One measure of the potency of an urban novel is the amount of pressure that it exerts on the reader. A fictional work that aims to evoke the life of a grand metropolis should know something of surfeit, cacophony, and split-second vicissitudes. Its aesthetics have to account for excess: how else will it show the gradations of beauty and ugliness that array any vast human settlement? Since its publication in 1929, Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz has been recognized as one of the supreme literary representations of city life. To lodge in its pages is to dwell at the convergence of so many images and references (e.g., biblical riffs; scientific facts; news snippets; weather, economic, and agricultural reports) as to make the thought of retaining but a smattering of its wealth doubtful after a first encounter. In his essay on Döblin's book, "The Crisis of the Novel" (1930), Walter Benjamin wrote, "It is rare indeed for the incidents and reflections to sweep over a reader and destabilize his comfort to this degree." The geographic area where Döblin sets his epic is an all- enveloping demimonde where the pious cross path with felons, where prostitution is just another gig, where crooks fret over their reputations among their brethren, where political debates run hot, and where bars act as many people's second homes. Benjamin, later in his essay, offers a contemporary account of the area from which Döblin drew his inspiration: "What is Alexanderplatz in Berlin? It is the site where for the last two years the most violent transformations have taken place, where the excavators and jackhammers have been continuously at work, where the ground trembles under the impact of their blows and under the columns of omnibuses and subway trains, where the innards of the metropolis . . . have been laid bare to a greater depth than anywhere else." Behind the tumult of Benjamin's descriptions we sense the headlong rush into modernity and disaster that today we associate with the Weimar Republic.
Broadly speaking, Döblin -- who was born Jewish but later converted to a Catholicism -- accomplishes two major feats in his novel. First, he captures the frenetic, Teutonic energy that arose in the aftermath of World I before the Nazis took power. If that time period continues to exert its hold over our collective memory, it's because we're still fascinated by the sociocultural fermentation that it engendered. As the historian Eric D. Weitz noted in Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy, "The Weimar era, with its heady enthusiasms, its artistic experimentation, its flaunting of sexuality and unconventional relations . . . was a direct result of the vast disruptions of World War I, the distorted reverberations of its crashing destructiveness." The characters in Berlin Alexanderplatz, with their carousels of lovers, fly-by-night business partners, and fickle acquaintances, lead mostly provisional existences. For them, a placid future is about as remote a possibility as colonizing another planet.
The second overarching accomplishment of the novel is moral. In telling the story of Franz Biberkopf, the book's central character, Döblin indicts the societal forces driving Germany to the precipice. Biberkopf's problems, which grow ever more piercing as the chapters go past, are the result of his irrepressible vitality, his inaptitude for reflection, and his fatalistic sense of destiny. This large, unrefined man, in his early thirties, begins his journey fresh out of prison, where he served four years for pummeling his girlfriend so badly that her injuries eventually resulted in her death. Though Biberkopf makes a vow -- with himself and anyone who will listen -- that he'll hew to a law-abiding path, a series of bad breaks leads him back into the criminal life. Biberkopf's troubles are not simply those of recidivism -- he is happiest for a spell and his life seems most in order when he takes up his old profession as a pimp. Rather, it's because he is a poor judge of character who blindly swallows so much of what life throws his way that he comes to grief. One night, he is visited by a premonition that "friend" Reinhold means him harm; the following passage shows how deftly Döblin flits between perspectives:
In the night Franz wakes up and doesn't get off to sleep again. It's freezing. Cilly beside him is asleep and snoring. Why can he not sleep? The vegetable carts are trundling on their way to the market hall. I wouldn't want to be a horse, not in this weather, at this hour. Stables is warm, I'll be bound. My God, that woman can sleep. Can she ever sleep. Not me. My toes are frozen. I can feel the itch and tickle. There's something inside of him, his heart, his lungs, his inner self, it's there and it's being buffeted and bent, who by? It doesn't know, the mystery thing don't, who by. All it can say for sure is that it's not asleep.Instead of heeding the warning signs of his vision, Biberkopf suppresses them. And so, even after Reinhold, the story's arch- villain, visits grievous harm upon him, Biberkopf refuses to break with him. Consequently, his complacency licenses the escalation of his degradation.
A bird sits up in a tree, a snake just slipped by while it was asleep, the rustle it made woke the bird, and now it's sitting there with its feathers all fluffed up. It didn't register there was a snake. Keep breathing, draw even breaths, one after the other. Reinhold's hatred is weighing on him and attacking him. It makes its way through wooden doors, and has woken him up. Reinhold too is lying there. He is lying fast asleep, in his dream he us a murderer, in his dream he is making room for himself to breathe.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who transformed Döblin's novel into a fourteen-part, fifteen-and-a-half-hour cinematic masterpiece, observed in an interview that the politics of his day were drifting toward the right. Thinking about his work in relation to Döblin's, he said, "I will continue to try to at least make the audience aware of the right wing trend so that they won't just stupidly an unconsciously go along with it like in the past." His words resonate alongside one of Döblin's warning in the novel; "There's idiocy in the air, there's hypnotism in the air, it's in the air, it's in the air, and it's staying there." Who, in 2018, can't relate to that?
Christopher Byrd is a writer who lives in New York. His reviews have appeared in publications such as The New York Times Book Review, The American Prospect, The Believer, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Wilson Quarterly.
Reviewer: Christopher Byrd
