Book Review: "Berlin" by Jason Lutes

Berlin (2018)
Jason Lutes (1967)
577 pages

Germany’s Weimar Republic teetered on the brink of collapse as the 1920’s came to a close. Successive administrations proved incapable of righting a decade long decline in the economic situation, and equally powerless to tamp down increasingly violent skirmishes on the streets between partisans of the National Socialist and Communist parties. Actively attempting to undermine the existing government, the leaders of these organizations fomented conflict, rallying their members toward ever more polarized positions and training them for combat. Stuck in the middle of this power-play: a besieged population left to fend for itself.

These conditions were particularly manifested in the capital city of Berlin. A large and growing metropolis in the heart of the continent, Berlin attracted all manner of immigrants from throughout Germany and across Europe as those desperate for work, grasping for power or simply escaping their past poured into the city in search of a new beginning. And, while some arrived with extreme political ideologies, others contributed to radically new and disruptive social, cultural and artistic mores and practices that for many, particularly in the middle class, seemed a piece with the deterioration of order on the streets.

This chaotic mixture of uncertainty and change has been captured brilliantly by Jason Lutes in his graphic novel Berlin, which is set in the period from late 1928 up through the installation of Adolf Hitler as chancellor in early 1933. Lutes’ gorgeously drawn scenes evoke both the grandeur and the grit of Berlin during the final, dramatic years of the Weimar Republic. Whether presenting streetscapes in which political violence disrupts people going about their daily business, or interior settings that reflect the variety of conditions under which people lived in the city, Lutes’ richly rendered drawings pull readers into this turbulent moment in Berlin’s history.

And he complements his artwork with an engaging story that explores the confusion, anger, and hysteria of the time through an extensive cast of characters representing the messy diversity that constituted Weimar Berlin. Beyond hardcore partisans of the National Socialist and Communist parties, Lutes builds his narrative around characters from groups caught up in a situation beyond their control: middle and upper classes looking to protect their position amid growing violence and a dysfunctional government – averse to the Nazi’s brutish populism, but receptive to their promises of a return to order; a working class barely scraping by and feeling abandoned by the ruling Social Democrats – perhaps disgusted by the violent methods of the communist party, but finding nowhere else to turn for support; and an educated elite of journalists, artists and others, eager to separate from the old ways, and yet disturbed by the growing political breakdown.

Lutes artfully weaves together these many lives around the central character of Marthe Müller, an “art student and daughter of a middle-class family from Köln (Cologne)” (as described in a helpful Character list at the back of the book). Marthe arrives in Berlin in September 1928 to attend art school, but more generally looking to escape the limitations she perceives within the middle-class life of her parents, and so to start her life anew in the big city.

On the train to Berlin, she meets Kurt Severing, “a writer for Die Weltbühne (The World Stage), a weekly magazine of politics and art,” who is returning home from an assignment. The two become friends and then lovers, and – the ingenue artist and the grizzled, world-weary journalist – our guides through a Berlin in which, as Kurt describes to Marthe on the train ride in, “many factions … clash in the streets with increasing frequency. Communists, socialists, nationalists, democrats, republicans, criminals, beggars, thieves and everything in between. All mixed up together.” (10)

An early scene of such a “clash in the streets” captures perfectly the character of the violence, as well as the confusion of a populace resigned to its presence in their lives. It opens with a young Jewish boy selling copies of a Communist newspaper on the street; when three neighborhood boys whose sympathies lie with the National Socialists first verbally and then physically assault him, he must run for his life. In the next frames, a friend of Marthe’s, looking down from an apartment window, describes to her the confrontation occurring below. When Marthe asks, “Why do you think they were chasing him?”, the woman waves her hand, saying, “Maybe they’re Sozi’s and he’s a little Nationalist.” She’s gotten the motivations exactly backwards, but then, for those in the center, the reasons for such skirmishes could seem opaque and the details unimportant, their personal political outlook often guiding what little explanation they could be bothered to discern.

Avoiding overly simplistic generalizations, however, Lutes brings to the depictions of his characters the complexity of real human lives. In the pages shown at right, for example, a woman is being interviewed in the summer of 1929 by Severing, who asks her why she had participated in the Communist party’s recent May Day march; she concludes her reply by saying that she attended not out of any desire for violence, but “to demonstrate my objection to the way things are going.” (247) After the interview, the woman returns home to her husband and their evidently comfortable, middle-class existence. Later, in a scene from the following summer, the husband has just witnessed yet another confrontation between the Nazi’s and the Communists on the street below their apartment, and declares, over his wife’s unease and objections, that the two of them will vote for the Nazi’s in upcoming elections, because “they’re the ones keepin’ order.”

This complexity of the last years of the Weimar Republic in Germany, and particularly Berlin, has provided a rich palette of source material for many writers. For example, the chaos and conflicts the Severing reports on and describes to Marthe have formed the background of a series of noir novels by Volker Kutscher centered on the fictional detective Gereon Rath, among them The Fatherland Files (Die Akte Vaterland). 

The pre-war noir novels of Philip Kerr series featuring detective Bernie Gunther have also had Weimar Berlin as their setting, including the stories in Berlin Noir. (My reviews of these stories linked to at right.) Lutes, however, with his richly drawn graphic novel, brings a powerful evocation of the physical reality of the moment that even the best descriptions in such novel leaves to readers to summon.

Beyond noir, an engaging and disturbingly realistic account of the human cost of the period can be found in journalist and author Ernst Haffner’s novel Blood Brothers (Blutbrüder). Haffner describes the lives of a lost generation of German youth in the wake of the destruction of families and livelihoods in World War I. Homeless and fighting for survival on the streets of 1920’s Berlin, his characters encapsulate the abandonment of a generation who would come to fuel disorder, as well as a desire for security – for those with nothing, a life free from the rough streets, while for those in the middle class, protection from a pack they consider beggars and thieves. (My review of Haffner’s book at right.) 

While in Haffner’s story the political dynamics remain in the background, in Berlin, Lutes focuses directly on the trumped-up excuses for violence that come to destroy the Weimar Republic. Late in the story, Lutes has one of the real, historical figures he includes, the poet Joachim Ringelnatz, wandering the streets of Berlin pensively. Observing the escalating violence and reflecting on the Nazi’s significant gains in recent parliamentary elections, Ringelnatz recalls a poem by William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming, that includes the lines 

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
More anarchy is loosed upon the world.
…
The best lack all connection, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity. (504) 

This vision – that “anarchy is loosed upon the world” – permeates Lutes’ graphic novel, both visually and through its narrative.

Lutes produced and published the stories collected into Berlin over the past couple of decades, so beginning before the most recent political events in the United States; but his completed novel seems nonetheless a cautionary tale for our times. Although we have yet to witness anything like the levels of violence and disruption that afflicted the Weimar Republic, Lutes’ story makes evident the parallels some find between that period and our present worsening social and political environment of seemingly unresolvable partisanship and polarization.

Certainly that is the case in the United States for the growing unrest over our current economic situation and direction. From economist Thomas Piketty’s analysis in Capital in the Twenty-First Century becomes clear, for example, the dramatic swings in wealth concentration over the past century. The extreme concentrations of wealth capitalism generated in the late 1800’s dramatically declined in the wake of the destruction of World War I and the progressive policies implemented after the Great Depression, but this proved a temporary reprieve from the logical extremes of unfettered capitalism, as Piketty also notes that over the past several decades wealth concentration has again steadily risen, returning to levels last seen a century ago.

This growing inequality has helped fuel populist uprisings over the past decade. And, though the wealthy elite have thus far managed to redirect that anger at other targets – racial divisions, immigrants, urban liberals – the anger is real, and may, as witnessed in the Weimar Republic and its aftermath, be difficult for any group to control over the longer run. Though the details may be different, the words of a worker being interviewed in Lutes’ story ring familiar in our current moment: “The November revolution [in Germany, 1918-19] started something that must be finished. The old nobility, the Kaiser and his barons, have just been replaced by the middle class, the landlords, the bosses.

Things are better than before, but the doors is closin’. We need t’drive a wedge in there an’ keep it open.” (231) 

As workers and the middle class today watch the doors of economic opportunity that had opened, at least for some, in the middle of the 20th century close again – parents see their children ending up worse off than they were – is it not surprising that some eventually decide it is time “t’drive a wedge” into the system, and to fight for a better future?

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Other notes and information: 

Lutes lists an extensive “References & Inspirations” at the end of the novel, including fiction and nonfiction books, as well as “visual references” and films. Among this latter set of titles is director Wim Wender’s remarkable movie Wings of Desire (Die Himmel über Berlin), which presents the story of angels moving among the inhabitants of Berlin, with one in particular longing to become human and experience life directly. The angles can listen in on the random thoughts of people as they go about their quotidian lives, and Lutes nods to the movie at various points by giving readers a look into the thoughts of passersby going about their daily shopping and business in his story. 

In her 17 January 2021 editorial in The New York Times (The Inevitable), journalist Michelle Goldberg highlights the modern American version of the tension illustrated in Lutes' story between the Nazi's role in creating violent disorder and their promises to reestablish order:

An animating irony of Trumpism – one common among authoritarians – is that it revels in lawlessness while glorifying law and order.  "This is the central contradiction-slash-truth of authoritarian regimes," said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, and N.Y.U. historian and the author of "Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present."  She cited Mussolini's definition of fascism as a "revolution of reaction."  Fascism had a radical impulse to overturn the existing order, "to liberate extremism, lawlessness, but it also claims to be a reaction to bring order to society."

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf