There are two sides to every story. I guess what really counts is which opinion is actually published. This thought arrives to me after reading the first volume of the book Maus by Art Spiegelman. In the story, a son records an account of what happened during World War II according to his father who survived the holocaust. This book was an easy read, keeping me interested from beginning to end. I think that a part of that is due to the fact that it is a first person account of what happened to someone involved in the thick of things at there worst. You can feel the emotions and strife as Vladek, the main character, attempts to keep his family safe from any harm.
At the same time though, I can't help but ask; what was everyone else going through during that time? Did the Germans fear for their lives, just as the persecuted Jewish population did? What about the Polish, what was going through their minds as the Germans took control of their nation? In Maus, the reader only gets the perspective of one person, leaving the reader to wonder what would have happened had the Germans won the war? Would we be reading a story about a first person account from the perspective of a young man fighting in the German army during World War II? Thankfully we will never know what would have happened had the Germans won, we can only speculate that the story would involve fear, anxiety, and hatred. Those emotions would be directed toward a different group of people, with a different bias. That just goes to show that it is the victors that write the history books, or in this case graphic novels.
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Excellent work, Adam. I'm thrilled to see that you're reflecting on history as a textual construct and not as a set of objective facts. White and Spiegelman, obviously, both support your opinion, with the latter using metafiction to stress the textual nature of history.
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