Ulli Lust

Hermann Karnau est un jeune acousticien allemand, responsable de la sonorisation de meetings politiques nazis au début de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Fasciné par les mystères de la voix humaine, il enregistre des centaines de voix au cours de la guerre puis procède à des expérimentations scientifiques pour le compte du IIIe Reich. Sa position l'amène à fréquenter Goebbels, le ministre de la propagande nazie, et plus particulièrement l'aînée de ses six enfants, Helga. L'adolescente, initialement très attachée à son père, découvre le véritable visage de celui-ci au fur et à mesure de l'avancée du conflit. Les mondes de Karnau et d'Helga se rejoindront finalement dans la noirceur la plus profonde, marquant la folie d'un système abject.

"Germany, in the final years of the Third Reich. Hermann Karnau is a sound engineer obsessed with recording the human voice in all its variations--the rantings of leaders, the roar of crowds, the rasp of throats constricted in fear--and indifferent to everything else. Employed by the Nazis, his assignments take him to party rallies, to the eastern front, and into the household of Joseph Goebbels. There he meets Helga, the eldest daughter: bright, good-natured, and just beginning to suspect the horror that surrounds her. Based on the acclaimed novel by Marcel Beyer, Voices in the Dark is the first graphic novel by the award-winning cartoonist Ulli Lust. It is the story of an unlikely friendship and of a childhood betrayed, a grim parable of naïvete and evil, and a vivid, unsettling masterpiece of comics storytelling. As Germany descends into chaos, Helga's and Hermann's lives intertwine, then finally collide. In Hitler's Berlin bunker, with the Red Army closing in, Hermann receives his greatest assignment: recording the Fuhrer's final words--and the last moments of Helga and her family"--