Birgit Vaye combines avant-garde comics with the African language of forms. In Madgermanes [“Majermans”], she captured the story of the Mozambican workers in the GDR. They were promised education, but they received only casual work. After 17 hours, they were supposed to stay in their dormitories, women and men were housed separately, and communication with the locals was not welcome. Pregnant women had to have an abortion, or they were sent back, and half of their earnings were sent to Mozambique to guarantee their subsequent return to their homeland. So in the 1980s there were about 20,000 contract workers from Mozambique – they were called the “Majermans”: apparently, intentionally distorting the phrase “Made in Germany” in the socialist fraternal country of the GDR. A Special Chapter There is one special chapter in the history of the German Democratic Republic going down, which Birgit Vaye reveals in Madgermanes. As in many stories about the GDR, the tragic and the absurd are next to each other. “They took off in response to a promise that they would go to heaven and learn something,” says Birgit Vaye, a German artist and comic book author born in 1969 who grew up in Continue reading →