Germany in Comics

Manifest Destiny - Nightcrawler is a one-shot comic from a few months back.
For those not following Marvel Comics: "Manifest Destiny" refers to the X-Men moving from New York State to San Francisco.

I really do wonder what the hell Marvel writers/editors were thinking when they took the label for an idea that boils down to "We must take away land from inferior humans, because God made us superior" and apply it to the X-Men.

Anyway, spoilers will follow.

I take an interest in American comics taking place in Germany, or featuring German characters, mostly because I want to know if really all American comic creators are so stupid they believe we're stuck about a hundred years in the past, as "all houses are timber frame constructions and people wear lederhosen every day" suggests.

The Eternals series published by Marvel in 2008-2009 did better than most.

Pertinent plot points: There's a group of superhumans (the Eternals) who have been turned into humans. Most of them don't even remember their true nature. Those that do are trying to find the others.

One of those they find is a German engineer, living under the name Phillip Stoss. "Stoss" is an existing, as far as I can tell not very common name. The etymology of the name might be more complicated, but obviously it is the correct alternative spelling of "Stoß", which is a noun translating to "push", or a number of similar things, depending on context.

He works for "Ziffengel Motorwerks" in Zuffenhausen. If "Ziffengel" is supposed to be a reference to anything, I couldn't figure out to what - "Engel" means "angel", though. "Motorwerks" I'd buy as a name for a metal band, because the butchered grammar is on par with stuff like using umlauts ignoring that they are pronounced differently from their corresponding regular letters, but not a serious company. The correct plural would be "Motorenwerke", or, if you like, "Motoren Werke". That's what the MW of BMW stands for, by the way.

A very minor quibble: Zuffenhausen would properly be Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen. But anyway, using Zuffenhausen as base for a car company was a very nice touch. In the real world, it's the seat of the Porsche headquarters.

He says his parents were killed when he was two, and, "I was sent to live with my Grandmother in Dresden. She looked after me until I was sixteen." The next thing he said about that was, "We lived above a little toy shop in a small village in the Schwarzwald." Now, the entire page was written to show up inconsistencies in his memory, what with mixing up pet names and car makes, but that is by far the biggest mistake. Since there is no reaction from his wife, or the people (probably) pretending to be German attorneys, I get the feeling it's something the writer missed. Let me illustrate:

Dresden is way out East, the Schwarzwald as far in the Southwest as you can go. Furthermore, while it's not easy to guess the age of comic characters from their faces, I don't think he's older than 50. In that case, those two places are in two different countries, and the Inner German Border was not that easy to cross.

One of the nicer points is Stoss correcting the "where did you attend college" to say he went to a university of applied sciences. The one in Cologne actually exists, and was founded in 1971. I can't figure out what "Rhineland University" is. The closest possible match seems to be the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelm Universität Bonn, calling itself "University of Bonn" on the English version of its own website. It doesn't seem to deal with engineering, though.

It may be not really obvious, but to me someone having a BMW or Audi as a first car sounds a bit weird, since they're both relatively expensive brands, even moreso around the supposed time of Stoss' youth (70s). According to my mother a VW Käfer, R4 or "Ente" was typical, with the very occasional old Ford thrown in.

Lastly, I'l like to point out that the inconsistent lettering was a bit confusing. The "interview" didn't have brackets, so were they speaking English? But the property Stoss was alledgedly inheriting was in Germany, so why would attorneys from an English-speaking country be involved? Probably just a slip.

Oh, well, all in all, even with the problems, it's better than most, and there obviously was some effort to get things right involved.

Marvel Comics, Eternals, written by Charles & Daniel Knauf, Illustrated by Daniel Acuña, letters by Todd Klein

imported from older blog
From the series about Germans in comics, commentary on Avengers: The Initiative 1 - Happy Accidents (2007-04) and 2 - Hero Moment (2007-05)

I'm not sure this Baron von Blitzschlag is undead or just old, but he certainly is another Nazi scientist. This is starting to get silly.

"Blitzschlag" translates to "lightning strike". Not a last name I ever encountered. If someone reading this is really curious about the "Baron" bit, you could look into Freiherr.

What's really interesting is the way he talks - not the over the top accent, but the fact that he consistently addresses Doctor Hank Pym as "Herr Pym".
This can come across as a bit of a snub, since he does not address him as "Doctor Pym" (or even "Doktor", if need be).
It's also interesting to see that he knows the address "Mr" (last page of #1), yet chooses to use "Herr" to address Pym.
With both combined, also considering the "I'm your greatest fan" speech in #2, it looks to me like von Blitzschlag is trying to get on Pym's nerves.

Unfortunately we have a "Herr Gyrich" earlier, so it seems like the "Mr. Secetary" might have been a slip, and I might be reading entirely too much into it.

A general note regarding having German characters use "Herr"/"Frau"/"Fräulein" instead of English forms of address: For most characters, it's nonsense.

Apart from the fact that something that common is easy to pick up when you learn a language, you would have to have spent your life alone in a cave to not know Mr and Mrs and Miss. It's all over entertainment.

We get a lot of movies and TV series translated from English. Those are not subtitled, but dubbed. However, even when speaking German, the characters use the English forms of address. (I'm not saying you couldn't find counter-examples, though I can't think of any right now.)

This is not a new trend. Even in the German dub, that pointy-eared guy from Star Trek is called "Mister Spock". The oldest example I could find in a hurry was Gone With The Wind (1953).
This also extends to titles, for exampel right now "Mr. Bean macht Ferien" gets advertised, and off the top of my head I can think of "Mrs. Doubtfire", "Mr. Bill" and an old cartoon show called "Mr. Maggoo".

Considering present day settings, "Fräulein" is particularly inappropriate, because it's obsolete. If someone who was not a senior citizen had addressed me as "Fräulein" when I was a teenager (last decade), I'd have thought they were making fun of me.

So, yeah, quite a few Germans in English comics sound very weird to me.

Back to the comic at hand, there's a small point left: In Avenger: The Initiative #2, von Blitzschlag calls M.V.P. "die Übermensch". That schould be "der Übermensch" (grammatically masculine, rather than feminine).

Imported from an older blog, commentary on Marvel Comics' Thunderbolts #110

Yes, sure, give the company that makes the propaganda toys making the villains look like heroes and the other way 'round a German name; frequent (and in contrast to this reasonable) Nazi references in the Civil War storyline really weren't enough. -_-

My first association for translating "Mittelwerk" would be "middle work", but I'm not sure if that makes sense.
"Mittel" can mean "middle, center" - for example "Mittelerde" is the German name of Middle-earth - but also "means" or "instrument" ("Mittel zum Zweck" = "means to an end"; "Der Zweck heiligt die Mittel." = "The aim justifies the means.")

Considering context, I suspect the aim was something like "tool factory".

Edited to add: Turns out I was wrong, and this is not a "German= evil" reference, but another Nazi reference, Mittelwerk having been an actual factory producing weapons during WWII.

It's still obviously something on author/real world level (or could you imagine an American company naming itself after a Nazi weapons producer?), and therefore I consider it gratuitous.

Imported from an older Blog

The Ultimates Annual 2, from October 2006 features another sort-of undead Nazi scientist (his mind has been copied into a computer), as well as some German language. The latter includes the most hilarious mess-up in that field I found so far.

Nothing to say about Zola but "another undead Nazi scientist?", so, language.

In case you're not interested in longer ramblings, here's the fun bit:

A kind of biological weapon was called "Weiber Staub" - "dust of broads".
I can see how that happened: They translated "white dust", found "weißer Staub" and mistook the ß for a B, giving them "Weiber", which is the plural of "Weib", which is an old-fashioned and nowadays derogatory term for "woman" or "wife".

To the helpful part: If you come across ß and can't use that letter, replace it with ss. If you are writing in allcaps, even do that if you could use ß, since this letter only exists in lowercase.

Imported from an older blog, on Ultimate Spider-Man 107 - Ultimate Knights pt 2

On the topic of killing the leader of an organization being pointless because someone else would step in, Daredevil says, "Not necessarily. They killed Hitler. And that was that for the Third Reich."

In the real world, Germany was bombed until most of the cities lay in ruins. The armies were beaten. Then Hitler committed suicide.

I'd like to go off on a tangent here: Do you know when the last time someone in Germany was killed by a WWII bomb?

November 2006.

He was killed during roadworks when the machine he operated struck a bomb that had been buried since about 15 years before he was born.

It happens only every couple of years that someone is killed (which is bad enough), but every year in Germany alone hundreds, if not thousands of tonnes of WWII bombs that failed to explode are found.

It might sound pretty self-centered, but, honestly, I think me being used to having about once a year roads blocked for bomb removal somewhere in my hometown or its suburbs is a big part of the reason why I react badly when someone makes light of war.

Imported from an older blog; refers to Sensational Spider-Man #30 from November 2006

We have our first German bad guy, garnished with a great dose of WTF. Sure won't be the last, but might be the weirdest: a man-shaped swarm of "bees and wasps controlled by a dead Nazi scientist's reanimated skeleton."

For a bit of nitpicking on a different topic, let's look at two narration boxes near the beginning:

"Before he was a super-villain, before he was a telephone-wire repairman, Dillon dreamed about being an artist."

"(The same way a young German man named Adolph once did.)"

Assuming that's supposed to refer to Hitler, the spelling's wrong - his first name was Adolf.
Arguably it's also a factual error: He was still Austrian when a young man trying to get accepted by the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. (Vienna's the capital of Austria.)

I had started a dedicated blog on this topic, and this is the first post imported from it. Now I post everything on the topic under the tag "Germany in comics" here.

I read comics. I sometimes even read Superhero comics. I'm fed up with the following:

• Germany being depicted as "place where everyone lives in timber frame construction houses and wears lederhosen", stuck a hundred years in the past.
• Roughly 9 of 10 German characters being villains.
• German language being usually completely butchered.

So, I'm going to point out this nonsense as I find it, serving the double purpose of letting me vent, and maybe, maybe helping someone out there avoiding factual errors. I will also point out comics that get things right, or at least not wrong, to see if things are really as bad as my current impression suggests.

I'm pretty sure other countries and languages are getting similar treatment, but I feel unable to accurately comment on those issues, so I'll leave that to other people... Thought I might be the only nutcase interested in something like this. :D

For a start:

2 panels from Marvel Comic's New X-Men #36 (published in 2007)

Yes, there are woodframe construction buildings in Germany - I even happen to live in one. It's not the norm, though.

However, Lederhosen are completely ridiculous as "typically German". First, they are "typical" for some parts of the Alps (parts of Bavaria, Switzerland, Austria, northern Italy).

Second, they are not everyday wear, but traditional costume. Ethnic. Folkloristic.

"Lederhosen" relate to "typically German" roughly like "traditional Native American costume" relates to "typical for the USA".

It's ridiculous, and not in a good way.