Hannah Brinkmann Gegen mein Gewissen
[Against my conscience]

To fully understand the graphic novel Gegen mein Gewissen (‘Against my conscience’) by the young illustrator Hannah Brinkmann, we need to look back a few decades in German history to a time when liberal, conservative, nationalist and antiquated but obdurately persistent attitudes all existed side by side, whilst at the same time the extra-parliamentary opposition (‘APO’) was radically challenging the cosy complacency of large parts of the newly affluent population and their habit of shutting their eyes to the past.

When the new West German state was established in 1949 there appeared to be nothing contentious about Article 3, Paragraph 4 of the ‘Basic Law’: ‘No person shall be compelled against his conscience to render military service involving the use of arms’; after the human tragedy of Nazism and the Second World War, who could even begin to contemplate the idea of reintroducing conscription? Seven years later, however, politics were dominated by the Cold War. Rearmament was in full swing, and the declaration in the Basic Law was farcically reinterpreted. Young men who objected to military service had to subject themselves to an examination of their conscience by an assessment panel administered by the Ministry of Defence itself – as though it were possible within a single hour of often highly aggressive questioning for the chief assessors and their honorary co-assessors to arrive at a considered judgment regarding the alleged pains of conscience of the applicant before them. In 1972 there were slightly under 30,000 conscientious objectors in the Federal Republic. More than 11,000 were approved following their initial appearance before the panel, but those who were turned down found themselves subjected to a long-drawn-out process that by no means always culminated in success. Those who despite rejection of their bid for exemption refused to serve under arms were prosecuted as criminals. Many conscientious objectors lost all faith in justice and the law during this period. In addition, they were vilified as cowards, traitors and ‘pussies’, even though community service - the obligatory substitute for military service - was often far more arduous than its alternative. Quite a few young men went completely to pieces under the relentless pressure of this systematic discrimination in both the private and public domains.

In this reviewer’s experience no other graphic novel has captured this discriminatory environment of the early 1970s as accurately, sensitively and realistically in both word and image as Hannah Brinkmann. Over more than 230 pages she recounts the story of her uncle Hermann, who took his own life in 1973. A dedicated pacifist, he saw no alternative following the dismissal of his conscientious objection and the refusal by the authorities to acknowledge the depressive state that he suffered as a result. Hannah Brinkmann’s family only told her the true facts behind the tragedy once she had reached adulthood. In her Afterword she writes: ‘Hermann’s story became my own. I could move on in my life only by recounting it.’

Hannah Brinkmann takes her readers on an absorbing journey back through time to the Federal Republic of the 1960s and 1970s by means of a captivating combination of narration, ligne claire drawings and surreal picture-sequences. Using painfully clear images with numerous shifts of perspective, she tellingly evokes the milieu in which Hermann grew up - that of a well-to-do Protestant family in North Germany: five siblings; the father a dentist and passionate huntsman; their house stuffed with hunting trophies that inspired fear in Hermann even as a little boy; the whole family and household kept together by a devotedly caring mother prone to closing her eyes to reality. Religious rituals played a central role, though most of the children increasingly took to rebelling against the family’s patriarchal pattern of life.

Hermann developed into a pacifist in this environment, and by way of a contrast to its orderliness and often sterile cleanliness Hannah Brinkmann presents various surreal images that reflect the young man’s inner imaginings and anxieties. She then also relates these fearful imaginings to actual historical events which she evokes in a realistic, quasi-documentary style, before finally offering a kind of family-photo-album review of the happier moments in Hermann’s short life.

There is consolation of a kind in the end: Hermann Brinkmann’s suicide triggered a political debate about the rightness or otherwise of the assessment process in respect of conscientious objectors; it was abolished in 1977.