5/13/2023 0 Comments Berlin lutes![]() ![]() ![]() An encounter that presages a relationship fraught with both intimacy and conflict. It is, more importantly, an encounter set up by Lutes between words (journalist Severing) and images (artist Mueller). The encounter between key protagonists, journalist Kurt Severing and art student Marthe Mueller, in the compartment of a Berlin-bound train in the September of 1928, is not simply meant to be a first meeting between a man and a woman. One does not, however, need to get to the middle of Lutes’ yarn about Berlin in the twilight years of the Weimar Republic to figure that such a stock opening has not been forced upon the artist by an imagination overwhelmed and exhausted by the stereotypes of mass culture. ![]() And yet the manner in which it unfolds into the larger narrative of Berlin – the third part of which is yet to appear and which is currently made up of City of Stones and City of Smoke respectively – serves to brush it against its own banal grain. The encounter between a man and a woman in a railway carriage with which the first book of his graphic-novel trilogy opens is an archetype. Jason Lutes, Berlin (Book 1): City of Stones, Drawn & Quarterly, Montreal (2001, Reprinted 2009) & Berlin (Book 2): City of Smoke, Drawn & Quarterly, Montreal (2008) ![]()
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