Rezension: "Schwarze Spiegel" von Arno Schmidt und Mahler

Abstract

With his idiosyncratic, highly successful adaptations of literary works (e.g. Thomas Bernhard, Robert Musil, Marcel Proust), the Austrian artist Mahler places himself in a long historical tradition within the medium of comics; at the same time, in these works he succeeds in preserving the specifics of his narrative and drawing style. The latest example from this series of publications is the adaptation of the story Schwarze Spiegel (1951) by the German writer Arno Schmidt (1914-1979), in whose extensive oeuvre apocalyptic settings can be traced many times. The choice of Schwarze Spiegel – a text that is also available in annotated reading versions for use in the classroom – proves to be particularly fortunate for Mahler's approach: Schmidt's grim but not humourless original goes ideally with Mahler's deliberately reduced style, both in form and content. The present adaptation thus not only allows an encounter with Mahler's condensed artistic approach, but also a re-encounter with a text by Arno Schmidt, who has long been considered a classic of German-language literature.