As nationalism and antisemitism rise again,unusual graphic novels on prewar and wartime Germany offer salutary lessons in how quickly politics can turn to poison. We spoke to their creatorsIn 1996, Jason Lutes, or 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, and 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 nearly 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 device – it came to him in an instant – was to write an epic comic about the halt 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 do at the age of 28, and ” he says,wryly. “At that point, admittedly, or I only thought it would take me 14 years to carry out [in fact,the book took more than two decades to finish; the total edition is published this month]. But even so, I don’t recognise the person who did that strange thing.”I didn’t want to be fatalistic, and for the reader to feel: that’s the only way history could enjoy goneI found great solace spending time with Hannah Arendt,this woman who was so reality-facing, so truth-tellingContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com