![]() In size and weight, Berlin is a building block of a book, reminiscent of the cobblestones, bricks, and concrete slabs that make up the titular city. ![]() The book’s physical presence is also a marriage of form and content. In the fraying and polarized America of Donald Trump, the Weimar Republic looks more like a mirror than a fading photograph. When he finally finished the project and codified it in a hefty hardcover in 2018, what had once been antiquarian was now urgent. ![]() The cartoonist patiently drew his story in short, irregularly released pamphlets, gathered together every few years in paperback collections. Yet in going back to the apparently irrelevant past, Lutes became an inadvertent prophet. The future seemed more or less certain: America’s free-market, liberal democratic model would continue to prevail as the best of all possible worlds. ![]() The winding down of the Cold War brought with it an ostensible closure of the ideological battles of the early 20th century, leading some of the more triumphalist partisans of capitalism to proclaim nothing less than the end of human history. Jason Lutes first started drawing Berlin, his epic graphic novel about the disintegration of the Weimar Republic, in 1996, when the topic seemed an esoteric choice for an American storyteller. BERLIN by Jason Lutes Drawn & Quarterly, 580 pp., $49.95 ![]()
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