Friday, November 16th: Presenting Jason Lutes' Berlin

A masterwork of the graphic novel golden age, Berlin tells the story of the metropolis’s citizens before the fall of the Weimar Republic, as fascism is on the rise throughout the world. Marthe Müller: a young woman escaping the memory of a brother killed in World War One; Kurt Severing: an idealistic journalist losing faith in the printed word as fascism and extremism take hold; the Brauns: a family torn apart by poverty and politics. Lutes weaves these characters’ lives into the larger fabric of a city slowly ripping apart.

Alexander Chee says Berlin is “at once a story about artists trying to make art during the rise of the Nazis in Germany, and a bildungsroman of the first order.”

The city itself is the central protagonist in this historical fiction. Lavish salons, crumbling sidewalks, dusty attics, and train stations: all these places come alive in Lutes’ masterful hand. Weimar Berlin was the world’s metropolis, where intellectualism, creativity, and sensuous liberal values thrived, and Lutes maps its tragic, inevitable decline.

There will be two presentations about Lutes’ work on Friday, November 16th, in Gainesville, FL. The first talk will be from 12 PM to 1:30 PM at Room 005 in Keene-Flint Hall at the University of Florida, in the History Department Conference Room. The second talk will be later the same day at Third House Books on 113 North Main Street from 6PM to 8PM.

See you there!