Staff Pick
This remarkable graphic novel pulls you in and keeps you going. It tells a big story through intimate stories of a few people in the Berlin of the late 1920s. You are left with the satisfaction of knowing more than you did, of knowing these people, and of your heart breaking with theirs. Recommended By Doug C., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Twenty years in the making, this sweeping masterpiece charts Berlin through the rise of Nazism
During the past two decades, Jason Lutes has quietly created one of the masterworks of the graphic novel golden age. Serialized in twenty-two issues, collected in two volumes, with a third to be released at the same time as this omnibus, Berlin has more than 100,000 copies in print and 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 Mller, 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.
Synopsis
"If there was ever any doubt of a graphic novel's ability to achieve a high level of storytelling, this book blows it away."--Newsday
"Astonishing in its scope, breadth and execution."--The Independent
Twenty years in the making, this sweeping masterpiece charts Berlin through the rise of Nazism
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 M ller, 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.
Synopsis
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 M ller, 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.