"Monster" and German reunification

Naoki Urasawa's manga "Monster," the source of that "The Monster with No Name" short we watched earlier this year, deals with trauma left by the divided and reunified Germany in a way which is relevant to our discussion of "Goodbye Lenin!" Having finally finished the 74-episode anime series based on the manga, I think I can talk a little bit more about what lessons "The Monster with No Name" imparts as a fable invented for Urasawa's story. I will try and be concise.

"Monster" takes place over the course of a decade, straddling 1989 on both sides. The main narrative follows a young Japanese brain surgeon living in Munich. He saves the life of a 10 year old boy (Johan) who has been shot in the head. His twin sister, Anna, is in a state of shock. Johan disappears from the hospital and Anna is placed into the care of a kind West German family, where she assumes a different name. Johan resurfaces a decade later as a sociopath and murderer who becomes a doppelganger of sorts for the good-hearted Japanese surgeon.

We find out that Johan and Anna were the children of a Czech prostitute who, before fleeing to West Germany, were placed into a series of orphanages designed to brainwash the children into soldiers. Anna suffered at the hands of a particularly traumatic experiment (long-term solitary confinement). She tells Johan of the experience, which the brother assumes (and consumes, connecting back to the fairy tale), transforming it into his own memory and his own impetus for murder. Anna suppresses the memory, fooling herself into thinking that it was actually Johan who was the subject of that experiment. As an adult, Johan plays with his own identity quite a bit, assuming different names, personalities and, at one point, even dressing as his sister. The lines from the fairy tale, "Look at me! Look at how big this monster inside me has become!" become a motif for Johan and eventually come to stand for the idea that the evil inside him was planted by his experiences with Urasawa's interesting vision of Communist mad science. His identity is constructed by his experiences with a particularly cinematic (and Western) vision of the Eastern Bloc. The monster inside of him finds an identity, the kind young boy Johan, and coexists with the boy until consuming his personality from the inside out. Anna--the monster who eventually goes West in the fairy tale--also has her identity consumed by Johan as a means to identify himself with a particularly traumatic event as justification for his murderous tendencies.

"Monster" is particularly engaging because it was written by a Japanese author from an outsiders perspective. The story deals with numerous themes beyond the East-West identity crisis, including the lingering remnants of Nazism and how they impact Germany's large Turkish population. The hero, a Japanese immigrant, factors into these issues as well. How well Urasawa examines these issues would be an interesting research topic for someone who knows a lot more about German history than me.