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Berlin Alexanderplatz

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Berlin Alexanderplatz

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Overview

The inspiration for Rainer Werner Fassbinder's epic film and that The Guardian named one of the "Top 100 Books of All Time," Berlin Alexanderplatz is considered one of the most important works of the Weimar Republic and twentieth century literature.

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. In Michael Hofmann's extraordinary new translation, Alfred Döblin's masterpiece lives in English for the first time.

As Döblin writes in the opening pages:

The subject of this book is the life of the former cement worker and haulier Franz Biberkopf in Berlin. As our
story begins, he has just been released from prison, where he did time for some stupid stuff; now he is back
in Berlin, determined to go straight.

To begin with, he succeeds. But then, though doing all right for himself financially, he gets involved in a
set-to with an unpredictable external agency that looks an awful lot like fate.

Three times the force attacks him and disrupts his scheme. The first time it comes at him with dishonesty and deception. Our man is able to get to his feet, he is still good to stand.

Then it strikes him a low blow. He has trouble getting up from that, he is almost counted out. And finally it hits him with monstrous and extreme violence.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681372006
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	03/06/2018
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	480
Sales rank:	225,259
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Alfred Döblin (1878–1957) was born in German Stettin (now the Polish city of Szczecin) to Jewish parents. When he was ten his father, a master tailor, eloped with a seamstress, abandoning the family. Subsequently his mother relocated the rest of the family to Berlin. Döblin studied medicine at Friedrich Wilhelm University, specializing in neurology and psychiatry. While working at a psychiatric clinic in Berlin, he became romantically entangled with two women: Friede Kunke, with whom he had a son, Bodo, in 1911, and Erna Reiss, to whom he had become engaged before learning of Kunke’s pregnancy. He married Erna the next year, and they remained together for the rest of his life. His novel The Three Leaps of Wang Lun was published in 1915 while Döblin was serving as a military doctor; it went on to win the Fontane Prize. In 1920 he published Wallenstein, a novel set during the Thirty Years’ War, which was an oblique comment on the First World War. He became president of the Association of German Writers in 1924, and published his best-known novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz, in 1929, achieving modest mainstream fame while solidifying his position at the center of an intellectual group that included Bertolt Brecht, Robert Musil, and Joseph Roth, among others. He fled Germany with his family soon after Hitler’s rise, moving first to Zurich, then to Paris, and, after the Nazi invasion of France, to Los Angeles, where he converted to Catholicism and briefly worked as a screenwriter for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. After the war he returned to Germany and worked as an editor with the aim of rehabilitating literature that had been banned under Hitler, but he found himself at odds with conservative postwar cultural trends. He suffered from Parkinson’s disease in later years and died in Emmendingen in 1957. Erna committed suicide two months after his death and was interred along with him.

Michael Hofmann is a German-born, British-educated poet and translator. Among his translations are works by Franz Kafka; Peter Stamm; his father, Gert Hofmann; Herta Müller; and fourteen books by Joseph Roth. A recipient of both the PEN Translation Prize and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize, Hofmann’s Selected Poems were published in 2009 and Where Have You Been?: Selected Essays in 2014. 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. He teaches in the English department at the University of Florida.

Chapter 1 3

The 41 tram into the city

Still not there

The example of Zannovich

The story is concluded in an unexpected way; helping the freed man to acquire new strength

Markets opening directionless, gradually drifting lower, Hamburg out of bed the wrong side, London continuing weak

Victory all along the line! Franz Biberkopfy buys a veal escalope

In which Franz swears to all the world and himself, to remain decent in Berlin, money or not

Chapter 2 37

Franz Biberkopf enters Berlin

Franz Biberkopf is on the job market, you need to earn money, a man can't live without money. And all about the Frankfurt Topfmarket

Lina takes it to the queers

The Neue Welt, in Hassenheide, if it's not one thing it's another, no need to make life any harder than what it is already

Franz is a man of some scale, and he knows what's what

The scale of this Franz Biberkopf. A match for the heroes of old

Chapter 3 95

Yesterday on the backs of steeds …

Today, shot through the chest he bleeds

Tomorrow in the chill tomb, no, we'll keep our composure

Chapter 4 111

A handful of people round the Alex

Biberkopf anaesthetized, Franz curls up, Franz doesn't want to see anything

Franz, on the retreat, plays a farewell march for the Jews

For as with animals, so it is with man; the one must die, the other likewise

Conversation with Job, it's up to you, Job, you don't want to

And they all have one breath, and man has no more than the beasts

Franz's window is open, sometimes amusing things happen in the world

Hopp, hopp, hopp, horsey does gallop

Chapter 5 153

Reunion on the Alex, bitching cold. Though next year, 1929, will be even colder

Nothing for a while, pause for rest and recuperation

Booming trade in girls

Franz reflects on the trade in women, and suddenly he's had enough, and wants something else

Local news

Franz takes a calamitous decision. He fails to realize he is sitting in a nettle patch

Sunday, 8 April 1928

Chapter 6 203

Crime pays

The night of Sunday

Monday, 9 April

Franz won't go down, and they can't make him go down

Get up, you feeble spirit, and stand on your own two feet

Third conquest of Berlin

Clothes make people, and a new person gets a new set of eyes

A new person gets a new head as well

A new man needs a new job or he needs none at all

A girl shows up, and now Franz is back to strength

Defensive war against bourgeois values

Conspiracy of females, our dear ladies take the floor, the heart of Europe is unchanged

Enough politics, idleness is much more dangerous

The fly clambers up, shaking the sand from its wings; before long it will buzz some more

Forward, in step, drum roll and battalions

The fist on the table

Chapter 7 287

Pussi Uhl, the flood of American visitors, and do you write Wilma with a V or a W?

The duel begins! It continues rainy

Franz breaking and entering, Franz not under the wheels, he's in the box seat now, he's made it

Love's weal and woe

Dazzling harvest in prospect, but miscalculations have been known to happen

Wednesday, 29 August

Saturday, 1 September

Chapter 8 341

Franz notices nothing, and the world goes on its way

A few bonds are loosened, the criminals fall out among themselves

Keep your eyes on Karl the plumber: something's going on with him

Things come to a head, plumber Karl gets caught and spills some beans

So I returned, and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun

And behold the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter

Then I praised the dead which are already dead

The fortress is completely surrounded, the last sallies are undertaken, but they are nothing but diversionary tactics

Battle is joined. We ride into hell with a great fanfare

The Police HQ is on Alexanderplatz

Chapter 9 397

Reinhold's Black Wednesday-but this section can be skipped

Buch insane asylum, closed ward

Dextrose and camphor injections, but in the end a different consultant is involved

Death sings his slow, slow song

And now Franz hears the slow song of Death

In which is described what pain is

Departure of the evil harlot, triumph of the great sacrifice, drummer and axe-swinger

Beginnings are difficult

Dear Fatherland, don't worry, I shan't slip again in a hurry

And by the right quick march left right left right

Appendix: Döblin's 'Alexanderplatz' from 'Writer's Relay on the Omnibus' 441

Notes 445

Afterword 447

From the B&N Reads Blog

Page 1 of

Editorial Reviews

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.

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.
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.

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

The Barnes & Noble Review

03/26/2018
In this translation of a harrowing and sprawling novel of 1920s Germany, the shifting fortunes of a man newly released from prison counterpoint the societal changes of the Weimar Republic. Döblin’s (1878–1957) first published the novel in 1929; it showcases the bitter underside of a society wracked by the aftermath of war and on its way toward totalitarianism. The story opens with protagonist Franz Bieberkopf being released from prison and heading to Berlin in hopes of finding a job. He ends up drifting between legal and illegal work, which bears a terrible toll on his body and sets in motion a series of tragic events. Periodically, Franz’s story pauses so that other characters can recount stories of their own, which sometimes echo and sometimes contrast with Franz’s circumstances. Hoffman’s translation moves seamlessly from the personal to the societal and back again, using Anglicisms (“Not if what I want’s the silk coat, innit?”) that are sometimes jarring. A constant throughout the novel is a sense of political unrest: characters heatedly debate Marxism even as nationalism and anti-Semitism are rarely out of view, hauntingly anticipating the rise of Nazism. This is a damning portrait of violence both personal and societal, with a sense of something terrible on the horizon. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

A raging cataract of a novel, one that threatens to engulf the reader in a tumult of sensation. It has long been considered the behemoth of German literary modernism, the counterpart to Ulysses." —Alex Ross, The New Yorker

"Because of its use of collage, stream of consciousness, and colloquial speech, Berlin Alexanderplatz has frequently been compared to Joyce’s Ulysses and John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer...Beneath the book’s innovative style, the reader can hear the gears of ancient narrative elements grinding: evocations of folk songs, myths and Old Testament stories, and themes of tragedy and fate.” —Amanda DeMarco, The Wall Street Journal

"It was long branded untranslatable…Yet a fluent, pacy new translation by Michael Hofmann gainsays that assumption, opening up the book for English-speakers….Something of the psychology of Weimar, the desire to touch the electric fence just to see what happens, lives on in modern societies and makes them, in their own ways, vulnerable to extremism and demagoguery...One lesson of Berlin Alexanderplatz is that darkness can take many forms." —The Economist

“[A] major writer who grappled with the roots of darkness in our time....” —Ernst Pawel, The New York Times

"In this new translation, the dissonant voices ring out boldly; we can tell when someone is being mimicked and wickedly sent up, enjoy the black Berlin humor...Döblin is never sentimental, or hysterical. He just gets us to listen to the drumbeat of violence throbbing in this city of the mind. Berlin Alexanderplatz is one of the great anti-war novels of our time." —Joachim Redner, Australian Book Review

“His was an extraordinary mind.” —Philip Ardagh, The Guardian

“Without the futurist elements of Döblin’s work from Wang Lun to Berlin Alexanderplatz, my prose is inconceivable.... He’ll discomfort you, give you bad dreams. If you’re satisfied with yourself, beware of Döblin.” —Günter Grass

“I learned more about the essence of the epic from Döblin than from anyone else. His epic writing and even his theory about the epic strongly influenced my own dramatic art.” —Bertolt Brecht

“As we look back over the rich literary output of this great writer, as we look back over the long and fruitful life of this fighter and this friend of man, this perennial spring of spiritual life, we venture to ask: When will the gentlemen [sic] of the Nobel Prize jury discover him?” —Ludwig Marcuse, Books Abroad

From the Publisher

★ 2017-12-24
"On Tuesday, 14 August 1928 von Arnim planted a bullet in the body of Pussi Uhl": no, it's not The Sopranos but instead a classic German novel of the criminal demimonde of the Weimar era.Franz Biberkopf is fresh out of prison, where he drew a few years for killing a woman. A low-level criminal otherwise, he finds himself in a different world, one in which Nazis are beginning to occupy the stage and people are lining up to take sides all around him. He flirts with fascism, but so does everyone; one of his confidants is outraged that a friend married an American woman who turned out to be a "Negress" and who, when confronted with the fact of her ancestry in divorce court, tried to sue for damages. "Gorgeous woman, petal-white, descended from Negroes, maybe dating back to the seventeenth century. Damages." Franz soon tires of politics, even if he buys the newspaper with "the green swastika on the masthead" and believes its lurid tales. Meanwhile, he makes halfhearted efforts to live a straight life, mostly because, as one chapter title tells us, "The Police HQ is on Alexanderplatz," the Berlin square that Biberkopf haunts. Still, he can't help but fall back into bad habits. There are other characters at work along the Alexanderplatz, though, more fantastic as the Ulyssean story progresses: at one point, anticipating Wim Wenders' film Wings of Desire, two angels accompany Franz, "two angels on Berlin's Alexanderplatz in 1928 alongside a former manslaughterer, then burglar and pimp." They provide clarity, for now death is stalking Franz—and everyone he knows and the whole of Berlin. American readers will have to adjust their ears to the translation's frequent use of Cockney ("Well, who'd'you fink, the fat girl, coz I had no goods left on me"), but Hofmann's version is vigorous and fresh, bringing Döblin to a new generation of readers.A welcome refurbishing of a masterpiece of literary modernism, one of the most significant German novels of the 20th century.

Kirkus Review

Berlin Alexanderplatz

Berlin Alexanderplatz

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