Reading Group
Online Book Klub: “Irmina”

Read. Talk. Share.

Thu, 10/15/2020
7:00 PM - 20:00 Online

Join our October book club meeting online! Simply send an email to info-seattle@goethe.de  and receive the Zoom access code. Let's keep reading and sharing experiences with the material! ​  

The book club is free and open to everyone interested, but participants must purchase the individual texts themselves and are expected to have read the title to be discussed prior to the meeting.   

Feel free to read this month’s selection in English or its original German; the discussion will be held in English.

About the graphic novel:

“In the mid-1930s, Irmina, an ambitious young German, moves to London. At a cocktail party, she meets Howard Green, one of the first black students at Oxford, who, like Irmina, is working towards an independent existence. However, their relationship comes to an abrupt end when Irmina, constrained by the political situation in Hitler's Germany, is forced to return home. As war approaches and her contact with Howard is broken, it becomes clear to Irmina that prosperity will only be possible through the betrayal of her ideals. In the award-winning Irmina, Barbara Yelin presents a troubling drama about the tension between integrity and social advancement, reflecting with compassion and intelligence on the complicity that results from the choice, conscious or otherwise, to look away.”

Barbara Yelin presents a masterpiece with Irmina, a gripping drama about the decision between personal freedom and ambition. Based on a true story, Irmina uses dense and evocative images to show a fractured career that exemplifies the complicity of many who participated in National Socialism—in how they looked away.

About the author:

Barbara Yelin was born in 1977 in Munich and studied illustration at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences. Her first publication in Germany was Gift, based on a script by Peer Meter. She subsequently published a collection of her Riekes Notizen comic strips, which were originally printed in Germany in the daily newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau. Yelin was a co-publisher of the anthology Spring for many years and gives workshops around the world. In 2015, Irmina won the prize for the Best German Graphic Novel at the PENG! awards. Yelin lives and works in Munich.