Contemporary Authors

• Irmina - 2016 SelfMadeHero,

• Herald Scotland - http://www.heraldscotland.com/arts_ents/14455179.Graphic_Content__Barbara_Yelin_on_silence_and_secrets_in_wartime_Germany/

  QUOTED TEXT: Making a drawing is always to think about a background, surroundings, about clothes, materials, furniture, architecture and so on. This urges you to go back to research, and this brings you again back to the circumstances of the time and what did people see (and what they didn’t want to see) and how did they behave. The drawing itself is an important process for me to climb into the story.

  Graphic Content: Barbara Yelin on how her grandmother's story inspired her new graphic novel Irmina
  Graphic Content: Barbara Yelin on silence and secrets in wartime Germany

  Graphic Content: Barbara Yelin on silence and secrets in wartime Germany

  27 Apr 2016 / Teddy Jamieson, Senior Features Writer

  Germany during the war. What did people see? What did people say or not say? What did people do? Those are the questions at the heart of Barbara Yelin’s beautifully drawn new graphic novel Irmina, which takes on one of the most distressing questions of the Second World War; the complicity of the German people in what was carried out in their name.

  Yelin,,who was born in Munich in 1977, has delved into the past of her country and her own family to tell a story that covers decades but never loses sight of the smallest details of what it means to be human. The result is potent and painful.

  For Graphic Content, Yelin talks about the book’s origins, the research she undertook and the power of the comic strip.

  What is the origin of your graphic novel Irmina? Is her story based on your grandmother’s?

  Ten years ago, I found a box with letters and diaries, stuffed under a cupboard, around the things of my late grandmother. Combing these, they made me realise that there was a period of her life, when she was a young woman in the 1930s, that she hadn't told us about, or at least very little.

  I started to profoundly try to put her story together through these little pieces, like a puzzle. But there were many missing parts, so I started doing specific archive research and also a lot of general historical research about that time, the 1930s in England and later in Berlin, to combine and imagine a possible reconstruction.

  But the book isn’t a biography. The general question which drove me is how was someone like her, who seemed to be such a modern, ambitious young woman, was changed so much by the culture, betraying her former dreams and beliefs? It became a novel, a character study, in which I used a lot of artistic license.

  HeraldScotland:

  What kind of research did you have to do to undertake to tell the story?

  Aside from the family documents I did a lot of historic research via archives, books, all kind of digital archives and the internet. I also had the advice of Dr Alexander Korb [Director of the Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies], who also wrote the afterword, which was a very essential help. But there is also a kind of artistic research just by the act of drawing itself.

  To imagine and find out about Irmina’s possible actions and reactions I also had to start to draw her, showing different scenes, from different angles. Dialogues and behaviour - hers and other characters - developed more and more when I saw how my protagonists look and behave.

  Making a drawing is always to think about a background, surroundings, about clothes, materials, furniture, architecture and so on. This urges you to go back to research, and this brings you again back to the circumstances of the time and what did people see (and what they didn’t want to see) and how did they behave. The drawing itself is an important process for me to climb into the story.

  How long did it take to draw?
  Article continues after...
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  The research, building the story, doing the storyboards (different versions) needed maybe two years. The final drawing needed less, about one and a half years. But as a freelancer you have of course to do some other work and commissions in between, so it’s never a process without interruption.

  HeraldScotland:

  What does working in the comics form allow you to do that maybe prose would not?

  Well, I’m not sure if it’s true to say that comics are able to do anything that prose is not. But I think they can perfectly reach a similar intensity and profundity – but in a very different way, by using different tools.

  By drawing, it is of course wonderfully possible to conjure the atmosphere of the story and the time. And using the speech balloons, all dialogues have to be precisely on the point.

  In my comic, there was an important aspect, too, which I wanted to show by my drawings: the absence of words, and the fact of looking away by the protagonist.

  My most important scenes are trying to tell the fact that people like Irmina and her German husband have been ignoring. They could have known about the persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany.

  Also afterwards, in the 1980s, Irmina was not able to speak about her memories. For the absence of words there is for example a very visible tool in the comics language: an empty speech balloon. I tried to make the fact of looking away visible in my drawings.

  Also, the sequence of the panels is just a magic tool to provoke the readers’ imagination and thoughts: the gap, the gutter, between the panels is always to be filled by the reader, and so he or she dives into the story too.

  Irmina by Barbara Yelin is published by SelfMadeHero, priced £16.99. You should read it as soon as you can because it is very good.

• Publisher -

  Barbara Yelin is a Munich-based comics artist. She received the Bavarian Art Award for Literature for her graphic novel Irmina, which also won the Best German Graphic Novel prize at the PENG Awards. She is also the author of Gift (with Peter Meter) and Riekes Notizen.

• Barbara Yelin Home Page - http://www.barbarayelin.de/

  Barbara Yelin was born 1977 in Munich and studied illustration at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, graduating 2004. Her first books, the graphic tale »Le Visiteur« (2004) and the comic »Le Retard« (2006), were published in France. She also regularly published comic short stories in SPRING, an annual comics journal published by a group of female illustrators.
  Her next graphic novel, »Gift« (2010, with author Peer Meter), describes the historic criminal case of Gesche Gottfried, a female serial killer living in Bremen 1828. Barbara Yelin's multi-award winning graphic novel “Irmina” (2014), published in 2014 (English 2016), is a gripping drama about having to chose between personal integrity and social advancement. Based on a true story, Yelin's atmospheric images document the many rifts in a young woman's life, thus concentrating on the choice made by many to look the other way and become accomplices of the Nazi regime.
  Together with Thomas von Steinaecker she created the web comic series "Der Sommer ihres Lebens" in 2015 (tr. The summer of her life".) In autumn 2016, the exhibition "Vor allem eins – dir selbst sei treu", a comics biography about the famous Israeli actress Channa Maron, which was created in collaboration with the Goethe Institute Tel Aviv and the comics artist david Polonsky, was published at Reprodukt.
  Barbara Yelin's works have been shown in numerous exhibitions. In 2008 she won the comics newcomer prize of the Frankfurt Book Fair, in 2015 the Bayrische Künstförderpreis, and in 2016 the Max und Moritz-Preis for Best German-language Comics Artist. Yelin lives and works in Munich.

• Goethe Institute Web site - http://www.goethe.de/kue/lit/prj/com/cgp/yel/en5974886.htm

  QUOTED TEXT: There is a lot of detailed, historical research on what really happened during Hitler’s Germany. Besides the existing diary entries and notes, most of the research is based on historic testimonies and lived memories of that time. This meant that I could work with these themes. I mainly wanted a detailed and authentic insight into people’s everyday lives in order to understand their behavior as much as possible. From a drawing perspective, I tried to illustrate the external limitations of the dictatorial regime while showing the internal restrictions going on inside Irmina’s head. To represent this, I tried using narrower [comic] panels for some sections. Throughout the book, I had sections, which were filled with a darker shade and some that were lighter, clearer. Everything Irmina sees or hears comes through the cracks of the living room curtain or through the Volksempfänger (a radio that was used specifically for propaganda), which only broadcasted Hitler’s speeches. The filtered world of Hitler’s words permeates Irmina. On the large centrefold spreads throughout the book, the reader sees what actually happened, what is obvious, what people are looking away from, like the burning synagogue on Chrystal Night (a pogrom against Jews in November 1938), for example.

  Artistic darkness – Barbara Yelin
  Barbara YelinBarbara Yelin’s use of the pencil can only be described as masterly. The artist, who was born in Munich and now lives in Berlin, has demonstrated this with the comic Gift (i.e. poison: Reprodukt Verlag, 2010), a cooperative work with Peer Meter, who wrote the texts. The story of Gesche Gottfried, a poisoner who lived and died in Bremen, stands out most of all by means of the artistic manner in which it deals with darkness. Yelin has developed a unique artistic form with pencil drawing, one that perhaps only Isabel Kreitz equals in the German-language cultural area.

  Slideshow Barbara Yelin
  Slideshow

  Slideshow

  In Gift we find powerful black-white contrasts. In this way, Yelin succeeds in effectively producing a dense atmosphere. But at the same time, she makes use of a further asset of the pencil: it can be blurred. Thus, sharp contrasts blend into an indefinite more-or-less. Street views, for instance, dissolve into an impenetrable fog, upwards into the skies, house fronts, stairwells and cellar rooms are transformed into impenetrable mazes and trail off into an opaque darkness...
  Proximity to the medium of film

  Yelin’s great skill lies in her modelling of areas of light: Gift presents spaces that are flooded with light, indeed are created by light in the first place, penetrating into the leaden darkness and and snatched from it. For this reason, the images seem peculiarly spatial and illuminated, an aesthetic effect reminiscent of Piranesi’s celebrated dungeon images – richly contrasted, theatrical scenes. In this way, Yelin reveals magnificent images of sublimity even in the most terrifying darkness.

  But this art-historical reference should not distract us from the fact that Gift is a comic, an art form that is still quite young, scarcely older than film, and that moves in close proximity to film, particularly where changes in our visual habits are concerned. It is therefore hardly surprising that Yelin’s picture series are often similar to camera tracks: from the roofs of Bremen’s Old City, we gradually descend into the lower levels of the streets, and thus into the story, as well.

  Great success internationally

  However, there is still something else that astonishes one about Yelin’s work: in Germany she has scarcely been published to date (she was finally awarded the Frankfurt Book Fair’s Sondermann Comic Prize in 2009). By contrast, the French seem to appreciate her work more. Her first major works were published there. Thus Le Visiteur (Èditions de l’An 2, Angoulême 2004), also a very moving pencil work narrative about a friendship between a raven and a little girl. Here, too, Yelin’s powerful staging of light is what impresses most.

  But Yelin’s aesthetic preferences are not limited to the pencil. For example, a coloured-pencil comic appeared – again in France – in 2006: Le Retard (Éditions de l’An 2, Angoulême). Here, it is the colours that wrest a great deal of dynamic vitality from a dreary backgroung grey: a dramatic scenario, a love story about people blindly driven that takes its course about as turbulently as brightly-coloured leaves in a cold autumn storm.

  Colour also plays an essential part in her comic reports from distant countries. In 2011, Yelin lived and worked for a few months in Egypt. As a guest of the Goethe-Institut Cairo, she experienced the Arab Spring and documented these thrilling days before the elections with drawings, sketches and short scenes. She led a three-week workshop with Egyptian comic artists on the theme Revolution Comics. In autumn 2012, an invitation from the Goethe-Institut India followed. In New Delhi, Yelin observed the conference Indo-German Urban Mela for two weeks and documented her impressions in a colourful online blog. Her very personal, humorous daily comic strip Riekes Notizen also arose from these experiences. It appeared in the daily newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau between October 2011 and June 2012.
  Dynamic light and colour effects

  With colour, Yelin’s drawings become more planar, but nonetheless more dynamic. This becomes very evident in her comic Stand-By (published in the anthology Pomme d’amour, Die Biblyothek, 2008). This story about a run-away girl captivates above all through the light and colour atmospheres in which Yelin immerses her various scenarios. Here, colour functions quasi as a barometer of inner states.

  Thus, Yelin aims at far more than simply illustrating stories. It is much more the case that she is at work on the repertory of comic forms. Its aesthetic always follows other logics besides merely narrative ones. That colour, for example, can also be an indicator of emotions does not mean that they simply serve as indicators for signalising something. Instead, the colour always “conceives of itself” in relation to the spectrum of other colours. This relationality wrests what the colour depicts from its “natural” context and location, thus opening the way to spacious fantasy worlds.

  Yelin’s pencil works therefore always contain a certain seriousness, but her colour tableaux are characterised by an enchanting insouciance or, with respect to aesthetic form, playfulness. This is most evident in her shorter and experimental narratives such as those in the comic anthology Spring, of which Yelin is a co-editor. All that remains is to hope that Barbara Yelin’s work will finally receive greater recognition in Germany, too.

  Yelin regularly accepts the challenge of new thematic areas. In 2011, together with author Mona Horncastle, she developed two art comics for Prestel Verlag: The graphic biographies of Vincent van Gogh and Albrecht Dürer are intended to introduce children to these celebrated artists.

  Interview with Barbara Yelin What a Graphic Novel Can Do
  Barbara Yelin
  Barbara Yelin | Photo: Barbara Yelin

  Barbara Yelin was born in Munich in 1977 and studied illustration at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences. She was awarded the Best German Graphic Novel Prize at the PENG awards in 2015 as well as the bayerischen Kunstförderpreis in the literature category for her book, “Irmina,” which tells the story of a young German woman’s life in Nazi Germany. As a guest of the Goethe-Institut Toronto, Yelin is attending the Toronto Comic Art Festival (TCAF) to present the English-language edition of “Irmina”. Before her visit, Yelin talked to us about the creative process behind “Irmina”, the importance of colour in her work and her role as an author.

  In previous interviews, you have emphasized that you begin your work with a question that you ponder for over a year. When you started “Irmina”, what questions did you consider?

  The basic question I had with “Irmina” was, “How can a woman like Irmina give up on her original life goals and dreams while fundamentally changing herself?” This question had not been answered even when I found my grandmother’s box with the old letters, notes and photos. I was able to reconstruct some parts of the story with those materials, but I found I was constantly asking myself how something like this could really happen. On the one hand, I was curious about the fact that so many Germans in Nazi Germany turned a blind eye to the persecution of Jews out of fear, security or even due to thoughts of self-preservation. On the other hand I tried to get to the bottom of why people were silent why nobody wanted to talk about or critically reflect upon things they knew or even somewhat-knew about.

  Silence and choosing to look the other way at crucial moments during the Nazi Germany are key elements in your graphic novel. How did you manage to portray those themes using pencil drawings?

  There is a lot of detailed, historical research on what really happened during Hitler’s Germany. Besides the existing diary entries and notes, most of the research is based on historic testimonies and lived memories of that time. This meant that I could work with these themes. I mainly wanted a detailed and authentic insight into people’s everyday lives in order to understand their behavior as much as possible. From a drawing perspective, I tried to illustrate the external limitations of the dictatorial regime while showing the internal restrictions going on inside Irmina’s head. To represent this, I tried using narrower [comic] panels for some sections. Throughout the book, I had sections, which were filled with a darker shade and some that were lighter, clearer. Everything Irmina sees or hears comes through the cracks of the living room curtain or through the Volksempfänger (a radio that was used specifically for propaganda), which only broadcasted Hitler’s speeches. The filtered world of Hitler’s words permeates Irmina. On the large centrefold spreads throughout the book, the reader sees what actually happened, what is obvious, what people are looking away from, like the burning synagogue on Chrystal Night (a pogrom against Jews in November 1938), for example.

  Do colours have specific meanings in your illustrations?

  Before “Irmina,” I almost always used different pencil shades of gray in my work. For “Irmina,” I implemented the additional use of colour on purpose. Primarily, I wanted to create a specific colour space with which I could not only convey dark moments, but also Irmina’s open-minded thoughts, especially in the beginning of the story. In addition, I used colours as accents. At the beginning of the story, I used the colour blue in order to show the reader the freedom and opportunities Irmina had when she arrived in London. In the middle part, red represents the violence and power of Nazi Germany but also the bloodshed and in particular, the guilt Germans must carry. In the last part of the book, turquoise marks the story’s turning point: Irmina’s hope for a better life by Barbados’ turquoise ocean. As well, the book has many situations where the reader might question Irmina’s behaviour or suffer with her. I wanted neither to make any decisions for the reader nor judge Irmina in any way. What I wanted was to leave an open margin for the readers to think about for themselves. I believe that’s something that the graphic novel can do.

  As supported by the Goethe Institut, you have illustrated comic diaries about social movements and changes in the arts scenes in Cairo, Delphi, Surabaya and Bali. Do you see yourself as an observer or communicator?

  That’s an interesting question! Maybe I am both. When I am abroad and trying to capture a picture and tell a story, I am certainly an observer. I would call myself that because the process of drawing requires a higher amount of dedicated observation time than taking a photo or passing through a situation. When I’m preparing my illustrations for a blog or a website, they become a sort of commentary. Nevertheless, I would not call it journalistic work. I would rather bring the smaller pictures to the reader’s mind than focus on the big political or social problems. I do that because I am completely convinced that the smaller stories are often more helpful in pointing to the larger context.

  At this year’s Toronto Comic Arts Festival (TCAF), you are going to present the English version of “Irmina.” Have you found that publishing “Irmina” in the English-speaking book market has opened new prospects for you?

  Definitely, yes. There are not many English versions of German comic books so far. Because of that, I really appreciate that there are still graphic novels reaching the American or Canadian book market. Of course, there are many inspirational comics coming out of North America. Without them, there would not be such a growth of comics in Germany. That is why I am really proud that a graphic novel like “Irmina,” which deals with Germany’s Nazi past, has been translated into English. Especially since the feedback in England, where the English version of „Irmina“ has already been published, reflects the readers’ challenges in dealing with their own ambivalent feelings towards Irmina and her actions.

• Amazon -

  Barbara Yelin was born in Munich and studied illustration at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences. She is the author of Gift (with Peer Meter) and Riekes Notizen. She lives in Germany.

• LOC AUthorities -

  LC control no.: no2013077909

  Descriptive conventions:
  rda

  Personal name heading:
  Yelin, Barbara, 1977-

  Birth date: 1977

  Place of birth: Munich, Germany

  Field of activity: Graphic novels Comic books, strips, etc.

  Profession or occupation:
  Illustrators Cartoonists

  Found in: Yelin, Barbara. Le visiteur, 2004: title page (Barbara
  Yelin)
  The artist's website, viewed July 22, 2013 (Barbara Yelin,
  b. 1977 in Munich, illustrator and comic book artist)

  Associated language:
  ger

  ================================================================================

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS AUTHORITIES
  Library of Congress
  101 Independence Ave., SE
  Washington, DC 20540

  Questions? Contact: ils@loc.gov

Irmina
Publishers Weekly. 263.15 (Apr. 11, 2016): p47.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:

Irmina

Barbara Yelin. SelfMadeHero, $24.95 (288p) ISBN 978-1-91059-310-3

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Inspired by a true story, this evocative chronicle of a young German woman's experiences in London as WWII looms reads like an aged relative's intimate scrapbook. Young Irmina toils in her training as a transcriptionist while experiencing alienation as a foreigner, an experience she shares with Howard, one of the first black students at Oxford. The pair bond over their shared outsider status, and affection blossoms--but the romance dies as circumstances force Irmina to return to Germany. Once Hitler's war machine kicks into high gear, she faces the reality of life under the Nazis: food and fuel shortages, restrictions on career opportunities for women, and the rising tide of anti-Semitism. German cartoonist Yelin, making her English-language debut, blends sketchy pencil lines and moody watercolor tones, creating an engrossing, candid reminiscence of an individual's promise crushed by the bleak times she had the misfortune of being born into. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Irmina." Publishers Weekly, 11 Apr. 2016, p. 47. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA449662991&it=r&asid=29474afed01237c5ce5cce3e35be3f88. Accessed 24 Jan. 2017.

QUOTED TEXT: The muted palette of the artwork, broken by lurid reds and soft pastels, draws the eye and gives voice to Irmina's unspoken, often repressed feelings, creating touches of depth throughout.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A449662991
Yelin, Barbara (text & illus.). Irmina
Mary E. Butler
Xpress Reviews. (Feb. 26, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC
http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/reviews/xpress/884170-289/xpress_reviews-first_look_at_new.html.csp
Full Text:

Yelin, Barbara (text & illus.). Irmina. SelfMadeHero. Apr. 2016. 288p. ISBN 9781910593103. $24.95. HISTORICAL FICTION

How could the German people watch as the systematic murder of their neighbors took place under the Nazi regime? Life is not that simple. Based upon letters Yelin (Riekes Notizen) found after her grandmother's death, this work shows us how a German woman goes from aspiring to achieve more than what pre-World War II London society prescribed for a poor, female immigrant to living as a well-to-do woman who conforms to the point that she is willingly blind to the atrocities happening around her. The muted palette of the artwork, broken by lurid reds and soft pastels, draws the eye and gives voice to Irmina's unspoken, often repressed feelings, creating touches of depth throughout.

Verdict Art Spiegelman's Maus would make a compelling comparison and companion piece to this work, adding strength to any research concerning this time period. Recommended for adult and teen readers who prefer historical fiction and can handle an ending that is honest rather than perfect.--Mary E. Butler, Marion Cty. P.L. Syst., Ocala, FL

See last week's Xpress Reviews
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Butler, Mary E. "Yelin, Barbara (text & illus.). Irmina." Xpress Reviews, 26 Feb. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA448031828&it=r&asid=a4335c29e5d6b15a874661ca412330e3. Accessed 24 Jan. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A448031828

• Broken Frontier
  http://www.brokenfrontier.com/irmina-barbara-yelin-selfmadehero-self-made-hero-graphic-novel-review/
  Word count: 1248

  QUOTED TEXT: Irmina, Barbara Yelin’s award-winning graphic novel, is a paradoxically beautiful and unsettling piece of work that avoids all the obvious choices to ponder how an independently minded young woman can become complicit with a murderous regime.

  From first page to last, Irmina’s driving force is her desire for independence through education and her simmering resentment at the opportunities she was denied in order to allow her brothers to receive theirs – seen at its most touching in her silent observation of a group of free-spirited female students in Oxford. In an era when millions of girls around the world are still denied an education, the frustration and lack of opportunity afforded to Irmina casts a relevant contemporary shadow.

  Going into this book, you might expect Irmina to follow the Hollywood path of looking around herself, burning with the injustice of it all and standing up for what’s right. However, one of the many strengths of Yelin’s book is that she never follows the easy path. Irmina is a provocative and often upsetting book, but it’s one that mixes craft and purpose to powerful effect and deserves to be read widely.

  Irmina – Barbara Yelin’s Compelling Study of a “Normal German” Asks Painful Questions about Choices and Complicity

  by Tom Murphy
  April 1, 2016

  27
  1

  Irmina by Barbara Yelin (SelfMadeHero)
  Irmina, Barbara Yelin’s award-winning graphic novel, is a paradoxically beautiful and unsettling piece of work that avoids all the obvious choices to ponder how an independently minded young woman can become complicit with a murderous regime.

  Irmina by Barbara Yelin (SelfMadeHero)Every now and then a magazine show will dust off the old wheeze of staging some sort of incident in a crowded place – the attempted mugging of a child, say – and seeing who intervenes. ‘Have-a-go heroes’ will be celebrated, while there’ll be much tutting and headshaking at those who, for whatever reason, choose not to get involved.

  An altogether weightier version of that investigation has been one of the key historical debates in Germany over recent decades, as a younger generation wonders how much their antecedents knew or could have done to stop the horrors of the Nazi regime.

  In Irmina, award-winning cartoonist Barbara Yelin takes a bold personal look at the issue, basing this deeply involving graphic novel on letters and documents left behind by her grandmother. She doesn’t try to come up with a pat answer or an ultimately life-affirming conclusion about the human condition. Instead, across nearly 300 pages, she creates a compelling character study that shows us ‘how’, if not ‘why’.

  Irmina by Barbara Yelin (SelfMadeHero)We’re introduced to Irmina as a student making her way to 1934 London, hoping to develop the commercial skills to enable her to stake out an independent life. However, the complexity of Yelin’s creation soon becomes apparent. The determined and phlegmatic young woman we meet displays an intransigence that varies between an admirable strength of will and snobbish disdain.

  When she meets Howard, a black Caribbean student on a scholarship to Oxford, they are drawn together as outsiders. However, events conspire against the couple and Irmina is pulled reluctantly back to Germany, where she soon finds herself drawn into the Nazi orbit. Before long, she’s working at the Reich Ministry of War, happily taking the fruit from a tree left behind by an unnamed “Jewess” who disappeared from a downstairs apartment, and making clear her differentiation between ‘emigrants’ and ‘normal Germans’

  Irmina by Barbara Yelin (SelfMadeHero)However, as her various aspirations are frustrated, Irmina is forced to fix her hopes for the future on an advantageous marriage. When she ties the knot with architect and SS officer Gregor Meinrich, she also ties her fate closer to that of the Nazi regime.

  With her ambition for Gregor now her driving force, Irmina finds herself increasingly aligned with the hegemonic viewpoint of the country’s rulers, denouncing Jews as “our misfortune”, and trotting out party rhetoric to anyone whose resolve seems to be wavering amid the hardships of war.

  Has she been swept up in a grand delusion or is she being opportunistically complicit? The complexity of Irmina’s character and the dark questions it forces us to ask ourselves show how lightweight most comic characterisation is. (And those questions are analysed at length in a probing and enlightening afterword by academic Alexander Korb, Director of the Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Leicester)

  Irmina by Barbara Yelin (SelfMadeHero)As the tide of the war turns and Berlin comes under increasingly heavy Allied bombing, Irmina finally has to take her son Frieder and flee to the countryside. In one of the book’s most telling sequences, as she leads the horrified child through the corpse-strewn ruins of the city, she tells him to “Do I what I do, Frieder, and look away”.

  With the American army approaching and the war hastening towards its end, she burns the pile of letters she has received from her husband on the Eastern Front – an act that symbolises the cutting of ties with the past and the selective amnesia of a volk that didn’t want to be associated with the atrocities carried out in its name.

  That distancing is seen from another perspective in the third part of the book, which pitches us startlingly from 1945 to the Stuttgart of 1983. Now a veteran school administrator, Irmina makes her solitary way like a ghost through the clean clutter of modern European life. However, the past isn’t done with her yet, and another letter out of the blue leads to a crushing realisation of the weight of history and the snowballing regret of lost opportunities.

  Irmina by Barbara Yelin (SelfMadeHero)Someone with a better eye for materials could probably describe Yelin’s artistic technique better than I can. However, its apparent mix of pastels and washes give the work a softness that perfectly suits the mid-century smog that envelops the largely monochromatic cities of London and Berlin. That gloom is punctuated only occasionally, most memorably by the red associated with Nazi banners and uniforms, signalling a seductive but dangerous allure. The lack of hard edges also gives the work an easy organic flow.

  From first page to last, Irmina’s driving force is her desire for independence through education and her simmering resentment at the opportunities she was denied in order to allow her brothers to receive theirs – seen at its most touching in her silent observation of a group of free-spirited female students in Oxford. In an era when millions of girls around the world are still denied an education, the frustration and lack of opportunity afforded to Irmina casts a relevant contemporary shadow.

  Going into this book, you might expect Irmina to follow the Hollywood path of looking around herself, burning with the injustice of it all and standing up for what’s right. However, one of the many strengths of Yelin’s book is that she never follows the easy path. Irmina is a provocative and often upsetting book, but it’s one that mixes craft and purpose to powerful effect and deserves to be read widely.

  Barbara Yelin (W/A) • SelfMadeHero, £16.99

• Morning Star
  https://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-459b-Graphic-novel-review-Irmina-by-Barbara-Yedlin#.WIetvFyhqJc
  Word count: 505

  QUOTED TEXT: Yelin’s drawings bring a nuanced story to life, with an assured grasp of tempo and an impressive palette rendering the emotional and ambient moods. Well worth seeking out.

  Graphic novel review: Irmina by Barbara Yelin
  May
  2016
  Thursday 12th
  posted by Morning Star in Arts

  Irmina is the disturbing story of a woman who sold her soul to the nazi regime, says MICHAL BONCZA

  Irmina
  by Barbara Yelin
  (SelfMadeHero £16.99)

  BARBARA YELIN was impelled to create this fiction after reading letters and diaries by her late grandmother, who lived through the nazi period in Germany.

  Despite her upper-class provenance, the financial resources of its protagonist Irmina von Behdinger are relatively modest but, ambitiously, she travels to London to study to be an executive secretary.

  While in London she falls for Howard, a Bajan who’s among the first black students at Oxford University.

  The attraction is mutual. They cycle, walk and go boating together until Irmina’s allowance is exhausted. She decides to go back to Germany but not before solemnly promising Howard to be back as soon as possible.

  But it’s not to be. Nazism in Germany is in full flight and Irmina is working for the Ministry of War and her career’s on the up.

  She meets and marries an architect, a rabid anti-semite and a fanatical SS member associated with Albert Speer. Ominously, he disappears for days on end during the Kristallnacht attacks on the Jews.

  The narrative is a vehicle for a much wider debate around what ordinary Germans, women in particular, did during the nazi period. Were they victims, as some would have them portrayed, or willing participants?

  Yelin promotes the view that they bought heavily into the project in more ways than one but particularly its opportunity for social advancement.

  The narrative fast-forwards to 1983 when, while working as a school secretary, Irmina receives an invitation out of the blue to visit Howard, now British high commissioner for Barbados.

  With her husband Gregor killed in the war and son and grandchildren in a distant city, the visit is an opportunity to summon up old memories and speculate on what might have been.

  The author points up the flaws in Irmina’s nature.

  Although independently-minded and capable of confronting racism head on while in London, in Germany she gradually and opportunistically accepted the nazi modus vivendi in pursuit of the status and recognition that went with it and the gravity of such compromise is implied in Howard’s honest incomprehension, not to say naivete.

  Tellingly, Irmina’s sorrow is without the sightless trace of remorse.

  Yelin’s drawings bring a nuanced story to life, with an assured grasp of tempo and an impressive palette rendering the emotional and ambient moods.

  Well worth seeking out.

• Beat
  http://www.comicsbeat.com/review-barbara-yelins-irmina-shows-how-history-destroys-us-in-little-ways/
  Word count: 1043

  QUOTED TEXT: With Irmina, Yelin illustrates a bigger representation these realities which so many of us, so imperfect we are, have faced in our own little ways. Irmina is each of us, not just some of us, and that’s the immense power and beauty of Yelin’s remarkable book.

  Review: Barbara Yelin’s ‘Irmina’ shows how history destroys us in little ways

  05/24/2016 5:00 pm by John Seven Leave a Comment
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  Quiet and brooding, while still warm and with a great delicacy, Barbara Yelin’s Irmina takes the author’s own discovery of her grandmother’s World War II era diaries and letters, and applies the resulting biography to higher philosophical heights that really concern the way any of us encounter the world.

  Irmina is a young German girl who makes her way to London to find her way in the world. Traversing the social structures there and trying to find a place to call home as she tries to secure a future for herself, two men loom around her, having a major impact on her life. One is Howard Green, a black student at Oxford, a native of Barbados, and a courteous and charming young man who becomes her constant companion. The other is Adolf Hitler.

  Irmina encounters England through Howard. She is a foreigner, too, and can bond with that aspect of him and form a sweet friendship with undertones of romance. Naturally, she is unhappy with the often subtle, though often not, racism Howard faces from his school and fellow students. Irmina has to deal with her own version in the form of constant quizzing about the state of Germany, the leadership of Hitler, and the judgmental responses when she expresses a passive neutrality while she attends to her own life.

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  Eventually, Irmina returns to Germany with the intention of coming back to England, and we see how her life unfolds during the tumult of Nazi Germany. It is not a happy existence, and yet Irmina is a survivor. The mundanity of her life stands in stark contrast to the period of destruction and genocide that it takes place in, following a period of half-heartedly accepting idealistic Nazi nationalism as a promise for a better future.

  The book concludes with a later-life Irmina facing ghosts from the past, including a manifestation of her own young potential

  Yelin presents Irmina’s story with a casual visual poetry that depicts her surroundings and her position in that space as crucial reminders of her place in the world. It’s a dark universe that Irmina exists in, even when she’s hopeful, and Yelin’s art also captures that. The story unfolds at a calm pace, taking the time to get to know the central character and how she functions in the world, letting the reader see how the extremely small moments of a life can send it careening in unwanted directions.

  Irmina couldn’t have come about at a better time for American readership. As the word “fascist” gets bandied around in regard to Donald Trump, each of us has had to do our own work figuring out what it means to our relationships with friends and family who support his candidacy. This not to say whether Trump is a fascist or not — just to point out another fork in the road where real consideration about the impact on the lives of everyday people.

  The relationship between our current fork in the road and Irmina’s is not as specific as I’m suggesting. It’s a struggle that exists throughout history, across scores of nations. As Dr. Alexander Korb says in the book’s marvelous afterword, “people experience the commotions of history first and foremost through their everyday lives, so that personal watersheds like first love, choosing a profession, the birth of a child or moving house can be of greater biographical significance than major historical events.”

  That’s important to understand as we consider the story of Irmina herself and of your Trump-supporting brother-in-law. Politics are not the personal, but the personal is the filter through which we respond to them. The personal can be as important as the wider good.

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  For Irmina, the regret for unrealized possibilities that wraps around her entire life is particularly heavy not for the wider historical concerns, but for the way they obstructed her own path, took advantage of her own weaknesses, and conspired to make her culpable in her own regrets.

  In the case of ordinary people swept up in history rather than driving it, it can sometimes be hard to deem them as good or evil, as doing the right thing or wrong thing. A true understanding of humanity shows that any given person is not the same person 30 years later. Most 50-year-olds can tell you that.

  So we’re left with how to judge Irmina. Can we really? I’m sure some feel they can, feel it’s quite easy to do and exhibit a level of righteousness about it. But a normal human being is a bundle of grayness. People aren’t that simple. Being in the moment isn’t that simple. Not being a victim is sometimes very difficult.

  Yelin understands all this, and also operates from the point that without this level of investigation in order to understand, we will not move forward as a species. Condemnation is not the answer in so many cases.

  With Irmina, Yelin illustrates a bigger representation these realities which so many of us, so imperfect we are, have faced in our own little ways. Irmina is each of us, not just some of us, and that’s the immense power and beauty of Yelin’s remarkable book.