about the book
A woman gets bullied on the street. Bystanders do nothing. Why?
That question comes to mind even more so when one wonders why German residents did nothing to stop Hitler and his murderous campaign to wipe out the Jews. This bleak graphic novel, in the form of a scrapbook, is based on a true story from World War II, written and illustrated after the author found letters and documents left behind by her German grandmother. The first images show ambitious Irmina, a young German woman whose life and ideals are about to change insanely.
She moves to London in 1934 to finish school and develop skills for a successful independent life. But while she stoically struggles to train as a transcriptionist, she is treated with snobbish disdain as a foreigner. At a cocktail party, she meets Howard Green, a black Caribbean student on scholarship to Oxford who is also treated as an outsider. Sharing this bond, their relationship blossoms…until she is abruptly forced to go back to Germany.
Choices disappear as the Nazis take over. As Hitler’s war machine kicks into high gear, Irmina faces food and fuel shortages, career restrictions, and the rising tide of anti-Semitism. Ideals fade away as she takes on a position at the Reich Ministry of War. Slowly her attitudes align with the current rhetoric. Afraid of losing her dream of a perfect life, she marries SS officer Gregor Meinrich, forcing her to become even more active in all things Nazi.
As the war hastens to an end, she is forced to flee with her son, ignoring the death she sees all around her. She burns her husband’s letters, a final act of cutting ties with the past and taking on a selective amnesia that distances her from the atrocities the Nazis carried out.
Fast forward to 1983. Irmina is a successful school administrator. When a letter arrives out the blue, crushing realities return. Was she an ordinary person swept up in a grand illusion; a simple person lied to and brainwashed who ignored what was happening around her; or was she driven by opportunistic greed to become complicit in the Nazi regime?
This is a provocative story about a woman coping with the time she was born into. What would you do if you found yourself in similar circumstances?
about the author/illustrator
Barbara Yelin was born in 1977 in Munich, Germany. She studied illustration at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences.
Her first comics were Le Visiteur and Le Retard, both published in France. Her next project was a graphic novel Gift co-written with Peer Meter which was followed by the mutlipart webcomic The Summer of Her Life with author Thomas von Steinaecker. In cooperation with the Goethe-Institue Israel, she worked on the comic biography Especially One: Thine Own Self Be Faithful—The Actress Channa Maron. Barbara also drew comic strips for the Frankfurter Rundschau and currently for the Tagesspiegel. Her work has taken her to such places as Cairo, Bali, New Delhi, and Tel Aviv.
More than a decade ago, Barbara found an old box stuffed with letters and diaries in her late grandmother’s things. They were from the 1930s and 1940s, a period her grandma never talked about. Barbara was curious to learn more. She started putting her grandmother’s story together like a puzzle, bits here and there. There were so many missing parts she started doing specific archive researches.
The book she wrote from what she found is NOT a biography; rather, it is the study of a question she kept asking herself. Why was an ambitious woman with so many dreams changed so much by the culture of the times? After the research, it took Barbara almost four years to create the graphic novel.
In 2015, Barbara was awarded the Bavarian Arts Prize for Literature and in 2016 she received the prestigious Max & Moritz Prize as the best German-language comic artist. After almost twenty years in Hamburg and Berlin, she is now living and working back in Munich.
Sources:
Author/Illustrator biography: Amazon
Author/Illustrator website
Author/Illustrator biography: Wikipedia
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