Starting in the 1930s, this graphic novel follows the story of Irmina von Behdinger. She’s young and ambitious and determined to do whatever she wants to do. She meets Howard Green, a Black student at Oxford University while staying in London. However, when Irmina has to return to Germany, they eventually lose touch and she marries a Nazi party member before WWII. Initially, throughout her stay in London, Irmina maintains that the Nazis are a phase and that politics has nothing to do with “normal” Germans. But, struggling in poverty in Germany, her determination to remain distant from politics becomes a distance from other people’s suffering. Focused on her own enfranchisement and discontent, Irmina’s initial stern perseverance becomes a cold and uncaring dismissal of any rumours involving Jewish peoples and the suffering of soldiers at the front. This graphic novel depicts the way that the rise of fascism is a slow process that remains almost invisible under the grind of just getting through our daily lives and how ordinary people can easily be caught in its promises of an easier and better life as long as you learn to wilfully ignore the suffering around you.
As you can see from the cover, the art work for Irmina is mostly pencil, with lively and soft colours for Irmina’s time in London while the grind of Berlin and the war is darker. However, the bright splashes of colour that occasionally occur in the darker Berlin panels – the red of jam, lipstick and Nazi banners – provide important metaphorical accents that drag you in.
In 2015, Irmina won the Best German Graphic Novel prise at the PENG Awards. It received critical acclaim and has been used in both comic studies and holocaust scholarship. Our David Wilson Library has several hardback copies with an afterword by Dr Alexander Korb, discussing women in the Nazi regime, the complicity in monstrosity of every day citizens who benefit from the regime as well as the possibility of being reported by your neighbours, family and friends, to help us think about ‘ordinary’ citizens in political regimes.
Written by Esther De Dauw
