Jutta Bauer | Germany
Since more than 10 years I am walking around with a familiar topic. Im coming from a huge family ( 8 brothers and sisters with my father, 5 with my mother). My mother is from Bohemia: „sudetendeutsch“, my father from the northern Germany: Mecklenburg. Really different. Also different is their family background. My mothers parents were farmers and glassworkers (there was a huge glass-industrie in that region, mostly homework) in the mountains and my fathers family was quite bourgeois. He was her teacher in a spezial school for farmgirls. After the war they came as refugees to Hamburg with some of my young sisters.
I want to talk in a comic-style about the family muddle, the different cultures, the food, the songs, the games and behind this the historic theme of displacement, especially of the „Sudetendeutschen“ from the czech country. I went to Czechia several times with an old czech-german guide for getting a feeling what happened there. How could it happen that neighbours changed into enemies? I feel, that my generation, -the children of the „Sudetendeutschen“ are the last ones to talk about that. And for years nobody talked about it here, just the old „Nazis“ and revanchists did, and they did it in the wrong way.
I hope I can manage to work about all this in a humorous, friendly, picturesque and warm style, always looking for the anecdotic and funny aspects. I will mostly do pictures and handwritten texts and also use facsimilar materials: handwritten recipies from my mother, letters and documents. My idea is a conglomeration of pictures, stories, information,... not a story. It seems to be very special, but I think, people can can find references to refugees today and get a feeling for the sorrow of living far from home which can be felt even by the children of refugees.
Education:
HAW Hamburg
Illustration, Siegfried Oelke
Graduation: 1981
Published titles: 20