In late 1970s / early 1980s people realized that some pictures do speak louder than words. The graphic novel that helped them with this realization was Art Spiegelman's Maus, which we will discuss in our next session. 

Maus started the rise of graphic novels, helped to introduce the concept of trauma in the wider society and is a profound work discussing the role of memory and ingenuity in one's life. At the same time, some passages are not for everyone and if that is your case I would suggest skipping pages 108 - 110 in the book (which amounts pages 101 - 103 in the pdf).

At the state exam, you will have to demonstrate that you can choose your sources and examples well, you understand them well, and you can also explain them well. To practice this, we played with translating a passage from the graphic novel to a social media post so that we could get used to the difficulty of paraphrasing and simplifying difficult ideas without loosing their depth.