Loads of Learned Lumber

Monday, March 9, 2020

Jason Lutes, _Berlin_

AN IMMENSE GRAPHIC novel--about 550 pages--and it took me months to read it, over which time its details got muddled in mind with those of Berlin Babylon. This too is set in Berlin in the years right before the Nazis came to power.

The narrative begins with Marthe Müller's arrival in Berlin in the fall of 1928. She has left her comfortable, provincial bourgeois family behind in Köln to study art and live a little--which she proceeds to do, having affairs with the somewhat older, deeply serious journalist Kurt Severing and with fellow student Anna, who is trans-masculine. There are a great many other characters: a Jewish family, assorted Communists, assorted brownshirts, a decadent-aristo ex-mistress of Kurt's, an African-American jazz group, several actually historical figures. Tensions rise, chaos looms. Hitler is being sworn in as Chancellor when Anna boards the train to go back to Köln at book's end, so it must be January 1933. Both Kurt and Anna see her off at the station.

What struck me over and over again is how painstaking Lutes is with architecture. The effect of being in an urban space is uncanny. He's less successful with people, I think; they are not as promptly distinguishable from each other as they should be. As characters, though, in the literary sense, they work well, especially Anna.

As a depiction of the era--what the heck, I was persuaded. Lutes does not go into a lot of detail about the politics of those years, using it mainly as backdrop, but still conveys that tipping-out-of-control feeling...all too reminiscent of the good old USA under our current president.

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