Copyright

Sarah Fichtner and Anja Werner

Published On

2024-04-22

Page Range

pp. 351–369

Language

  • English

Print Length

19 pages

15. Connecting Across Divides

A Case Study in Public History of the (e-)Motion Comic ‘Ghost Train―Memories of Ghost Trains and Ghost Stations in Former East and West-Berlin’

  • Sarah Fichtner (author)
  • Anja Werner (author)
Chapter of: (An)Archive: Childhood, Memory, and the Cold War(pp. 351–369)
In this chapter, we describe the process of―and reflect on our experiences with―creating the collaborative, international motion comic ‘Ghost Train―Memories of Ghost Trains and Ghost Stations in Former East and West Berlin’, which is based on memories that we shared in a Reconnect/Recollect project workshop. During this workshop, Sarah Fichtner shared her West Berliner childhood memory of accidentally riding an underground train through ‘ghost stations’ of East Berlin. In turn, Anja Werner recalled a scene from her East German childhood of when she actually heard such ‘ghost trains’ rumbling underneath an apartment in East Berlin. From the experience with our motion comic, we gather that motion comics, because they are pieces of art, can add additional layers to history work. They do so by working with and addressing emotions, thus becoming (e-)motion comics as they connect people through memories across divides, time, and space.

Contributors

Sarah Fichtner

(author)

Sarah Fichtner grew up on what she perceived as an artificial island called West Berlin. She is a social anthropologist and education researcher, interested in the process of ‘doing school’ and what it takes to shape the school of the future, whether in Germany or Sub-Saharan Africa, where she spent quite some time. She has also been working on childhoods in the context of flight and migration. As the project coordinator of the activist ‘encounter’ network and inspired by her Mnemo ZIN colleagues, Sarah Fichtner became interested in collective and artistic biography and memory work as a means for transcultural learning.

Anja Werner

(author)

Anja Werner grew up in small-town East Germany during the Cold War, where she was prepared to live in a world that today no longer exists. She, therefore, became a writer and historian. She is currently affiliated with the University of Erfurt in Germany. In her research and teaching she focuses, among other things, on digital memory work in transcultural contexts with a special interest in educational exchanges among Black and/or Deaf people from the West and the Global South. Together with Sarah Fichtner, she initiated a motion comic project about memories of the German division at the Marienborn Memorial to Divided Germany (https://mocom-memories.de/en/home/). In her ongoing book project, she examines two deaf missionaries, African American Andrew Foster and his German wife Berta Zuther-Foster, who, between 1957 and 2009, opened more than thirty schools and churches for the deaf in thirteen African countries.