The surge lets up periodically for intervals in which a sardonic, omniscient narrator comments on the action, and alerts us that, whatever Franz’s fortunes may be at the moment, there’s still worse to come. After he tells Lüders about his good fortune, Lüders proceeds to rob her. For them, a placid future is about as remote a possibility as colonizing another planet. And what little was left, in the east, was hidden behind the Berlin Wall, and thus out of bounds for Fassbinder and his crew. Jeff Tompkins, a writer and comics artist in New York City, is the Online Content and Community Manager for Library of America. The sheer brio of Döblin’s prose, together with the unstoppable forward momentum of his narrative, makes all this squalor not only bearable but riveting. Reinhold is described in the book as slim and disheveled, a sad-eyed man with a “long yellowish face” who walks “as though his feet are always getting stuck.” John slinks and slouches, snakelike; you expect him to to start hissing at any moment. He is punished for his naive trust in others. He played Döblin. ↩, Interview with Hans Günther Pflaum, reprinted in The Anarchy of the Imagination: Interviews, Essays, Notes, edited by Michael Töteberg and Leo A. Lensing (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 47. Change ), You are commenting using your Google account. Nothing’s really changed, Ida’s called Mieze, that’s all, you lost an arm, careful, you’ll end up being a lush, and everything’ll start all over again, only worse, and that’ll be the end of you…. The same instincts evidently served Döblin in real life, too. The epilogue of the story, when Biberkopf goes through hell inside his own head, is described in some detail in the book. When she resists Reinhold’s advances, he strangles her. an exhibition and screening of the restored film at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, March 18–May 13, 2007, and at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, New York, October 21, 2007–January 21, 2008. Pushed to the brink, confronted with a vast, indifferent or even actively hostile bureaucracy, where do these exiles choose to make their stand, in the novel’s opening? The German title, Faustrecht der Freiheit (First Right of Freedom), hints more directly at one of the themes that runs through Döblin’s novel too: the struggle for survival of a man who wants to be decent in a dog-eat-dog world. Jutzi’s Berlin-Alexanderplatz bears some resemblance to Ruttman’s documentary film, with its wonderful images. The novel, in Fassbinder’s words. Berlin Alexanderplatz is also a story that seems perfectly natural to Fassbinder himself. The sheer brio of Döblin’s prose, together with the unstoppable forward momentum of his narrative, makes all this squalor not only bearable but riveting. The political meetings, described in the novel, of anarchists and Communists are pregnant with latent violence. FICTION Alfred Döblin (born 1878 and died 1957) was a German novelist, essayist, and doctor, who wrote over a dozen historical and science fiction novels. Change ). First of all, he added a character who wasn’t there in Döblin’s version: Frau Bast, Biberkopf’s ever-loyal, all-understanding, blindly loving, warmly maternal landlady. The second overarching accomplishment of the novel is moral. As is often the case in life, his slight physical disability—a stammer—adds something to his dangerous charm. In 1970, he actually married one of his muses, the singer Ingrid Caven. “Why didn’t you have a bed tattooed there instead?” she wonders. Browse our largest collection of experiences. He quickly finds a new girl, called Polish Lina. ↩. He chose to use American slang: “Now I getcha, wait a minute, m’boy….” And so on. In a typical passage, Biberkopf talks to himself: You swore, Franz Biberkopf, to stay decent. Döblin was in fact a doctor, and practiced as a psychiatrist in Berlin, where he heard many crime stories firsthand. Prophecy of a larger degradation, perhaps? Click here to learn more. Berlin Alexanderplatz is his best known work. “[P]olitics has got nothing to do with me,” he avows, “and if people are stupid enough to allow themselves to be exploited, then it’s no fault of mine”—a creed that may sound only too familiar to a lot of American readers in the twenty-first century. Berlin Alexanderplatz is also a story that seems perfectly natural to Fassbinder himself. Berlin Alexanderplatz, the great novel of Berlin and the doomed Weimar Republic, is one of the great books of the twentieth century, gruesome, farcical, and appalling, word drunk, pitchdark. A new girlfriend, Mieze, moves into his room, passing on to him the money she makes in the streets. Like his Biberkopf, Fassbinder himself was deeply drawn to mother figures, first of all his actual mother, Liselotte (Lilo) Pempeit, who acted in several of his films, including Berlin Alexanderplatz, where she appears as the silent wife of a gang boss. He is offered a job as a security guard in a factory. Fassbinder made the story his own. This reading of the book helped the young Fassbinder cope with his own demons. In addition to Berlin Alexanderplatz, New York Review Books publishes his selection from the work of Malcolm Lowry, The Voyage That Never Ends, and his translations of Jakob Wassermann’s My Marriage and Gert Ledig’s Stalin Front. In Döblin’s words (my translation): Although he does all right economically, he is at war with an outside force, unpredictable, something that looks like fate. Bullshit, can I help it? But that is not how Döblin’s epic tale begins. Her mannerisms—the licking of her fingers to smooth her eyebrows, the coltish hopping onto Biberkopf’s lap, the giggly flirtations, the fits of hysterical screaming—are marks of a kind of innocent sluttishness, if such a thing can be imagined. In his life as much as in his films, love was often mixed with violence: two of his lovers committed suicide. Franz Biberkopf, the hero of Döblin’s novel, is a pimp, not a bad sort, but given to sudden helpless rages. “Franz is one slick dude,” we read at a point when things are going well for the protagonist. Each option comes with its own perks and exclusive content. When Fassbinder made his fifteen-hour-long film of Berlin Alexanderplatz for television in 1980, Döblin’s city was mostly gone, destroyed by Allied bombs, Soviet artillery, and East German wrecking balls. Fassbinder composed every frame with the eye of a painter, and manipulated his actors rather like a puppet master. © 1963-2020 NYREV, Inc. All rights reserved. Döblin lingers on the curious docility of the creatures on their way to execution, and also notes the efficiency of the elaborate train network that brings the victims from the outlying districts to the slaughter. We get to know him not just from the outside, as a fat, muscular, working-class Berliner, a lover of schnapps, beer, and women, an “unpolitical” man, a fixture of the bars and cheap dance halls around the “Alex,” but from the inside too, in a constant stream of interior monologues filled with his dreams, anxieties, confusions, hopes, and illusions. Where else but right on Berlin Alexanderplatz. John, too, is often filmed in close-up, usually from a low side angle that brings out his sly malice. One of the novel’s most incisive scenes is a confrontation with an anarchist spokesman: after listening to the other man’s spiel, Franz outs himself as a pimp and snarls, “I shit on your moaning and strikes and your little people who are supposed to be organized. There are references to Döblin’s novel in several of Fassbinder’s earlier movies. Though not impossible to imagine, there is no suggestion that these feelings are physical. He teaches in the English department at the University of Florida. Did I ask to be a pimp? Döblin could not have known quite what was in store for Germany just a few years after he published his novel. Let them try. Döblin adds his own all-seeing authorial voice to the patchwork of speech, songs, police reports, private thoughts, commercials, and other big-city noises. The living language I hear around me is enough, and my past gives me all the material I need.
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