Nicolas Juncker creates friendship in the ruins of war

Audio 48:30

By: Jean-François Cadet Follow

Nicolas Juncker is the guest of VMDN for his comic book "Only in Berlin" published by Casterman. The story of an improbable but not impossible friendship between a German and a Russian, a bit like two flowers in the middle of a field of ruins, in Berlin in the spring of 1945.

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Comparison is not right, says the well-known adage. However, since the beginning of the global health crisis, many people have multiplied the rapprochements between the singular period that we are living and the armed conflicts that have bloodied the planet. It must be said that many political leaders, many doctors also use a martial vocabulary: they speak of war, battle, merciless struggle against an invisible enemy named Coronavirus. Every day, we review the troops, we are surprised that the stewardship does not always follow, we count the dead too. However, it must be recognized that if we have not yet toured the victims and suffering of the Covid-19, we are far from the chaos of total war, like that experienced by the city of Berlin in 1945, when the Soviets defeated the Nazi enemy. The cartoonist Nicolas Juncker plunges us into this hell, in an impressive graphic novel which tells the crossed destinies of two women: a German and a Soviet, two enemies who will form a very strange friendship against a background of hatred and destruction.

This is not a first, but it is still quite rare that in the West we tell the Second World War on the German or Russian side. It is even rarer when we do it not through the destinies of men, whether soldiers or politicians, but through the destinies of women. Yet this is what our guest of the day does in a graphic novel full of sensitivity. A story all in gray inspired by authentic testimonies, a story nourished by the horrors of war and barbarism, and which is however doubled by an incredible hunt for the corpse: that of the Führer, that of Adolf Hiltler. "Only in Berlin", by Nicolas Juncker, is published by Casterman .

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