Dreadful knowledge: Berlin: City of Smoke

Berlin: City of Smoke (Drawn & Quarterly, 2008), Book Two of Jason Lutes's in-progress trilogy about the Weimar Republic's disintegration, picks up shortly after the 1929 May Day massacre that terminated Book One, City of Stones. Lutes, who is among the most skilled practitioners of the high-input labor of cartooning, continues to harmonize rich and emotive drawing with brilliantly imagined dialog and plotting. Each character, appearing however briefly, has a fully developed personality and it's this humanist heart of Berlin that makes witnessing the city's nauseous slouch towards tragedy so agonizing. A few characters depart the German capital in Book Two, and the knowledge that these exits are in fact escapes enhances the reader's dread for those who remain. Lutes himself has cautioned that "it's somewhat simplistic and reductive to make many direct comparisons between the current political climate and that of the Weimar Republic," but it's impossible to ignore the familiar feel of the angry unemployed father who finds comradeship and an outlet for his rage among the Nazi's or of the elites who prefer laughing at satirized Brownshirts in the cabaret to confronting the totalitarian power growing in the streets and the Reichstag. As Noam Chomsky recently reminded an audience in Belfast: "There is now a mass of people with real grievances who want answers and are not receiving them. A common reaction in elite educated circles and much of the left is to ridicule the right-wing ­protesters. "But that is a serious error." Nick Holt's website is gritsandroses.org