It starts in Berlin. That could be called unusual for a comic about Cologne Cathedral. And there is no Neukölln Cathedral. We are also in Marzahn-Hellersdorf. It’s not Gothic either, more like it gothic: A partnership threatens to break up because he, a comic artist, puts his private life aside in favor of the drawing table, which drives them out, onto the bike and into death – a traffic accident, then medical equipment and finally the switching off of the devices. Still no sign of the cathedral.
Sebastian Strombach chooses an introduction that leaves one guessing. However, anyone who knows that he lost his partner a few years ago in exactly the same way as is described here will look at this comic with different eyes: It is a highly personal project, even if after the nine Berlin pages, the remaining 225 take place in and around Cologne and actually revolve primarily around the cathedral. Introduced by the sentence “Death and birth, beginning and end – let us begin our story with that”. And then death is followed by the birth of a child in Bethlehem, where three kings travel, whose bones become the center of veneration in the previous building of today’s Cologne Cathedral from 1164 onwards. And from 1248 onwards a new house was built for them. The church that the whole world knows today.
“Jeck” is the name of the comic about the church, and you would hardly have expected that either. What does that mean? First of all, another fact: every autumn the German Architecture Museum in Frankfurt presents its “Architectural Book Awards”. Ten books will each be honored, and regardless of the English name of the prize, these are mostly publications from publishers from German-speaking countries (in 2025 there were nine along with one Japanese title). This does not take away from the significance of this prize, because nowhere else in the world is so much architecture published – and with international impact, which is why half of the most recently awarded books are written in English. And one in Kölsch. At least partially. Just “Jeck”.
An architect finds his way into drawing comics
Table of Contents
The most remarkable thing about “Jeck”’s award is not the very few Cologne passages (the more difficult ones are subtitled), but rather the fact that it is the first comic ever to win a DAM Architectural Book Award. This is astonishing given the relationship between the two art forms – I just say: “page architecture” – especially since there is an illustrator in François Schuiten whose retro architectural fantasy has long had an influence far beyond comics; In 2000, the Belgian designed the “Planets of Vision” pavilion at the World Exhibition in Hanover.
But Sebastian Strombach, born in 1974 and grew up with Franco-Belgian comics, is also intensively active in the architectural field: he studied the subject, worked as an architect, and eight years ago his comic “Wolkenbügel” came out, a cultural history of the 1920s in Berlin that was strongly influenced by the utopian architecture of the time. This was followed in 2020 by “Verkehr”, a comic about the Berlin City Palace, and now – in a nice continuation of the title – “Jeck”. That is one reason for the less ecclesiastical title.
How your own family comes into play
Strombach lives, as we know from the opening to “Jeck” and from his earlier architectural comics, in Berlin. What interests him about Cologne Cathedral? Well, his family comes from the area, and another Strombach, Sebastian’s grandfather Franz, even makes an appearance in “Jeck.” First as a painting doctor who, because of his passion for art, neglected the large number of patients who were admitted to his hospital during the bombing raids on Cologne during the Second World War, and then a second time in 1964 when he looked for school exchange places abroad for his children, which would bring Eberhard Strombach to France, where he met Sebastian Strombach’s mother.
What does this have to do with Cologne Cathedral? They are interludes (again, very personal ones), each of which follows important recent turning points in the cathedral’s history, which has now reached almost nine hundred years. First of all, there is the miracle that the cathedral survived four years of constant Allied bombing of the city and in 1945 was the only surviving building standing in a desert of rubble in Cologne. Strombach dedicates one of his 22 double-sided panoramic images to this view, which have been recurring throughout all eras since Roman times and always look at the same area from a bird’s eye view – in sum, a simple but effectively staged macro-history of the city’s development in the actual micro-history of the church building, which has not been completed to this day because the cathedral constantly requires further restoration work.
History and stories are two different things here
The second event associated with the Strombach family history is the German-French reconciliation, which took place in the 1960s in the shadow of the heavily war-torn Gothic cathedrals of Reims and Cologne. Speaking of reconciliation: “Jeck” as a title is not only linked to the “Verrück” comic, but is also used as a word by Strombach to put into the mouth of the Mayor of Cologne and later Chancellor Konrad Adenauer as a verdict on modern architecture – seen in this way, the volume is also a continuation of “Wolkeneisen”.
Historical and fictional moments intertwine in Strombach’s new comic. Goethe was in Cologne twice in his life, but on his first visit the words that were put into his mouth in the corresponding scene from “Jeck” were already published: passages from the essay “On German Architecture” about the Gothic (for which Goethe was inspired by the Strasbourg Cathedral).
History and stories are two different things: on the one hand, historical factuality (history writing), and on the other hand, fictional narratives (story writing, commonly known as literature). In the story of Cologne Cathedral (used here in both senses) a lot of things are shrouded in myth, and so some things in Strombach are speculative or even fictional. He corrects other things: For example, the glossing over of the acquisition of the relics of the three kings – a raid, nothing else.
Church skepticism in the history of the cathedral
Just like the Christian religion doesn’t fare particularly well in its constant coziness or conflict with secular power. At the end of the book, Strombach introduces a sheep metaphor that works completely differently than the usual religious connotations: he has a shepherdess drive her flock through the cathedral. To his amusement, a man from Cologne recently claimed to him that he was of course familiar with the imagined early modern episode. The people of Cologne always know everything better, or at least they already know it for a long time.
Heinrich Heine, on the other hand, knew about the Cologne Cathedral: “It will not be completed, despite all the cries / of the ravens and the owls, / who, with an ancient mind, like to stay / in high church towers. / Yes, the time will come, / when, instead of completing it, / the inner rooms will be used as a stable / for horses.” This is what it says in “Germany, a Winter’s Tale” from 1844, and it is possible that the predicted agricultural use inspired Strombach to create his sheep. But Heine was completely wrong. The new Prussian lords of Cologne had resumed the construction work that had been interrupted in 1528 two years earlier, and by 1880 the cathedral received its striking double-tower facade – finished after 632 years!
But that didn’t do any good, because we’ve only reached page 165 in the comic, and what follows are the First and Second World Wars, as well as the occupation of the Rhineland in between and then the occupation again and finally the Federal Republic and the completely unsuccessful reconstruction of Cologne.
Gerhard Richter’s cathedral window would have needed paint
Where “Jeck” previously wrote bitingly anti-clerical historiography, in the twentieth century it became anti-national. And we see hubris, racism and terror. The famous “cathedral bomb”, a temporary walling up from a bomb hit in the north tower that is still visible today, was built by forced laborers. In 1965, Turkish guest workers were once allowed to pray in Muslim ways in the cathedral, but then never again. Both are rather unknown stories, while some spectacular things are left out of the comic: the treasury robbery in 1975 or Gerhard Richter’s south window, which was installed against the archbishop’s wishes. But for the latter, Strombach would have needed 72 colors, and his comic is black and white.
But apart from all the anecdotes and reminders: the way this comic tells the history of construction and also looks under the cathedral in the twentieth century, where an aesthetically extremely questionable civil engineering concept was pursued at the end of the 1960s, definitely justifies the DAM Prize. But you don’t have to have a classical architectural interest to admire Strombach’s black and white volume. It is informative, cleverly told and highly imaginative. Especially in terms of site architecture.