Kurt is the hardboiled hack who chronicles the steady decline of Germany into barbarism. Marthe attends art school and learns about Neue Sachlichkeit (the New Objectivity) but struggles to find meaning in her own drawings in an age of rapidly evolving media, specifically radio and the movies. They fall in love, but the story is soon complicated by the political heat of the day. Marthe Müller, a young woman artist keen to try her luck in the metropolis, meets the journalist Kurt Severing. The story begins with a nod to cinema when, as in Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927), a train approaches the outskirts. This monumental effort is rewarded by arriving when a warning about the far-right could not be timelier. Serialised as 22 individual comics, we now have the collection in a handsome brick of a book. Referencing the Weimar Republic has become something of a cliché recently, and so it is important to highlight that Jason Lutes started work on Berlin, his impressive graphic novel about life in the city between the wars, over 20 years ago.
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