Why didn’t the superheroes liberate Auschwitz?

Captain America Comics, Vol. 1 #1, cover of Joe Simon, Jack Kirby, Marvel, March 1941.

From 1941, the superheroes are confronted with the Nazi concentration camps. But why do they not release them? Around this question are raised those of the superpower and the apparent passivity of the Allies in the face of the Holocaust.

With the exceptional presence of Chris Claremont.

Chris Claremont © Beth Fleisher.

Chris Claremont, the man who made Magneto a Shoah survivor.

Interview by Philippe Guedj. Full text available in the catalogue Shoah et bande dessinée, 2017 © Mémorial de la Shoah / Denoël Graphic.

Legendary writer of the comic book X-Men between 1975 and 1991, Chris Claremont brought the title into adulthood by attributing to the bad mutant Magneto a tragic past directly related to the Shoah. As a preamble to his visit to Paris in January 2017, the brilliant author has kindly delivered some keys of his inspiration.

Did your stay in a Kibbutz, in 1970, lay the first stone of your future reflection on the Jewish origins of Magneto?

It was indeed an experience that deeply marked me. It was in 1970, I was 20 years old, America was stuck up to the neck in Vietnam, where I had no desire to go fight. I was a student at a small left-wing college where one of the professors of political theory was Hannah Arendt’s husband. In January and February, the school closed to encourage us to do a complementary field internship with our theoretical studies.  The year before, I had also done my internship at Marvel and there I really wanted to find something related to political theory, a subject that fascinated me. An announcement in The Village Voice mentioned the possibility of doing a tour in a kibbutz in Israel [...]. In January, I left for Tel Aviv via Paris and spent two months working in a kibbutz, in the valley of Elah, near the Jordanian border, where, I was told, David had fought Goliath [...].