It’s going to be a comic. That much was clear.
Cover Image: © Aike Arndt, 2025.
What happens when we look at history through the lens of a comic is less clear. Simply Illustrating a scholarly article rarely works – academic papers and comics follow very different rules. In a comic, I can express a great deal in just a few images, things that would take up entire pages in text and would therefore likely never make it in at all. The expectations regarding how Argumentative Logic (thesis, argument, evidence, etc.) and the structure of the information presented are very different. While a scholarly article needs a guiding thread that builds the argument step by step and ends with a conclusion, a comic usually works with storytelling, connected actions, and perhaps even surprising punchlines. So from the outset we have to approach research and source material differently. But how does that work?
Seed Money Project
In May 2025, the Leibniz Association gave us – the comic artist Aike Arndt, my colleagues Johannes Kleinmann, Michael Homberg, and myself – the opportunity to try exactly this. Under the title “Zeitgeschichte im und mit dem Comic: ‘invisible labor’ – der digitale Wandel der Arbeitswelten von den 1970er bis 1990er Jahren,” the Leibniz Lab “Gesellschaftliche Umbrüche und Transformationen” is funding our 12-month project to create a comic about the history of work at the steel plant in Brandenburg an der Havel.
The Leibniz Lab is not primarily a funding body for comic projects, but it focuses on different fromats of science communication. These have been and continue to be central to our project as well: The partially decommissioned steel plant now houses an industrial museum, where, since the early 2000s, former employees have established formats of shared remembrance, such as the “Erzählcafé,” on their own initiative. This Erzählcafé still exist today.
“Gesellschaftliche Umbrüche und Transformationen,” whether the digitalization and AI-driven permeation of all areas of life [1] or the political and everyday upheavals in the GDR and FRG at the end of the 1980s, fundamentally shape many lives even today. Some of these transformations can be tied to specific events (for example, the fall of the Berlin Wall) but they are preceded and followed by periods of change that form the background noise of these events.
Oral History
We can study these processes through archival documents, newspaper clippings, photographs, and film material, and write books and articles about them that are then read by other historians. But this does little to help those people who are directly affected by structural upheavals.
Their shared experiences can help reconnect source material to lived realities and make it possible to understand what significance these major changes hold in individual biographies. Such accounts are well suited to complement source-based historical research with the dimension of subjective memory. (Of course, these memories must be handled just as carefully as any other sources.)
Giving a voice to those involved and affected is possible, for example, by interviewing them – so-called Oral History can be important in contemporary historical or ethnographic research as well as in Public History.
A dialogical format can also be a key component of science communication. On most topics, people bring their own experiences with them. These should not be ignored or worse delegitimized by historical research, even if that may sometimes be how it appears. On the other hand, historical research must act as a corrective against those who have forgotten history and against factually false narratives.
Communicating scholarship without researchers presenting themselves as all-knowing narrators Thus can sometimes Present a challenge. This comic project attempts to meet that challenge with humor and openness.
What are we doing, exactly?
Since May 2025, we have visited the Industriemuseum in Brandenburg an der Havel several times, in different constellations, and explored the halls of the old steel plant. We were fortunate and delighted to be able to take part in an “Erzählcafé,” where many former employees from various IT departments of the steelworks were present, including some women working in the punch card department. We heard wonderful, happy, sad and enraging stories and were entrusted with very different memories. We are deeply grateful for the openness with which we were received.
As a permanent member of the team, the artist Aike Arndt accompanied us in our historical work and not only conducted research and asked questions himself, but also began sketching along the way. Since participants in the Erzählcafé asked us not to make their identities recognizable, these sketches and monst character studies are not based on specific individuals, but rather on general impressions: gestures and facial expressions, the stories told, and the atmosphere in the room. However, if you take a look at the researched team depicted, you might notice some familiar faces…
How to make a Comic
But how do you actually make a comic? And what stories do you tell? To answer these questions, we meet fairly regularly online and sometimes in Berlin or Potsdam, in varying combinations. It takes a great deal of coordination to create a script that not only does justice to our contemporary witnesses and their stories, but situates them historically, and at the same time results in a coherent narrative that people actually want to read. (And, the Spaghetti Monster forbid, have fun doing so!)
After quite a bit of back and forth, by the end of the year we now have a script and rough sketches. We are very happy with the work so far, but we also see that there is still a lot ahead of us: checking historical accuracy, sensitivity readings by ourselves and external readers, as well as fine-tuning the details.
where did we leave the dialogue, one might ask?
We are planning to engage in two directions:
As part of a final event, we organize a project presentation with a comic reading and a panel discussion in March, in cooperation with the Brandenburg Industrial Museum. This event will not be aimed only at researchers and policymakers, but explicitly also at the people of Brandenburg, especially former steel plant employees. We are hoping to engage in lively discussions. We are currently organizing this.
Beyond that, we want to initiate a scholarly dialogue around the question of whether the comic is a suitable medium for research and its communication. The publishing house of the Deutsches Museum runs an open-access series, DM Studies, which publishes edited volumes and monographs, including on the topic of digitization. We are currently in talks with the series editors and the publisher about publishing the comic there. This would mean that it would also undergo a (single-blind) peer-review process. Such a process opens up entirely new questions about the comic and about peer review itself. How can a comic be evaluated as a format for scholarly publication when it inherently relies on the combination of image and text and must always navigate between fact and fiction?
But we are not there yet.
For now, we are excited to complete the comic and to host the final event in Brandenburg. What comes next promises to be just as engaging.
[1] Full disclosure: this text was proofread by such an application; it is, however, painfully aware of the negative side effects of this technology and tries to rely on it as little as possible.
