"Berlin" by Jason Lutes and "Belonging" by Nora Krug

I don't read many graphic novels, but I read an article that featured these two late last year and thought they sounded interesting. Both are about Germany and its Nazi past, although they deal with the subject in very different ways. And their artistic styles are completely different, as you can see from the respective covers.

On the whole, I preferred Berlin, particularly in artistic terms. It's a bold, sweeping, black-and-white portrait of the city in the early 1930s, when Germany was still a democratic state and its capital a hotbed of art, theatre, sexual experimentation and free expression. It follows the intersecting stories of a young female art student named Marthe Muller, who arrives there from Cologne, and an idealistic but increasingly world-weary journalist named Kurt Severing, among a cast of dozens of other characters. Both the main leads are intelligent, real-seeming and likeable, and the portrayal of the city itself is beautifully done.

But I did feel the book was a little swamped by all those other characters, many of them communists and Nazis, who felt less three-dimensional and who tended to blur together in my mind, not least because many of them looked too alike. Almost all of the women have short hair, for example, which makes them hard to distinguish, and too many of the working-class characters simply looked dirty or old beyond their years. Berlin is not ruined by these flaws - it's still a wonderful achievement - but I do think it might have worked better as a narrative if the author had kept a tighter focus on his central protagonists.

Belonging is actually a non-fiction book, a sort of memoir/investigation. Written by a young German woman who lives in the United States, it begins brilliantly: a chance meeting, soon after her move to New York, with an elderly Holocaust survivor, which leaves the author squirming and ashamed of her country's past. It then goes back in time to the end of the Second World War, with a couple of reproduced documents that I knew nothing about and that were fascinating and revelatory.

The first was an excerpt from a 1945 US War Department training film written by Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr Seuss. 'The German people are NOT our friends,' writes the author of The Cat in the Hat. 'However sorry they may seem, they cannot come back into the civilized fold just by sticking out their hand and saying, "I am sorry". Don't clasp that hand! It's not the kind of a hand you can clasp in friendship. Trust none of them.'

The author, Nora Krug, grew up next to an American air base and there are personal recollections of the locals' relationship with the US soldiers. There is also a harrowing photograph of naked, skeletal corpses being paraded through a village street on the backs of horse-drawn carts, with the caption: 'In some towns, the Allied forced local farmers to drive the bodies of the dead through the streets on the way to the burial site, for everyone to see.' Something else I knew nothing about.

The book does not quite live up to this initial promise, however. Essentially, it is the story of the author's investigation of her own family's past: how much they did know about what was going on? How implicated were they in their country's guilt? As with all such real-life investigations, the story comes up against the limits of what can actually be found out, and the possibility of a slightly bathetic conclusion. I feel like Krug tries to dramatise some fairly undramatic material by over-emphasising her inherited guilt, her horror at the crimes of the past. And, while the scrapbook-esque style of the art works quite well with the historical material, I'm not mad about her actual drawings.

On the whole, although neither novel has put me off graphic novels as a genre, neither made me eager to plunge back into it right away either. I guess ultimately they're just like non-graphic novels: everything comes down to how good the story is and how well it's told. They do look very handsome on my shelves though.