Introduction

Alfred Döblin

Franz Biberkopf

Crisis of the Novel

Subject & City

Subject & Masses

The Place

ALFRED DÖBLIN'S ALEXANDERPLATZ

Often compared with Joyce' Ulysses and Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer, the novel is often regarded as the first modern German novel to be concerned with the representation of the metropolis. It tells the story of the petty bourgeois criminal and former transport worker Franz Biberkopf and his repeatedly frustrated efforts to become a "decent man," after his release from Berlin's Tegel prison where he had been confined for the "accidental" murder of his girlfriend. The end of the story suggests a "conversion" of Biberkopf into the "new man" "Franz Karl Biberkopf," finally able to make use of his "reason." As Biberkopf tries to eke out a living, taking on jobs as salesman, vendor of newspapers and pimp, the novel describes this struggle against the constant backdrop of the life of the city. The narrator enters at will into the thoughts of various members of the crowd, and intersperses his narrative with a precise, quasi-documentary, montage-like rendering of bits of advertisements, song lyrics, overheard voices in Berlin dialect, sayings, and noise. Biberkopf's fate takes a bad, fatal turn when he gives in to the seductions of his "friend," the criminal Reinhold, who provides him with a series of exchanged women, lures him into partaking in a crime, and finally pushes him out of a racing car, whereupon Biberkopf looses one arm. As a cripple Biberkopf works no longer and becomes involved in shady business. His "friend" Reinhold steals his lover, and finally rapes and kills her. The presentation of the turbulent urban scene is interspersed with Biblical leitmotivs (from the books Hiob and Jeremia) that raise the action to an apocalyptic level. Biberkopf's fate is represented against the backdrop of the urban masses, he is the poor creature elected for suffering and redemption.

Biberkopf, 1

Cf. Weyergraf/Lethen: "Jeder ist aufgerufen, sein gleichsam schlafwandlerisches Massendasein abzustreifen, um als selbstbewußtes Glied der Gemeinschaft wiedergeboren zu werden...Allerdings fasziniert Biberkopf's Geschichte nur, solange sein Leben der Moral widerspricht, auf die es der ethische Sozialismus seines Autors abgesehen hat" (652). For a detailed reading, see Volker Klotz, Die erzählte Stadt (Hanser: Munich, 1969), 405 ff.

Biberkopf 2

Cf. "Individuality vs. Collectivity," Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, In 1926. Living at the Edge of Time (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 293-302.