Davide Osenda
Ultima lezione a Gottinga

THE REVIEW

“Last Lesson in Göttingen would make a nice debut even if it were about the price of zucchini in Lower Saxony between the two wars.” With these words Andrea Plazzi (yes, yes...the one from Rat-man but also from Will Eisner etc. etc.) presents the small but great graphic jewel by Davide Osenda, a self-taught watercolorist who wandered into the world of auteur comics almost by chance.

We are in Göttingen in the 1930s, and the Jewish Professor Fiz, who senses the beginning of the end, holds his last and moving lesson in an apparently empty classroom. A kind of clash between Reason and Madness. In fact, framing this story, beyond the windows of a university classroom, is History, the one where the National Socialist party commits a massacre against humanity.

The lesson presents an incredible journey into the abysses or rather the peaks of mathematics, a long path in which we encounter the theoretical evolution of infinities passing through Hilbert, Cantor, Gödel, and Zermelo, managing to convey through images a world so complex that it hardly seems possible to understand every single passage. And here lies the immense ability of Osenda, because through the imaginative metaphors of the gramophone and card games, the author succeeded in representing the unrepresentable, pure theory.

Meanwhile, the world is trembling under the goose step, and the books burned in the square and the men gathered in the square to be loaded onto trains can only forebode the worst, preparing for mass extermination.

This is what Davide Osenda has drawn.

“The comic, alternating the hellish chiaroscuro of Nazism with the paradisiacal brightness of mathematics, manages to make visible with the eyes of the body what can only be fully seen with the eyes of the mind [...]” (P. Odifreddi, from the introduction to “Last Lesson in Göttingen, 001 Editions, 12.50 euros).

The comic was presented at the latest edition of Lucca Comics after being exhibited at the Mathematics Festival in Rome and at a solo exhibition at the Civic Museum of Cuneo (hometown of Davide Osenda).