BOBC

This article deals with the series of graphic novels that David Vandermeulen has been devoting to Fritz Haber, the 1919 Chemistry Nobel Prize, and to the involvement of German scientists and entrepeneurs of Jewish descent in the war. In his attempts to reveal the tensions pervading German society and its main scientific and industrial circles before and after the Great War, the author goes beyond the mere popularization of history to get closer to what the historian confronts when s.he touches the complexity of her/his subject. The very structure of the historical narrative, its actual plot, necessarily requires a point of view regarding historical facts. Vandermeulen builds it by confronting the “objective” chronicle of facts with the mythical tales of Germanic grandeur that prevailed in Germany before the war.