Multidirectional memory is hard.

Flix's latest comic "The Humboldt Animal" shows what it can look like.

As in 2018 in his volume "Spirou in Berlin" - which was about the last months of the GDR - Flix uses of all things André Franquin's Franco-Belgian character cosmos to retell German history.

The timing is favourable.

Because there is a dispute in Germany, a dispute about remembrance.

The arguments about anti-Semitism at Documenta 15 showed it, and the Humboldt Forum in Berlin cannot shake the uncanny resemblance to the Potemkin Prussian concrete in which its builders cast it.

The imaginary gulf between the commemoration of the Shoah and decolonial awareness is deeper than ever in Germany.

As early as 2009, Michael Rothberg described one reason for this as “competitive memory” in his book “Multidirectional Memory – Holocaust Remembrance in the Age of Decolonization”.

Assuming that the resources available for remembrance are scarce and that public remembrance is a zero-sum game, then, according to Rothberg, remembrance of the Holocaust "precludes" remembrance of other historical crimes.

Conversely, "the memory of slavery or colonialism would erase the memory of the Holocaust" in "the public sphere".

However, “multidirectional” memory shows that there is another way.

According to Rothberg, this is not based on competition, but on dialogue.

The Flix comic begins with an image quote from Alexander von Humboldt's famous depiction of the Chimborazo in Ecuador.

There Humboldt collects future museum objects with Aimé Bonpland, including not only a specimen of the Marsipulamis, an animal species invented by Franquin, but also a mummy stolen from a burial cave.

Throughout the story, a green, animalistic fluid flows out of their mouths.

In wintry-grey Berlin, where the mummy finally lands, it refers to the green rainforest on the slopes of the Chimborazo: in other words, to the context from which the mummy was torn.

Above all, however, the green fluid resembles those breathing and speech bubbles that are actually reserved for living characters in comics - in Italian they are called "fumetti" (little puffs of smoke).

So the mummy is not a dead object,

but an ensouled, a "spiritual" being.

As it crumbles to dust near the end of the story, the Marsupilami opens a window, allowing the remains to be carried outside by the wind and blown away.

At least that's how the mummy escapes the museum.

Once there is the crime of the colonizers...

A jaguar baby is unequivocally alive, which Humboldt finds and, as the comic makes very clear, violently abducts its parents.

It can hardly be surpassed in terms of lovable big paws and touching childlike scheme.

Humboldt calls the kitten a "damn cute brat" and immediately tells him: "I promise you, I'll break your neck tenderly and then you'll be the prettiest piece in my entire collection." This extremely brutal phrase should not be overlooked .

The museum logic of representation as mortification cannot be expressed more clearly.

Fast forward to 1931: the mummy and baby jaguar, now stuffed and mounted on a board, can be found in a box in the Berlin Museum of Natural History.

Next to it lies the Marsupilami, a humanoid creature with black-spotted yellow fur and a tail eight meters long.

It magically comes back to life, flees the museum and befriends seven-year-old Mimmi Löwenstein, who lives in precarious circumstances with her single mother.

As their family name, a menorah on the kitchen table and a straw Star of David hanging from Mimmi's window handle suggest, the Löwensteins are Jewish.