On the Coffee Table: Shigeru Mizuki's Hitler

Title: Shigeru Mizuki's Hitler

Writer and Artist: Shigeru Mizuki

via Amazon

I've spent quite a bit of time with the work of Japanese manga master Shigeru Mizuki.  I was especially impressed by his Showa series, detailing the history of Japan from 1926-89.  As with many of his generation, World War II was a defining experience of his life.  His series Hitler, first serialized in Japan from 1971-72, offers a rare Japanese perspective on the European theater of the war.  Mizuki tells the human story of Hitler from his student days in Vienna to his death in Berlin in 1945.

Notice, I said "human" story, not "humanizing."  In his books on Japan, Mizuki makes crystal clear that he harbors deep resentment towards his government's destructive impact on its own nation during the war years.  The author sees Hitler the same way.  Just like Japan's leaders, the Nazis exhausted the nation's resources to pursue a maniacal vision of empire.  Indeed, Mizuki holds Hitler personally responsible for the troubles in his own life.  The human story he tells only makes Hitler all the more monstrous.  The Führer did not emerge overnight.  We get everything from his starving artist days, his military career, his wildly inappropriate crush on his own niece and, of course, his ultimate rise to power.  I learned quite a lot, particularly about the history of the party itself, beginning in the early 1920s.

The resulting impact is a bit like that of a Scorcese gangster movie.  The Nazis, Hitler included, were real people with dimension, not celluloid demigods, and that makes them all the more terrifying.  The beginning of the rise was surprisingly humble.  This could happen again all too easily.  Indeed, in other parts of the world, it has.  

Mizuki used the same artistic approach he employed in his Japanese history.  Individual historical figures are presented as near-caricatures against hyper-realistic backgrounds, often recreations of authentic photographs.  Mizuki deliberately did not devote much material to the Holocaust.  It is acknowledged graphically at both the beginning and end of the story but not in between.  Mizuki worried that to do more would overshadow the rest of the chronicle.  He wanted to emphasize the man and his madness over his most horrifying deeds.  

Shigeru Mizuki's Hitler is hardly a comforting read though it is certainly engaging.