BERLIN by Jason Lutes Drawn & Quarterly, 580 pp., $49.95

Jason Lutes first started drawing Berlin, his epic graphic novel about the disintegration of the Weimar Republic, in 1996, when the topic seemed an esoteric choice for an American storyteller. The winding down of the Cold War brought with it an ostensible closure of the ideological battles of the early 20th century, leading some of the more triumphalist partisans of capitalism to proclaim nothing less than the end of human history. The future seemed more or less certain: America’s free-market, liberal democratic model would continue to prevail as the best of all possible worlds.

Yet in going back to the apparently irrelevant past, Lutes became an inadvertent prophet. The cartoonist patiently drew his story in short, irregularly released pamphlets, gathered together every few years in paperback collections. When he finally finished the project and codified it in a hefty hardcover in 2018, what had once been antiquarian was now urgent. In the fraying and polarized America of Donald Trump, the Weimar Republic looks more like a mirror than a fading photograph.

When I first started reading Berlin more than two decades ago, I primarily admired it as a bravura feat of historical reconstruction. Everything—the trains, the buildings, the fashion, the faces—looked right, a testament not just to archival research but also, more importantly, to a style that channeled the imagery of the era. Lutes’s clean, brisk cartooning owes much to Hergé (the creator of Tintin), but there is more than a dash of noir taken from German Expressionism and the woodcut novels that flourished in the 1920s and 1930s (notably those by artist Frans Masereel). The style has an uncanny aptness, as if the book were a product of the very period it surveys.

Courtesy of Drawn & Quarterly

The book’s physical presence is also a marriage of form and content. In size and weight, Berlin is a building block of a book, reminiscent of the cobblestones, bricks, and concrete slabs that make up the titular city. Cartoonists refer to the white spaces between the panels in a graphic novel as “gutters,” and the street metaphor is particularly appropriate for Berlin. Reading a graphic novel, especially one as dense with geographical information as Berlin, is akin to deciphering a map. The inside cover of Berlin is, in fact, a map of the city, which reinforces the experience of the book as a kind of urban guide in narrative form.



Still, in reading the whole of Berlin, the immersion in a historical urban environment is secondary to the political dilemma that confronts the characters. Berlin features a large and diverse cast: workers and plutocrats, communists and fascists, bewildered liberals and political activists, Jews and anti-Semites, pacifists and street fighters. What unites them is the shared experience of living in a crumbling democracy, where economic chaos, distrust of the established order, and rising violence all work to destroy social cohesion. On a personal level, this means the characters are all tested, again and again, to show empathy, and even the best of them sometimes fail these tests. But the redemptive thrust of the book comes from the resilience of solidarity and hope even in the darkest times.