Pure distilled Lutes. If you liked "Jar Of Fools", you'll love this volume as well.
The plot follows the lives of several individuals, normal people in abnormal times, small wishes trapped in a nation that is slowly going mad. A secluded journalist, a shy artist girl, a middle-class jewish family, a prole german family, a down-to-earth policeman, and then war veterans, art students, faction leaders, demonstrations, desperation, dreams, violence, love... they all mix up to paint a vivid landscape of the unstable Berlin between the two Wars, without ever being didascalic, always looking at the people, what they see, what they feel... and the end of the volume is just heartbreaking (if a bit predictable).As someone who studied the Republic of Weimar quite thoroughly, I have to say that Lutes is careful with the references; but this book is mostly about the emotional portrait of a generation that didn't recognise the blowing wind of history, and was unable to put in practice the fragile equilibrium of modern democracy. Weimar will always be a memento that democracy is not just in the structures and rules of parliamentary debate, but in minds, bodies and souls of the people who compose it; and Lutes knows it.
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