![]() ![]() Lutes spent the time well, crafting multidimensional, true-feeling characters in a set of stories connected by the unstable circumstances of their time and place. (According to Lutes, he was inspired to write about Germany between the wars after reading an advertisement for a photography book dealing with the period in The Nation.) He was not yet 30 when he started the first volume, and he was over 50 and the father of two when the final book was published this fall. Jason Lutes dedicated over 20 years to the making of this work of more than 550 pages of nuanced, exactingly rendered pen-and-ink drawings and dialogue. Reading this book knowing what the coming war would lead to, one can’t help but be reminded, too, of the cattle-car trains that would carry Jews to the death camps. ![]() Roaring along the tracks in 1928, the train was taking its passengers not only to Berlin but also to the future. Lutes’s lovely black-and-white ink drawing of a steam locomotive conjures a nostalgic conception of the past for contemporary readers while reminding us that rail travel represented the wonders of the modern age in the time of the book. Berlin begins in the fall of 1928, with the image of a passenger train steaming across the German countryside-toward Berlin, we soon learn-and it ends, in the spring of 1933, with another train leaving the city with one of the original passengers on board. ![]()
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