| Berlin, Book Two: City of Smoke (Hardcover) |
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Praise for Berlin Book One:
“A comic of impressive scope, taking place in Weimar Berlin and touching on the issues of politics, aesthestics and technology in that cultural ground zero.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“[Berlin] will be the longest, most sophisticated work of historical fiction in the medium. Lutes has a natural, clean, European drawing style, much like Hergé’s Tintin . . . This book has the density of the best novels.” —Time
The second installment of the epic historical trilogy
The second volume of Jason Lutes's historical epic finds the people of Weimar Berlin searching for answers after the lethal May Day demonstration of 1929. Tension builds along with the dividing wall between communists and nationalists, Jews and gentiles, as the dawn of the Second World War draws closer. Meanwhile, the nightlife of Berlin heats up as many attempt to distract themselves from the political upheavals within the city. The American Jazz band Cocoa Kids arrives and quickly becomes a fixture. The lives of the characters within Lutes's epic weave together to create a seamless portrait of this transitory city. Marthe Muller follows lover Kurt Severing as he interviews participants in the May Day demonstration, but moonlights in the city’s lesbian nightlife. Severing acts as a window through which the political shifts within the city and its participants can be seen. As with Berlin Book One: City of Stones, Lutes creates a sense of anxiety, of the doom to come.
"There’s nothing more satisfying than a convincing fabrication, and as the writer and illustrator Jason Lutes states, ‘comics is [sic] The Trickster’s medium’. Ten years ago Lutes undertook the ambitious project of writing a comic based on Berlin during the Weimar Republic. In his ‘Berlin’ trilogy he weaves a shifting cast of several fictional characters into the narrative of actual historical events and figures of the interwar city. Drawing in black and white, Lutes employs the ligne claire – the ‘clear line’ style, of which Hergé’s Tintin is the most famous example – to conjure a realistic picture of Europe in the 1920s. The first book, Berlin: City of Stones (2004), began by following the aspiring artist Marthe Müller’s introduction to the city in September 1928. The narration drifted like the wandering camera of Vittorio de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948) or the eavesdropping angels from Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (1987), listening in on people’s thoughts before moving on among the political, economic and cultural polarities of the time.
This year sees the release of the second part of the trilogy, Berlin: City of Smoke. Political tensions are growing, following the violence of the May Day riots in 1929 and the crash of the New York stock exchange. Street clashes and anti-Semitism are becoming more prominent. The journalist and pacifist Kurt Severing aids Die Weltbühne magazine’s inquiry into the riots, resulting in a set of interviews reminiscent of the cinéma vérité of Chris Marker’s Le Joli Mai (1963). Meanwhile his editor, Carl von Ossietzky, is charged with treason for reporting on Germany’s illegal military rearmament. (Von Ossietzky, one of the genuine historical characters in the book, was in fact convicted in 1931.) Meanwhile Berlin’s extravagant night-life remains in full swing. Lute’s characters are carefully placed stereotypes – the gruff policeman, the working-class communist, the affluent Jew, the flippant socialite – imbued with personal ambivalence and at the mercy of historical events beyond their control. The main protagonists are an artist and a journalist, who, like their creator, are trying to make sense of the world around them in images and words. Amid the polyphony of political rhetoric and mundane musings Lutes examines how stories can become histories and vice versa.
The ‘Berlin’ trilogy is rooted in the traditions of literary Modernism: it was inspired by Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), whose narrator shifts incessantly between first-, second- and third-person viewpoints, and which Döblin himself rewrote after reading James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). Using the physically and literally kaleidoscopic comic form, Lutes turns the fragmentary visions of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and Joyce to his advantage. Closing on the Reichstag elections of September 1930, which saw the first major rise in support for the National Socialists, Berlin: City of Smoke is an intricately woven collective portrait and an enthralling high point in the recent history of comics."
--Chris Fite-Wassilak
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