Read. Talk. Share.
Read our book of the month and join us for a discussion online! Simply register via Eventbrite to receive the Zoom access info. Let's keep reading and sharing experiences with the material!
The Goethe Pop Up Seattle 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,
Madgermanes in English or its original German. The discussion will be in English.
Please note: This month’s selection ships from overseas, so we recommend ordering the book soon to ensure timely delivery.
Registration
About the graphic book:
Madgermanes
By Birgit Weyhe (trans. Katy Derbyshire)
236 pp
"Madgermanes is what the Mozambican workers once contracted out to East Germany are called today. At the end of the 1970s, some 20,000 of them were sent from the People’s Republic of Mozambique to the GDR to labour for their socialist sister country. After the Berlin Wall fell, almost all of them lost their residency status. Decades later, they are still waiting for most of their wages to be paid.
Birgit Weyhe depicts their search for belonging and a place to call home, caught between two cultures and two states that no longer exist. Based on extensive interviews, she creates three fictitious narrators and transforms their stories into a visual language that skillfully interweaves African and European narrative traditions." (V&Q Books)
About the author:
© Darjush Davar
Birgit Weyhe was born in Munich in 1969. She spent her childhood in East Africa and studied literature and history in Constance and Hamburg. In 1997, she received her Magister Artium (Master of Arts).
In 2002, she began her illustration studies at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences. Since receiving her diploma in autobiographical comic storytelling, she has worked as a freelance illustrator and comic draftswoman. Her works have been shown in numerous exhibitions at home and abroad and published in various international magazines and anthologies.
On behalf of the Goethe-Institut, she has given lectures and workshops in several countries and participated in artist exchanges in Sao Paulo and Helsinki. Since 2012, she has been a guest lecturer at the University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg where lives with her two daughters and her partner.
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