Berlin: City of Stones
Posted by: Misha Stone
In Jason Lutes’ Berlin: City of Stones Marthe Muller travels to Berlin to study art and meets journalist Kurt Severing on the train into the city. It’s 1928 and this chance meeting comes just before Germany finds itself on the brink of violent change.
Set in Berlin in 1928 and 1929, this graphic novel is the first of two parts that delves into the human stories of how politics and war effect real people. There is a cinematic quality to the drawings; Lutes knows how to set a scene, to show the landscape or cityscape and then focus in on the characters whose stories he wants to tell. There is a great deal of history here about Germany leading up to WWII and how their defeat in WWI haunted them.
But Lutes really creates the human side of those who were Communists at great risk to themselves, and even how there were people simply living their lives with this political strife as a backdrop they could often willingly ignore. The two principal characters, artist Marthe Muller and Kurt Severing, a journalist her elder, are 3-dimensional and Lutes lets us hear their innermost thoughts.
I was really impressed overall with the scope of this book and am looking forward to reading Berlin: City of Smoke.
