Ken Krimstein draws wacky gag cartoons—one classic shows two adjacent storefronts: the window sign in the left one reads MEDICAL MARIJUANA DISPENSARY, while the window sign on the right reads MEDICAL CHEEZ DOODLES DISPENSARY—but the artist doesn’t look the least bit demented. He’s more like a cross between a boomer hipster and the favored uncle who shares his best anecdotes at first-night seder. I would never have pegged him as a midcentury philosophy buff.
“When I was a kid I loved biopics—like Young Abraham Lincoln, The Life of Louis Pasteur, Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet—and, I always say this, the comics cognoscenti have their pantheon of comic books from the 50s. Classics Illustrated is not one of them.”
Those cafe society scenes in Weimar Berlin in particular show how propulsive Krimstein’s style is, how fluidly he conveys freewheeling conversations, how nimbly he switches gears. When he introduces multiple speakers within a frame, sometimes—as when Hannah visits Saint Augustine—dialogue flows down the page in a sort of “she says-he says” volley. At other times he resorts to a collage of captions, rotating the speakers clockwise or counterclockwise. I wonder if the counterclockwise mode was deliberate, or if it has something to do with his being left-handed.
All of her vast experience, the events of recent world history, and her evolution beyond philosophy had led her to embrace freedom and plurality as essential for an authentic life and world peace. Her earliest qualms about the newly established state of Israel arose from its foundation along ethnic (rather than pluralistic) lines, and its lack of a formal, written constitution guaranteeing freedom for all residents. So when she accepted an assignment from the New Yorker to cover the 1961 trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief architects of the Holocaust, she knew she needed to report the proceedings as dispassionately as she could. In a panel showing a long-distance phone call to her husband and soul mate, Heinrich Blücher, Krimstein shows Hannah figuring out her angle: “If we turn Eichmann into a demonic monster, we somehow absolve him of his crime, and all of us of our potential crime, the crime of not thinking things through. The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”
“Yes,” he says. “It broke through a lot of internal barriers that I had. It caused me to question, deeply, how courageous of an individual am I, and what I would do if I was faced with making those sorts of decisions [that Hannah made]. What clarity of vision would I have? And how willing am I to be the kind of pariah she became? And then, the sense of loss [over] the destruction of not only humanity, but the cities, and culture—everything just wantonly destroyed.”
By Ken Krimstein (Bloomsbury). In conversation with Dmitry Samarov Sat 11/17, 5 PM, the Dial Bookshop, 410 S. Michigan, dialbookshop.com. F
