![]() 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. ![]()
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