Marthe attends art school and learns about Neue Sachlichkeit (the New Objectivity) but struggles to find meaning in her own drawings in an age of rapidly evolving media, specifically radio and the movies.
They fall in love, but the story is soon complicated by the political heat of the day. Marthe Müller, a young woman artist keen to try her luck in the metropolis, meets the journalist Kurt Severing. The story begins with a nod to cinema when, as in Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927), a train approaches the outskirts. This monumental effort is rewarded by arriving when a warning about the far-right could not be timelier. Serialised as 22 individual comics, we now have the collection in a handsome brick of a book. Devastatingly relevant and beautifully told, Berlin is one of the great epics of the comics medium.Referencing the Weimar Republic has become something of a cliché recently, and so it is important to highlight that Jason Lutes started work on Berlin, his impressive graphic novel about life in the city between the wars, over 20 years ago. Weimar Berlin was the world’s metropolis, where intellectualism, creativity, and sensuous liberal values thrived, and Lutes maps its tragic, inevitable decline. Lavish salons, crumbling sidewalks, dusty attics, and train stations: all these places come alive in Lutes’ masterful hand. The city itself is the central protagonist in this historical fiction. Lutes weaves these characters’ lives into the larger fabric of a city slowly ripping apart.
Berlin is one of the high-water marks of the medium: rich in its well-researched historical detail, compassionate in its character studies, and as timely as ever in its depiction of a society slowly awakening to the stranglehold of fascism.Berlin is an intricate look at the fall of the Weimar Republic through the eyes of its citizens―Marthe Müller, a young woman escaping the memory of a brother killed in World War I, Kurt Severing, an idealistic journalist losing faith in the printed word as fascism and extremism take hold the Brauns, a family torn apart by poverty and politics. an ending so electrifying that I gasped."― New York Times Book ReviewDuring the past two decades, Jason Lutes has quietly created one of the masterworks of the graphic novel golden age. Best of 2018 nods from the Washington Post, New York Public Library, Globe and Mail, the Guardian, and more! "The magic in Berlin is in the way Lutes conjures, out of old newspapers and photographs, a city so remote from him in time and space.
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