mickey can escape his cartoon world his author remains captive in the material world 23 See also editAnthropomorphism Mickey Mouse in VietnamPortals nbsp Comics nbsp France nbsp Judaism nbsp World War IINotes edit Translated from the French by Alister Wedderburn the ellipses are present in Rosenthal s original text 6 References editCitations edit a b Rosenberg 2002 Abstract a b c d e Marx Bernard 2014 Mickey a Gurs Les carnets de dessin de Horst Rosenthal Amitie Judeo Chretienne de France in French Retrieved 1 May 2019 a b c d e f Knudde Kjell 7 July 2018 Horst Rosenthal Lambiek Comiclopedia Lambiek Retrieved 1 May 2019 a b c d e f Morgan Glyn Summer 2015 Speaking the Unspeakable and Seeing the Unseeable The Role of Fantastika in Visualising the Holocaust or More Than Just Maus The Luminary Lancaster University 6 Retrieved 1 May 2019 a b Weiner amp Fallwell 2010 p 464 a b Wedderburn 2018 p 13 Menia Francois 21 October 2014 Mickey Mouse une figure de l innocence au camp de Gurs Le Figaro in French Retrieved 1 May 2019 a b Chute 2016 p 174 Wedderburn 2018 pp 14 15 Spiegelman 2011 p 138 Rosenberg 2002 pp 275 276 a b Rosenberg 2002 pp 278 279 Wedderburn 2018 p 180 Wedderburn 2018 p 185 Rosenberg 2002 p 275 Chute 2016 p 176 Mulman 2010 p 87 Mulman 2010 p 86 Barsam 1992 p 204 a b c Mulman 2010 p 85 Feinstein 2008 p 71 Feinstein 2008 p 58 Wedderburn 2018 p 187 Sources edit Works citedBarsam Richard Meran 1992 Nonfiction Film A Critical History Indiana University Press pp 204 205 ISBN 0 253 20706 1 Chute Hillary L 2016 Maus s Archival Images and the Postwar Comics Field Disaster Drawn Harvard University Press pp 153 196 doi 10 4159 9780674495647 006 ISBN 9780674495647 via De Gruyter Mulman Lisa Naomi 2010 A Tale of Two Mice Graphic Representations of the Jew in Holocaust Narrative In Baskind Samantha Omer Sherman Ranen eds The Jewish Graphic Novel Critical Approaches Rutgers University Press pp 85 93 ISBN 978 0 8135 4775 6 Feinstein Stephen 2008 Art from the Concentration Camps Gallows Humor and Satirical Wit Journal of Jewish Identities 1 2 53 75 doi 10 1353 jji 0 0029 S2CID 161489868 Rosenberg Pnina 2002 Mickey Mouse in Gurs humour irony and criticism in works of art produced in the Gurs internment camp Rethinking History The Journal of Theory and Practice 6 3 273 292 doi 10 1080 13642520210164508 S2CID 143675622 Spiegelman Art 2011 MetaMAUS A Look Inside a Modern Classic MAUS Pantheon Books ISBN 978 0 375 42394 9 Wedderburn Alister 2018 Cartooning the Camp Aesthetic Interruption and the Limits of Political Possibility PDF Millennium Journal of International Studies 47 2 169 189 doi 10 1177 0305829818799884 S2CID 149585148 Weiner Robert G Fallwell Lynne 15 December 2010 Sequential Art Narrative and the Holocaust In Friedman Jonathan C ed The Routledge History of the Holocaust Taylor amp Francis pp 464 469 ISBN 978 1 136 87060 6 External links edit nbsp Wikimedia Commons has media related to Mickey au Camp de Gurs Mickey au Camp de Gurs All the panels at Le Figaro Mickey a Gurs at Calmann Levy the publishers Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Mickey au Camp de Gurs amp oldid 1176831813, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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