Everyday Life in Germany — Four-Panel Comics
Everyday Life in Germany — Life in Germany in Four-Panel Comics
Song Minseon and Choi Jungwon, two designers living in Germany, chose four-panel comics as a way to record their days far from home. Their stories, fitted into four square frames and drawn from adjusting to life in Germany, small everyday moments and travel, are most charming for their gently dry humor and candor.
Interviewer Pyo Youngso
Interviewee Song Minseon, Choi Jungwon
Could you start with a brief introduction?
Hello. We’re Song Minseon (Song) and Choi Jungwon (Choi). One of us is a design master’s graduate and the other an international student, both living in Germany. Before coming here, we created and ran a design studio called Toasted Page together, and we still balance work and study today.
Was there a particular reason you left to study design in Germany?
It probably differs from person to person, but if you put the emphasis on ‘studying visual design abroad,’ Germany isn’t often the first choice. We get asked a lot why we came to Germany, and it isn’t an easy question to answer. I suppose it began when Song became interested in the German language. As we studied German, we naturally grew curious about the country itself, and since we’d been vaguely thinking about studying abroad, we began to consider Germany seriously. It also helped that there’s no tuition and that prices are relatively low compared with other European countries. We were both swamped with work and living very busy lives, so we wanted a break, and at the same time we hoped to gain new experiences and learn something through living abroad. Of course, learning a new language and culture here hasn’t been purely fun, and now that our studies are coming to an end, there are things we regret. Still, it feels like an experience we could only have now.
What is daily life in Germany like in the age of COVID-19?
At the beginning of this year, we’d resolved to ‘travel lots of small European towns while we’re in Germany!’ But then the pandemic hit, and we ended up stuck at home. Staying in all day made us take meals very seriously. We cooked and ate dishes from all kinds of countries at home. We also tried recreating the delicious local food we’d eaten while traveling. Recently, we bought bacalhau (salt cod) at a Portuguese grocery store and made ‘Bacalhau à Brás.’ It’s a Portuguese home-style dish: you soak the bacalhau in water for a day to draw out the salt, shred it by hand, and serve it with potatoes, eggs and olives. The Christmas markets, which are the hope of Germany’s long winters, weren’t held this year either, so we made the drinks sold there, such as Glühwein and eggnog, at home.
As the lockdown dragged on, our similar days grew dull, so we’ve been trying to make content on our own initiative, even apart from work. In December, we made a short animation every day from the 1st to the 24th and uploaded them to Instagram, and recently we even started a YouTube channel without any grand ambition. Filming and editing videos takes a lot of effort, but using YouTube (the channel is called ‘Jam Factory’) as an excuse to try all sorts of new things has made our time a little richer.
How did you first start drawing comics, and how do the two of you work together?
It started with our wedding invitation. We got married just before coming to Germany, and to make the invitation a little unusual, we drew our daily life as comics and made a small booklet. The people who received it really loved it. After that, we began posting comics on Instagram every now and then, and that has continued ever since. Last year, we gathered those comics into another book and placed it in independent bookstores. As for how we work, whenever either of us has an idea for a comic, we jot it down or sketch it, then share it and talk it over. Then whoever has free time or feels like drawing at that moment draws it and posts it on Instagram. So the drawing style shifts a little here and there, but nobody ever seems to notice. (Laughs)
Your comics often make readers snicker. When you look for material in everyday life, is there anything you consider most important? Humor, for example…
Since we started drawing in Germany, we used a lot of material about the differences between Germany and Korea and things that struck us as new from an outsider’s perspective. After about a year, though, we started running out of material. So the Germany content became less frequent, and we began drawing more everyday stories. Because the two of us are together all day, we say a lot of odd things and make nonsensical puns, and we note those down on our phones and turn them into comics. We’d love to make them funnier, but the jokes we make day to day are bland and chilly to begin with… Sometimes we even worry about each other, saying, ‘Don’t do this when we’re out.’ Anyway, hearing that you laughed now and then while reading makes us very proud.
Please recommend a favorite work on the theme of travel, in any genre, whether a film, book or artwork.
Song I love a documentary film called ‘Photographic Memory’ and have watched it several times. It’s by the documentary filmmaker Ross McElwee, who handles the shooting, appearing on screen and narration himself, and it tells an autobiographical story. In the film, he keeps clashing with his sulky, late-teenage son, who is absorbed in the internet and electronic devices. To understand a son who has changed from the endlessly adorable child he once was, he looks back at what he himself was like at his son’s age. Then he heads to Saint-Quay-Portrieux, a seaside town in France where he once stayed briefly while working as a photographer’s assistant. Facing how changed a once-familiar place has become, and realizing that he has remembered those events very differently from how they really were, he also reflects on his relationship with his son. It’s a wonderful film that is quiet yet stirs complex feelings about past and present, memory and truth, analog and digital.
Choi I like Murakami Haruki’s travel essays. His novels no longer mean as much to me as they once did, but the travel essays he wrote without straining are still easy and fun to read. If I had to pick one, I’d recommend ‘Faraway Drums.’ It collects the travel essays Murakami wrote while staying in Europe and working on ‘Norwegian Wood’ and ‘Dance Dance Dance.’ On a Greek island in the off-season with a storm blowing in, and in a Rome where thieves are always eyeing your bag and mail vanishes the moment you send it, Murakami cooks meals with his wife, goes jogging and writes. Unlike the cover’s tagline, ‘a romantic and sentimental European travel essay,’ the writing has a rather dry and cynical attitude, and I love the odd funny moments hidden throughout.
When the pandemic is over, where would you most like to travel, and why?
These days we’d rather go back to a place we’ve already been than somewhere new. When we came to Europe in 2017, we traveled to a few Italian cities, and among them, 1San Remo stays in our memory. Song loves the novelist Italo Calvino. We’d heard San Remo was his hometown, so we put it on our Italy itinerary. When we got there, though, the once-a-week Calvino walking tour didn’t match our dates, and there was no Calvino museum or memorial of any kind. So we ended up taking a trip with nothing to do with Calvino at all. San Remo has a high hill like a backyard rise, and when you look down at the city from there, you can see Italy’s characteristic winding trees stretching out in every direction. It made us wonder whether this might be the endless forest of 2Ombrosa that appears in Calvino’s novel. It isn’t a famous tourist destination and it wasn’t what we expected, but it was a city that strangely felt good.
We’d also like to mention Kungsleden, a trekking route at the northern tip of Sweden. That’s another place we’ve already been. Because it lies within the Arctic Circle, there are no tall trees, just rolling hills where only moss and shrubs grow. The scenery is truly beautiful, and with nothing blocking your view, your eyes feel cleansed. We walked all day along a trail where you might meet one or two people a day, if that, carrying packs of more than 15 kilograms, and it was a truly unfamiliar experience. Unfortunately, Choi’s knee started hurting partway through the trek, so we couldn’t finish the route we’d planned and had to end it midway. If the chance comes, we’d like to work hard on our leg strength and walk the course exactly as we planned it back then.
1 A city on the Mediterranean coast of Liguria, in northwestern Italy.
2 A fictional town described as lying on the Italian Riviera in Calvino’s novel ‘The Baron in the Trees’ (Il Barone Rampante).