As nationalism and antisemitism rise again, new graphic novels on prewar and wartime Germany offer salutary lessons in how quickly politics can turn to poison. We spoke to their creators
In 1996, Jason Lutes, a cartoonist with just one slim graphic novel to his name, was leafing through a magazine in the house he shared in Seattle when his eye fell on an advertisement for a book of photographs about Bertolt Brecht’s Berlin. The ad briefly described the German capital in the 1920s, with its wild cabarets, seedy bars and jostling population of artists, architects, writers and philosophers, and in as long as it took him to read it, his life was changed. Lutes had never visited Berlin. He knew almost nothing about the city beyond what the copywriter at this university press had to say about it. But, no matter. Here it was in black and white: his next project.
The plan – it came to him in an instant – was to write an epic comic about the end of the Weimar republic and the beginnings of Nazism. It would be 600 pages long and he would publish it in three instalments. “It was quite a commitment to make at the age of 28,” he says, wryly. “At that point, admittedly, I only thought it would take me 14 years to do [in fact, the book took more than two decades to finish; the complete edition is published this month]. But even so, I don’t recognise the person who did that strange thing.”
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