A memory is not a neatly filed document. It returns, falters, shifts its distance from the present. Barbara Yelin gives this disorder a form: in her comics, narrative text, dialogue and drawing meet without the image merely illustrating what the text has already explained.
On 1 November 2026, Yelin will be awarded the 50th Roswitha Literature Prize in Bad Gandersheim. The occasion turns the spotlight on an artist whose work continually poses fresh questions about remembering: what can be told when the evidence is incomplete — and how much interpretation may a drawing add?
Traces become narrative
Yelin, born in München in 1977, studied illustration at Hamburg University of Applied Sciences. In 2010, she published ‘Gift’ (Poison) with the comics writer Peer Meter, before presenting ‘Irmina’, a narrative project of her own woven from family history and research. Material discovered from her grandmother’s life became the starting point for a story about conformity and looking away under National Socialism. The book does not seek a comfortable moral distance: it focuses on how decisions take shape in small steps.
Historical research is not simply the framework beneath the narrative. It becomes part of its tension. In ‘Emmie Arbel. Die Farbe der Erinnerung’ (Emmie Arbel. The Colour of Memory), Yelin takes conversations with the Holocaust survivor as her starting point. The life story that emerges extends beyond persecution, revealing how childhood experiences continue to shape a later life. Yelin has said that she worked with historians, oral history specialists and archives.
Drawing as a way of asking further questions
In a published conversation with the history education network EuroClio, Yelin describes how she interwove different periods on the page. She did not want to use explanatory shifts to signal when the narrative moves into a memory. Instead, she says, she brought together parts of images, statements from conversations, and historical and contemporary photographs — like pieces of a memory puzzle.
What matters here is that drawing does not pretend it can fill every gap. Yelin showed Arbel drafts so that she could check details, correct them or leave them uncertain. A question posed through drawing — whether it was dark, who was in the room, what the narrator was wearing — can prompt new memories. But it can also reveal what is no longer accessible. In this movement between further questions and revisions, the method itself becomes part of the storytelling.
In an interview with the Goethe-Institut, Yelin spoke about her growing engagement with memory: she had encountered it repeatedly in different forms, and had increasingly become preoccupied with its connection to trauma, violence and loss. This is not a claim that drawing can resolve such experiences. Rather, it opens up a space in between: readers have to make connections between panels without every meaning being spelt out.
Women’s lives, different forms
The breadth of Yelin’s work is also evident where she places other lives centre stage. ‘Vor allem eins: Dir selbst sei treu’ (Above All: To Thine Own Self Be True) tells the story of the actress Channa Maron; ‘Die Giehse – ein Leben für das Theater’ (Giehse — A Life for the Theatre) is devoted to Therese Giehse. She created ‘The Summer of Her Life’ with Thomas von Steinaecker, while ‘Unsichtbar’ (Invisible), made together with her sister Ursula Yelin, takes up the story of a refugee from Eritrea. Yelin, then, does not work on just one subject or in a single form. What recurs instead is an interest in how an individual life is intertwined with social history.
For these works, the idea that comics can be literature is not a theoretical claim but a question of narrative means. A glance, a pause or an empty space carries a weight that elsewhere would be borne by a paragraph. The Roswitha Prize will be presented on 1 November at the Stiftskirche Bad Gandersheim. Its jury honours Yelin’s contribution to contemporary literature; beyond that judgement, the distinctive quality of her books lies in their refusal to present memory as a finished image. They show how it takes shape: from voices, traces and decisions — and from what remains open between two images.
Original reviewed by the editors · 26 October 2026
