Opera (and Comics) Against Fascism

Exploring how the graphic novel ‘Death Strikes’ intersects with the modernist opera ‘Der Kaiser von Atlantis,’ a work composed by Jewish prisoners during the Holocaust.

By Melissa ChanFebruary 16, 2026

• Comics

• Music

• History

SAN DIEGO’S COMIC-CON is not the typical venue for modernist opera. Nevertheless, during the summer of 2025, soprano Alice Del Simone and mezzo-soprano Hannah Benson presented selections from a 1943 German-language opera by Viktor Ullmann, Der Kaiser von Atlantis oder Die Tod-Verweigerung (The Emperor of Atlantis or The Disobedience of Death), to the convention’s cosplayers, collectors, and superfans. The opera, adapted from a libretto by Peter Kien, tells the story of Death, who—burned out by his duties attending to humankind’s relentless warring—stomps off the job.

The singers were part of a panel about the World War II–era opera and its 2024 graphic novel adaptation, Death Strikes: The Emperor of Atlantis, published by Dark Horse Comics. The graphic novel, written by Dave Maass and illustrated by Patrick Lay, subsequently became the source material for a new production of Der Kaiser von Atlantis staged the following year by the Louisville Orchestra in Kentucky. This is how two opera singers ended up at the world’s largest comics convention, where their presence made a strange sense: comics literature often orbits universal themes such as love or the fight between good and evil—not unlike opera. The larger-than-life warriors of Wagner’s Valhalla seem hardly different from the flamboyant superheroes of DC and Marvel.

Der Kaiser von Atlantis was originally created under extraordinary circumstances while Ullmann and Kien were interned in Theresienstadt concentration camp (today known as Terezín) in the present-day Czech Republic. An Austrian Jew, Ullmann served on the Italian front during World War I before pursuing music studies in Vienna and Prague. His teachers included Arnold Schoenberg, the pioneering modernist composer and father of atonal music. Ullmann was deported to Theresienstadt in 1942. Kien was born shortly after World War I, not far from Theresienstadt, and was imprisoned there at 22. The bulk of his literary and artistic output—thousands of sketches, paintings, poems, and plays—was produced as a prisoner.

Theresienstadt was unique among the Nazi concentration camps. Even while tens of thousands of Jews died there and more than 88,000 were sent on to Auschwitz and other camps to be killed, the Nazis permitted prisoners a limited cultural life, including concerts, stage plays, literary readings, and art exhibitions. The Reich in turn used these events in its global propaganda campaign to demonstrate their good treatment of prisoners.

As a reporter who has covered international human rights issues for more than two decades, I’ve puzzled over how Ullmann and Kien produced Der Kaiser. On its artistic merits alone, it is an excellent midcentury composition. How did these two men produce not just competent but even extraordinary opera under such deprivations? Starvation and cold severely diminish mental and cognitive health, sapping prisoners of energy and concentration. Yet, as quoted in the endnotes of Death Strikes, Ullmann claimed that “Theresienstadt has served to enhance, not to impede, my musical activities,” adding that “by no means did we sit weeping on the banks of the waters of Babylon, and that our endeavour with respect to arts was commensurate with our will to live.”

The opera they produced is an inventive and wild story for any age, an allegorical critique of modernity wrapped up in a fantastical zombie tale. Maass says those latter elements drew him to the work: he imagines that Kien, who worked on costume design in addition to serving as librettist, “could’ve had a career in comics had he survived the war, á la Joe Kavalier in Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.”

The opera and its comic adaptation sketch a fictional future in which Atlantis never sank and has instead become a techno-totalitarian superpower under Emperor Overall. This madman declares war on everybody, demanding his citizens kill until no one is left alive. The graphic novel describes the situation as “everyone against everyone.” Horrified, Death declares that he will stop taking souls. The Atlanteans, however, continue to slaughter as decreed, leaving bloody piles of the would-be dead. In Maass and Lay’s story, these undead limp and crawl along with vacant eyes in various stages of decomposition. Pierrot, a jester representing light and life, watches helplessly from the sidelines in place of a Greek chorus. Lay sketches him as a 19th-century Barnum & Bailey circus clown with Weimar-era folly pizzazz hopping incongruously through apocalyptic landscapes. In both opera and book, you feel the diabolical humor and absurdist tragedy of it all.

Ullmann and Kien held rehearsals in Theresienstadt, but the opera never formally debuted. The Nazis recognized the production’s satire of the Third Reich and nixed it. Ullmann passed the manuscript along to the camp’s librarian for safekeeping—and in October 1944, both he and Kien were sent to Auschwitz. Ullman was murdered in a gas chamber two days after his arrival. Kien died from sickness. Their opera would not receive its world premiere until 1975, when De Nederlandse Opera (now known as the Dutch National Opera) performed it in Amsterdam.

Since that year, Der Kaiser has been shown across Europe. Because the recovered manuscript did not survive its lost decades fully intact, opera companies made guesses over missing sections. That was difficult work—the composition is atonal but not entirely so, and it draws on styles from across musical genres. Ullmann sampled everything from Baroque music to jazz to military marches. He also composed for the instruments and musicians available to him in Theresienstadt, contributing to the particular modernist sound of the opera. A few productions in the 1980s consulted surviving musicians from Theresienstadt, such as Karel Berman, the bass singer who played the role of Death during Ullmann and Kien’s rehearsals.

In 1995, more than 50 years after imprisoned musicians first practiced Der Kaiser, the opera finally returned to and premiered in Theresienstadt. More recent notable productions include Deutsche Oper am Rhein’s version, with its minimalist staging comprised of radiating lines of rope, the singers tied like trapped marionettes as they challenge each other: Death against Emperor Overall, Pierrot against Death. Future performances are scheduled in Vienna, Geneva, and Mainz, Germany.

American audiences have had far less access to Der Kaiser. The opera made its US debut at the San Francisco Opera in 1977, but it hasn’t seen the same levels of programming as in Europe. Its length, at approximately one hour, has made the show difficult to schedule for opera companies, whose audiences expect a full, multihour evening. American orchestras and opera companies also navigate a different financial model from that of their subsidized European counterparts. Ticket sales matter much more, driving music directors to lean on scheduling popular and pleasing Italian operas.

Der Kaiser is therefore more often found in the United States at music conservatories, where its length and parts work well as a “starter” opera for student singers—on a pedagogical level, though certainly not on a thematic level. Organizations such as the Los Angeles–based Ziering-Conlon Center for Exiled and Suppressed Composers, with its mission to support performances of music “by composers whose careers and lives were tragically cut short by the Nazi regime,” are working today to bring greater awareness to Der Kaiser. The organization was involved with both the Louisville Orchestra performance and the publication of Death Strikes.

Given the opera’s relative obscurity in the US, Maass’s discovery of it is all the more special. He found it “as a teenage mallrat in the late 90s at a Best Buy. It was part of a CD sampler of ‘degenerate music’ suppressed by the Nazis, with cover art by none other than Art Spiegelman.” Three decades later, he joined forces with Lay and character designer Ezra Rose to produce Death Strikes. “I always felt that the message and story of Der Kaiser von Atlantis deserved a much wider fan base than just the very narrow audience for 20th-century German-language opera,” Maass explained in our conversation about the genesis of the book.

The graphic novel is a magnificent and macabre work. The narration and dialogue alike have the beautiful lilt of poetry inspired by its source material, and Maass has deftly freshened it for contemporary readers. Lay’s choice to stick to a black-and-white palette, together with aesthetic touches that hearken back to early 20th-century woodcut art, gives the book a newspaper-like feel—nostalgically analog.

The production of the graphic novel involved extensive research. Maass reached out to experts in Los Angeles and around the world, from Haifa, Israel, to Basel, Switzerland. He saw original copies of the music himself and traveled to Theresienstadt. Maass and Lay reviewed Kien’s original artwork and even stayed in the same hostel where the librettist once spent time as a student.

Adam Millstein, the creative producer of the Louisville production and program manager at the Ziering-Conlon Center, also visited the concentration camp. “Seeing it in person was incredibly impactful and devastating,” he said, and it only underscored how he must “try to do as much service as [he] can to the lives and legacies of these composers.”

The synthesis between the Louisville production and the graphic novel gives the opera audience the estranging impression that they are also watching a silent film. Scenes from the novel are projected onstage, allowing singers to move across and engage with the comics landscape. We see the skyline of Atlantis, with its brutalist watchtower and blinding searchlight sweeping the city. When Death sings in his final confrontation with Emperor Overall, his skeletal face looms down over the orchestra as their music grows quieter and quieter. His calm but somber voice usurps the stage: “I am the greatest celebration of freedom! I am the last lullaby” (translated from the opera’s original German). Death takes his responsibilities far more solemnly than the reckless people who have been murdering each other. When it is Emperor Overall’s turn to respond, Death’s glower fades and the two face each other from opposite sides of the stage, the orchestra between them. It is a visually rich yet ingeniously simple production that manages to both entertain audiences and convey the solemn backstory of its origins.

As all singers gather onstage for the opera’s final lines honoring Death, the images of Death and Emperor Overall dissolve into a picture of a violinist, Paul Kling. Appointed Louisville Orchestra’s concertmaster in the 1950s, he played in rehearsals of Der Kaiser a decade earlier as a teenage prisoner in Theresienstadt. Surviving by feigning death during a winter transport march, the young musician fled and eventually ended up in Tokyo with the NHK Symphony Orchestra before arriving in Kentucky.

Millstein says the staging was “very dedicated to the graphic novel, and the graphic novel was very dedicated to the original vision.” With the production’s use of material from the recently published book, “it looks back toward the 20th century but also forward to the 21st century” by integrating a medium popular with Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Given the innovative though minimal staging, Millstein hopes this version of Der Kaiser can tour and be presented in as many places as possible.

The revival of Der Kaiser and its adaptation as Death Strikes could not come at a better time for the United States. Leaders of the American Far Right call for chaos, revolution, and the dismantling of our democratic institutions, and neo-Nazis for the end of “Jewish oligarchy,” while gleefully admiring the tyrants and strongmen they believe can deliver new Final Solutions. They hunger for an Emperor Overall and view their movement as a global wave renewing the world. Their exhortations sound fantastical—but just look at how much our government has veered toward authoritarianism in just the last year. We hurtle along the widening gyre of the dark unknown. As Pierrot describes in Death Strikes, “Humanity is in freefall. / And the world is a dumpster fire. / We’re spinning out of control / On a merry-go-round of misery / With a madman at the wheel.”

What happened to the creators of Der Kaiser was evil. And what Ullmann and Kien showed was their capability to produce great art while at their most vulnerable, when it could have easily felt as if it didn’t matter—at least by the conventional norms of creative output, where audiences and cultural critics would respond and, in an alternate universe, where Ullmann might have received future commissions. That they both kept up a steady pace of creative output, for themselves and for their doomed prisoners, suggests they understood the intrinsic value of their art.

Ullmann and Kien died with no idea that their opera would ever be known beyond the confines of Theresienstadt, or that an Asian American sitting in Berlin (of all places!) would be writing about them some 80 years later. The tragedy is that the ones who should heed the message of Der Kaiser are the ones least likely to see it or read its graphic novel adaptation. The lesson is that we should nevertheless carry on with our creative pursuits, for art produced in such times is defiance against fascism—more than we might ever know.