Berlin 3: City of Light comes out September 4 as a $24.95 trade paperback edition from Montreal-based publisher Drawn and Quarterly. Fans have been waiting patiently for the third collection, compiling the final 8 issues, for nearly a decade.

Two collected volumes – Berlin 1: City of Stone and Berlin 2: City of Smoke – came out in 20 respectively. He released chapters roughly annually in comic book form – not an ideal format for such a rich and complex narrative. Lutes said he built the cast with an eye toward representing as broad a spectrum of German society as he could to convey the complexity of the world from many points of view. The cast expands to include various bohemians, aristocrats, trade unionists, middle class burghers, street urchins, a band of black American jazz musicians on tour, and a Jewish family eager to assimilate, despite the prejudices of German culture. This simple incident evolves into a complex story encompassing politics, sexuality, gender identity, economic relationships and the first emergence of the modern urban experience that we can still recognize nearly a century later. On the train, she encounters a cynical journalist, Kurt Severing, who is one of the thousands of scribes chronicling the cutthroat political maneuverings of Germany’s unruly democracy. Aspiring artist Marthe Müller comes to the capital from Koln, seeking something beyond the future as a bourgeoise housefrau that her parents have planned for her. The series begins in 1928, following the lives of a handful of ordinary Berliners experiencing the exhilaration, confusion and alienation of modernity in one of the world’s great cities. Lutes said he spent two years doing research, then envisioned the completion of the work as a 15-year project but “as usual, I was a little behind on the deadline,” he joked. He read extensively, but only work that was written before 1933, so he could recreate the mindset of people who did not yet know what was in store for them. Once he started reading about it on his own, he became fascinated and wanted to explore the subject of how a modern society that seemed so open and tolerant of new forms of expression could transform overnight into something so barbarous. He said that he was initially drawn to 1920s Germany because he didn’t encounter much about Nazism or the Holocaust in his high school history class.

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