Berlin

 
 
Berlin

by Jason Lutes

Drawn & Quarterly
2020

 

 

Berlin is a graphic novel, and an absolute masterpiece. It's 550 pages long, and dense for a comic. Lutes's art is black and white with clean, precise linework that's highly realistic. I've see Lutes's art in a handful of roleplaying game book illustrations before, but his work here is a tour de force.

 

Berlin probably centers on Martha Muller - it begins with her arrival and ends when she leaves, but Lutes follows at least a half-dozen characters closely, and dozens more make repeat appearances, and the story covers the late 1920s to early 1930s. 

 
I don't know how someone who studies literature would classify Berlin (besides, obviously, calling it 'historical fiction,') but it reminds me of descriptions of the early social realist novels. We hear dozens of viewpoints and philosophies, from leaders making speeches to friends debating ideas, we see frank and unsentimental portrayals of everyday life, and at several points, hear the stray thoughts of a dozen people in a crowd.

 
Martha is fleeing an arranged marriage in Koln. She comes to Berlin to study art initially, and end up befriending and dating Kurt, a pacifict newspaper reporter, and fellow student Anna, who starts the book a lesbian and ends it a trans man.

 
We also follow the Braun family, who are split up by politics. Mother Gudrun takes daughter Silvia to join the Communists, while father Otto takes the other two children to join the NSDAP. Both groups provide food and communal housing to willing foot soldiers. Silvia ends up bounced around by fate, living briefly with the tramp, Pavel, and getting adopted for a time by the Jewish Schwartz family, before choosing her own path.

 
We see the Cocoa Kids, a Black jazz band from the US. We see several May Day demonstrations, and the violence visited on the Communists by the Socialist government. We see the rise and rise of the NSDAP. And in general, we see people trying to make lives for themselves in a cosmopolitan city in a time of conflict that we in the audience know is doomed to end in tragedy.