Birgit Weyhe - Böcker

‘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 skilfully interweaves African and European narrative traditions. Winner of the Berthold Leibinger Foundation Comic Book Prize and the Max and Moritz Prize for Best German Comic ‘The book is a great document and a monument to the injustice that befell me and other contract workers in East Germany.’ Emiliano Chaimite, Dresden ‘Birgit Weyhe traces emotions and situations, translating them into overwhelming images by entering into an artistic dialogue between European and African culture.’ Max and Moritz Prize

At a conference, the graphic novelist Birgit Weyhe is accused of cultural appropriation. Is she exploiting her privileges as a white writer when she tells stories about Black people?She tries a new approach with Priscilla Layne, an African American professor of German studies with Caribbean roots. Growing up, Priscilla is labelled an ‘Oreo’: too white for her Black classmates, too Black for the white kids. By joining the skinhead movement and becoming a rude girl, she discovers a community where she feels valued. Music, clothes, hair, food, class, race, gender, education – her life and identity are a complex composite.