The current refugee crisis in Germany has prompted the development of strategies to facilitate communication between Germans and their sometimes unwelcomed guests. Given the barriers of language and culture between Germans and refugees, the comic book, with its emphasis on both visual mediation and verbal communication, has become one of these strategies. Thus a new genre has arisen: der Flüchtlingscomic.

This category, however, ostensibly includes three distinct types of communication, serving different purposes and for different audiences. Among the first type are works in which Germans channel the voices of refugees to make their stories accessible to other Germans, such as Paula Bulling’s Im Land der Frühaufsteher (2012) or Mike Loos’s edited Geschichten aus dem Grandhotel: Comic-Reportagen von Augsburger Design-Studierende (2016). These works show a level of aesthetic sophistication befitting the training of the artists and the expectations of their target readership.

The second, less complex, type includes works produced by government or other agencies, aimed at a refugee audience. These comics, such as the Hessian Justice Ministry’s Fit für den Rechtsstaat – Fit für Hessen! (2016), attempt to inculcate German norms and values in their readers, ranging from an understanding of basic human rights, through tolerance of homosexuality, to proper behavior at public swimming pools. These efforts, while arguably serving a necessary function, are more slick advertising than art; they have also been harshly criticized from both sides of the political spectrum, seen variously as either finger-wagging neo-colonialism or futile attempts to convert a hostile and potentially dangerous foreign element.

The third type, however, produced in a pilot workshop in Berlin’s Moabit district (2015), is now giving refugees themselves the opportunity to draw their own comics, above all as therapeutic self-expression, though also in order to communicate their situation to others. While the program may be expanded to other cities, there is as yet no infrastructure to publish these comics; instead, however, the American artist serving as instructor has various platforms to depict the workshop from her point of view. Her enthusiasm and sympathy for her students are obvious, but these comics ultimately express the same institutionalized forms of privilege and marginalization as the other two types. The Flüchtlingscomic’s deceptive diversity thus raises the question of whether these existing Western media structures are capable of serving an integrative function—even with the best of intentions.