Barbara Yelin is a German author and graphic artist whose stories traverse the past, the present, and the fictional. In 2016, she was awarded the Max and Moritz Prize for the Best German-Language Comic Artist. On Oct. 29, 2025, she spoke at a virtual colloquium, “Drawing, Writing, Researching,” hosted by the German studies department at Gettysburg College, open to Swarthmore students. She shared her creative process and read an excerpt from her Eisner Award-nominated graphic novel, “Irmina,” a story exploring moral blindness and nuanced complicity based on materials from her grandmother’s life. After the panel, The Phoenix spoke with Yelin via Zoom. Below is an edited transcript of that interview. To preserve accuracy and nuance, the conversation was bilingual; sentences originally in German were translated and later proofread by Yelin.
Xinto Xu: Thank you for agreeing to this interview today. I wanted to start by asking about “But I Live (Aber Ich Lebe),” your documentary graphic novella about Emmie [Arbel]’s memories as a child during and after the Holocaust. Based on the interviews between you and Emmie, how did you translate and reorganize her words into a sequence of graphics?
Barbara Yelin: In the case of the book about Emmie, the memories she told me were more than just her words. What she said consisted of words but also many silent parts that framed a trauma. These silences were quite important: Where are they? How long do they last? When does she take a break? Emotions for which there are no words, empty spaces for things that are no longer there, people who are no longer there.
On the other hand, the quotes I chose from the interviews were often themselves powerful sentences — quite simple but very well put. I didn’t change them, but I took parts of the sentences and reorganized them. It’s like a remix.
For this story, I drew from our conversations, Emmie’s facial expressions, my researched images, archival materials, and also from Emmie’s photo album, and then I brought them together in a new context. What I tried to show in the narrative was that Emmie’s experience of the present and the past is not strictly chronological: the past, as trauma does, sometimes breaks into the present. Memory is not chronological, memory is not structured, and it is never without gaps. That is what I wanted to understand and follow in the book, instead of a chronological order. I also wanted the reader to understand that history is not just something from long ago that doesn’t touch us anymore. Again and again, history and the present reconnect and influence each other.
XX: Has creating art and making graphic novels changed your relationship with the past and the present? If so, how?
BY: Making a graphic novel means questioning, reading, researching, talking to people, and deepening my understanding. When I draw, I notice details that I hadn’t realized before. This often becomes clearer when I run a graphic novel workshop with others. Maybe we find a portrait of someone whose life we know little about: where they lived, who they were, what they said, or how they felt about the things happening around them … These are often not reconstructable. Then we continue researching and follow the traces: maybe we find another photograph, a letter, a document … and through that, we begin to uncover the details.
As for the present — of course. Why do artists learn about the past? It’s not only a scientific approach; it’s necessary for us to understand the present, its complexity, and the many worlds and influences that shape it. Of course, we can’t change the past, but understanding it helps us reflect on our present time and shape our future.
XX: On that note, beyond projects about historical events like World War II, your work also engages with more contemporary issues. For example, you created a travel sketchbook during your stay in Cairo in 2011. For you, what are the differences between documenting the past and documenting the present?
BY: Well, the drawings I made in Cairo shortly after the Arab Spring, and also later in New Delhi, India, were more like travel diaries that documented what I was seeing, experiencing, understanding — and, very often, not understanding. There were often more questions than answers for me at that moment, because I’m not an expert and not a local; I’m just a learner. This was also true when I worked on a documentary comic about a refugee from Eritrea (Unsichtbar).
The approach, of course, is different, because the past is finished and the present is not. There might be information and developments I can’t yet know. For example, when I was in Cairo, I had no idea how things would develop — that a few years later, an authoritarian regime would return, that the protests would turn out to be just a brief moment of opening, and that it would close again.
In the last two years, I’ve been working on a large group project with others about the situations and emotions of people in Germany who feel threatened by political changes, “Wie geht es dir?” After Oct. 7, there was a huge polarization in the socio-political sphere, combined with the country’s ongoing shift toward the right wing. We conducted many interviews with people affected by that, asking questions and listening with an open mind — not anticipating or assuming the answers, just listening and then putting that into a context and into a comic. That’s something you can only do with present events; when I work on the past, most of the people are no longer there. Yes, that’s quite different.
Also, when dealing with the present, we have access to many more sources. Many times, when I work on the past, it is like a puzzle: there are pieces we know, and always pieces that are missing. I just have to do my best to reconstruct and tell the story in the most likely and truthful way possible, and to make this process transparent.
XX: In your lecture, you mentioned your experience working on Irmina both as an artist and as a historical researcher. How do these two roles interact with each other, and how do you balance them?
BY: For my projects, I would say I’m about 70% an artist and maybe 30% a researcher. I’m not a historian, not an archivist, not a psychologist, and not a trauma specialist. I learn from talking with people who are experts in these fields, and I’m very grateful to be able to work in dialogue with them. But my approach to understanding and narrating the reality we live in is certainly more through art.
As artists and writers, we work with different layers and tools for depicting and connecting things, and we have more freedom. I’m at a point where I’ve done a lot of work on biographies and history projects that are very meaningful and important to me — but that’s not what I want to do all the time. Now I would love to explore other kinds of narratives, such as fiction, more topics about the present, and maybe even include myself in the story.
It is important for me, as an artist, to take a stand against injustice, against fascism, and against the rise of the new right here in Germany; to take a stand for integration, diversity, and feminism, with empathy and courage.
XX: We are living in a time of the global resurgence of right-wing ideologies and witnessing political events like, as you mentioned, the [Alternative for Germany]. In this context, what role do you think an artist should play? What is the responsibility of an artist, if there is any at all?
BY: Yeah … that’s the big question of our time. At the moment, I think we need narratives that can help us understand the complexity of things. The world has never been simple, but now there are so many new changes, and they are all huge topics like the climate catastrophe, AI … all these developments that are happening much faster than we assumed, and that are threatening many things we thought were safe. And then there are all these political changes that we are not only experiencing now but that will actually influence our lives and futures fundamentally.
As the complexity of the world keeps growing, I think literature and art are ways of dealing with that complexity — of at least trying to place it — and of helping us not to sink into distress but to be stable, and, so important, optimistic. Art, novels, and films may help us understand more about each other, to empathize with multi-perspective narratives, multi-directional memories, and multi-layered stories.
