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... [Berlin has] an ending so electrifying that I gasped.--New
York Times Book Review
During the past two decades, Jason Lutes has quietly created one of the
masterworks of the graphic novel golden age*. 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.
Lutes weaves these characters' lives into the larger fabric of a city
slowly ripping apart.
The city itself is the central protagonist in this historical fiction.
Lavish salons, crumbling sidewalks, dusty attics, and train stations:
all these places come alive in Lutes' masterful hand. Weimar Berlin was
the world's metropolis, where intellectualism, creativity, and sensuous
liberal values thrived, and Lutes maps its tragic, inevitable decline.
Devastatingly relevant and beautifully told, Berlin is one of the
great epics of the comics medium.
