HFBK

Julia Stolba

“The experience she has acquired over the course of a lifetime should belong to everyone who knows what to do with it. […] Everyone who is young in this world could be her grandchildren. And she has only one wish for this generation – that they are spared the experiences that she and her comrades have paid for with blood. And just one question: if it does come to that, who will be prepared?”

Who was Helena Kuhar-Jelka, who hid leaflets in her hat during the Nazi dictatorship, smuggled food and medicine into the forests, developed codes to warn her comrades, and eventually joined the partisans in the forest herself? The Carinthian-Slovenian partisan was born in 1906 in Leppen/Lepena, in the trenches of the Karawanken mountains. After the “Anschluss” of Austria into Nazi Germany 1938, she supported the resistance as a civilian until she was betrayed in 1943 and fled to the forest. Jelka survived imprisonment by the Gestapo and remained politically active throughout her life after liberation. She fought against discrimination against Carinthian Slovenes and for women’s rights.

The graphic novel ‘Jelka’s Traces’, developed jointly by @markusgoenitza and Julia Stolba, traces the stages of her life. In addition, the narrative focuses on transgenerational dimensions: conversations and images from Breda Županc, Helena Kuhar’s youngest daughter, Zdravko Haderlap, her grandnephew, and other companions, as well as the archive of Brigitta and Thomas Busch. What can we learn from resistant women like Jelka today?

The exhibition Jelka’s Traces. Making of a Graphic Novel is the artistic part of Julia Stolba’s doctoral thesis ‘The Dissociative Archive. Of Partisans, Ghosts and Affects in the Peršmanhof Museum’ at the HFBK Hamburg. It shows the process of creating the graphic novel and the archival work within the project.