East in the West: Graphic novel “Be liberated”: The melancholy of downfall

Typically GDR: “I am Mo” is written in white, delicate letters at the top left of the first, spongy, dark page of Sandra Rummler’s new comic. At the beginning, the viewer’s gaze slides from a winter coal-brown sky down into an empty street canyon; the only light source in the portrait-format, full-page picture is the arc lamp at the bottom right. The street could be in Dresden, Leipzig or Halle, but it is Berlin-Pankow, Flora-Kiez. The neglected houses on the right and left slope their dark windows gently down towards the street, whose cobblestones are marked with bright dots under the lantern.

Inked image elements flow into drawn, framed individual bodies. That seems a little worrying. Already here, on the first page, the usual readings are confused. The right side appears as a zoom into the previous one: closer, darker – an oblique view into a gap in a house, onto a dull gray wall, roofs, chimneys. In the foreground is the edge of a house, in the middle of the page the two sentences: “I was born in the winter of ’76. Our house was right next to the wall.«

In the 264-page graphic novel »Be(f)ready«, the child Mo takes us into his world, which will soon collapse on a November night. On the following double page, again brown, muddy and hazy, the girl’s flat, clear figure stands out. She stands out. Yellow bubbling hair, the pair of eyes on the left or right side of the nose, the mouth a line. On this page there is a note: “That behind became the place of my imagination.” Like a colorful foreign body, Mo drifts through the gray-brown world, which brightens as the Berlin Wall falls. Until the fantasy world floods the muddy brown. Mo is almost 14 years old when she sets out to see the colorful side of the city in the west. And happy to be able to return to the dark, empty part of the city to the east in the evening.

Like her main character Mo, Sandra Rummler was born in East Berlin in 1976. In recent years, several excellent comics have been created by Mawil, Ulla Loge and Kitty Kahane that deal with life in the GDR and the experience of its end.

In Rummler’s work, the end of a childhood is depicted in a few bullet points in (coincidental) harmony with the disappearance of a country – in a new, unique way. Because the break between characters and background is exciting, Rummler’s image creation is breathtakingly complex. Mottos complement speech bubbles, pages with dialogues alternate with atmospheric images: a delicate pink evening sky on the canal, golden yellow over prefabricated buildings, blue-black at the Eberswalder intersection, modern brown the factory on Mühlenstrasse.

The plot zooms in on moments of Mo’s coming of age: the first period, the first crush on a woman, the first time falling in love, bullying by West Berlin classmates, surfing on the S-Bahn, being chased by neo-Nazis. The wild year of anarchy after the fall of the Berlin Wall finds space as well as the rotting of empty factories, techno parties, apartment squats, the father’s unemployment and the first place to stay.

The touching thing about Sandra Rummler’s pictures is their melancholy. “I mourned again for the homeland that I can no longer visit,” said the artist in a recent interview with RBB about her comic and her experiences.

Sandra Rummler: Be free. Avant-Verlag, 264 pp., br., €29.