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A review by meepelous
Berlin Book One: City of Stones by Jason Lutes
4.0
Jason Lutes is a white american man who has still managed to create at least one pretty good book - maybe more, all his books have been fairly well received but I have yet to read them. Started in the late nineties, the Berlin trilogy has certainly loomed large on his wikipedia page but he's also done other work including Jar of Fools, The Fall, Houdini The Handcuff King, and chidlren's series The Secret Three and Sam Shade along with several other short works. In 2008 he joined the faculty at Center for Cartoon Studies and I guess he remains thusly?
Berlin: City of Stone was originally published as issues by Black Eye Productions starting in 1996, with trades coming out in 2000, 2002 and 2018 published by Drawn and Quarterly after Black Eye Productions went under.
Moving onto the back of the book - Berlin: City of Stones presents the first part of Jason Lutes' captivating trilogy, set in the twilight years of Germany's Weimar Republic. Kurt Severing, a journalist, and Marthe Muller, an art student, are the central figures in a broad cast of characters intertwined with the historical events unfolding around them. City of Stones covers eight months in Berlin, from September 1928 to May Day, 1929, meticulously documenting the hopes and struggles of its inhabitants as their future is darkened by a growing shadow. Along with two praising blurbs from The San Francisco Chronicle Book Review and Time Magazine from 2000. At least I would like to think that people think slightly more highly of historical fiction in the graphic novel form in 2019. Maybe I'm delusional.
While this is a fictional depiction of historical events from one person's perspective, having read this almost a decade ago I was more tuned in whenever the Weimar Republic has come up in conversation since which has been pretty interesting. And ominous.
While I did enjoy the book overall, I would say that the art is a highlight. I mean, I had a hard time telling the women apart for a minute but the art is otherwise very nice. Plus there are a lot of female characters. Dramatic black and white with great line quality. The style of the tone is also perfectly matched with the fact that this is a ominous historical fiction.
The way gender and sexuality are treated in the comic is interesting because the ways that gender and sexuality were being treated in that time and place were also interesting, and I'm glad that Lutes did not shy away from that. Even if it's not coming front and center either. FYI everyone, a lot of interesting LGBT+ positive culture and research was happening in Germany before the rise of Nazis. Certainly not something ever to be repeated no? There is some nudity in this book, but there's actually full frontal and flaccid male nudity, and certainly no erotic fixation on dominating vaginas, so gold stars all around.
With race being such a contentious issue (to put it disgustingly lightly) in WWII Lutes seems to be setting the stage for what is to come in a way that shows Germans that fall all along the spectrum politically. Although the proto-nazis are all tertiary, with one older policeman we see a couple of times pulled between his lived experience fighting side by side with Jewish Germans in WWI and the first signs of official political crackdown on communists. Not that those two things sound equal, but we generally see him among younger (overtly anti-Semitic) coworkers. And the idea that political crackdowns was tied up with and lead up to the Jewish death camps is not how WWII was presented to me in school. Much like (but long before) Strange Fruit volume II used a sambo icon as visual shorthand for racial slurs, Lutes replaced swastikas with plain white circles. Me being not terribly bright it did take me a minute or two to catch on to this fact but it's pretty obvious in retrospect.
I should also mention that we do follow at least one Jewish German family, and the growing level of racially motivated violence they are experiencing. But the way that Lutes mostly focuses on the fairly everyday and timeless problems that the characters face is unsettling, and will likely only become more so as the screws keep turning tighter and tighter. I wish this book was a little less pertinent to my current life.
Berlin: City of Stone was originally published as issues by Black Eye Productions starting in 1996, with trades coming out in 2000, 2002 and 2018 published by Drawn and Quarterly after Black Eye Productions went under.
Moving onto the back of the book - Berlin: City of Stones presents the first part of Jason Lutes' captivating trilogy, set in the twilight years of Germany's Weimar Republic. Kurt Severing, a journalist, and Marthe Muller, an art student, are the central figures in a broad cast of characters intertwined with the historical events unfolding around them. City of Stones covers eight months in Berlin, from September 1928 to May Day, 1929, meticulously documenting the hopes and struggles of its inhabitants as their future is darkened by a growing shadow. Along with two praising blurbs from The San Francisco Chronicle Book Review and Time Magazine from 2000. At least I would like to think that people think slightly more highly of historical fiction in the graphic novel form in 2019. Maybe I'm delusional.
While this is a fictional depiction of historical events from one person's perspective, having read this almost a decade ago I was more tuned in whenever the Weimar Republic has come up in conversation since which has been pretty interesting. And ominous.
While I did enjoy the book overall, I would say that the art is a highlight. I mean, I had a hard time telling the women apart for a minute but the art is otherwise very nice. Plus there are a lot of female characters. Dramatic black and white with great line quality. The style of the tone is also perfectly matched with the fact that this is a ominous historical fiction.
The way gender and sexuality are treated in the comic is interesting because the ways that gender and sexuality were being treated in that time and place were also interesting, and I'm glad that Lutes did not shy away from that. Even if it's not coming front and center either. FYI everyone, a lot of interesting LGBT+ positive culture and research was happening in Germany before the rise of Nazis. Certainly not something ever to be repeated no? There is some nudity in this book, but there's actually full frontal and flaccid male nudity, and certainly no erotic fixation on dominating vaginas, so gold stars all around.
With race being such a contentious issue (to put it disgustingly lightly) in WWII Lutes seems to be setting the stage for what is to come in a way that shows Germans that fall all along the spectrum politically. Although the proto-nazis are all tertiary, with one older policeman we see a couple of times pulled between his lived experience fighting side by side with Jewish Germans in WWI and the first signs of official political crackdown on communists. Not that those two things sound equal, but we generally see him among younger (overtly anti-Semitic) coworkers. And the idea that political crackdowns was tied up with and lead up to the Jewish death camps is not how WWII was presented to me in school. Much like (but long before) Strange Fruit volume II used a sambo icon as visual shorthand for racial slurs, Lutes replaced swastikas with plain white circles. Me being not terribly bright it did take me a minute or two to catch on to this fact but it's pretty obvious in retrospect.
I should also mention that we do follow at least one Jewish German family, and the growing level of racially motivated violence they are experiencing. But the way that Lutes mostly focuses on the fairly everyday and timeless problems that the characters face is unsettling, and will likely only become more so as the screws keep turning tighter and tighter. I wish this book was a little less pertinent to my current life.