But it is this painful act of reading, of watching these blinkered characters do their thing, or not, that gives Berlin its strange force. Berlin is infuriating in its flatness and its blanks. They are isolates colliding, particles in a world heating up. They connect to one another, but not with one another. This splitting and multiplying of persons and viewpoints gives each one not only a connection to all the rest in a six-degrees-of-separation way, but also a strangely provisional status.

In a process that amounts to a kind of social mitosis, one character meets another, causing a third and fourth to emerge. If I were to pick one word to describe Berlin, it would be 'fragmented.' And this fits well with Lute’s montage aesthetic. Lutes’s wordless pictures of the city, especially at night, are some of the most dazzling passages in the book. the unspoken hero of Berlin is the city itself, in all its fractured and disordered glory. It is this impassivity that makes reading this book a deeply unsettling experience. Instead it has an atmosphere of aloofness. Berlin has no authorial voice, no narration, no overarching perspective. And so the pages of Berlin cut, sometimes abruptly, from street shots to close-ups, from train tracks to interior monologues, from newspapers to parlor rooms, and from one character to another. The compositional principle of Berlin is montage. In so doing, it offers a more comprehensive way of looking at our own troubled times, which can easily invite despair and resignation.

The achievement of Lutes’s Berlin is that it combines both sides of the gender divide in urban fiction. Still, in reading the whole of Berlin, the immersion in a historical urban environment is secondary to the political dilemma that confronts the characters. Everything-the trains, the buildings, the fashion, the faces-looked right, a testament not just to archival research but also, more importantly, to a style that channeled the imagery of the era. When I first started reading Berlin more than two decades ago, I primarily admired it as a bravura feat of historical reconstruction. 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.

Berlin jason lutes hardcover