Introduction

Alfred Döblin

Franz Biberkopf

Crisis of the Novel

Subject & City

Subject & Masses

The Place

ALFRED DÖBLIN'S ALEXANDERPLATZ

The Crisis of the Novel

Döblin's innovative literary technique in his most famous novel has often been compared to the stream-of-consciousness technique in Ulysses, and while Döblin himself recognized a certain affinity with Joyce (less than a direct influence), it must be said that he arrived at a new poetics—distinguished by multi-perspectivism, cutting, montage, and simultaneity—as a result of his long participation in various tendencies of the German avantgarde, from his early formation in the Expressionist movement, to his status as the most significant critic/sympathizer of Italian Futurism, to his affiliation with the tendency of the New Sobriety. As W. G. Sebald has commented, Döblin's various aesthetic-programmatic pronouncements are often quite apodictic and rigoristic in tone:

The steps that he himself successively overcomes, are criticized one after the other from the vantage point of the newest and latest tendencies, without, however, taking into account the aporias of the avantgarde. Döblin's literary-theoretical essays read like an inquisitional journal. Bourgeois realism, the psychological novel, impressionism and aestheticism, finally even his own expressionist position and futurism—nothing is secure from his reformatory zeal, directed towards the creation of an exemplary modern literature.Der Mythos der Zerstörung im Werk Döblins (Klett: Stuttgart, 1980), 128.

While Döblin's poetics, then,underwent significant changes over time, it can nevertheless be said that his various experiments with literary techniques and forms bear witness to a remarkably consistent vision of a new realism, or "naturalism." One such way of expressing "reality" can be seen in Döblin's use of montage aesthetics for its documentary value. Walter Benjamin has argued that this aspect of the novel's style, adapted in part from the visual and verbal experiments of the Dada movement, is more significant than its supposed links to Joycean stream-of-consciousness technique:

In reality this is something different. The stylistic principle of this book is montage. Petit bourgeois leaflets, scandalous stories, misfortunes,...popular songs, and advertisements sprinkle this text. The principle of montage explodes the novel its form and its style, and it opens up new, very epic possibilities, mostly with regard to form. In fact, the material of montage is not at all random. Real montage is based on the document. In its fanatical battle against the artwork Dadaism has made use of it in order to ally itself with everyday life. For the first time, if only tentatively, it has proclaimed the sovereignty of the authentic. In its best moments, film has prepared us for it.

Walter Benjamin, "Krisis des Romans: Zu Döblin's 'Berlin Alexanderplatz," in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3

The relation between realism and modernism is complex and has been imagined in different ways. Realism and modernism are either conceived as binary categories, or it is argued that modernist literary techniques achieve effects of "realist" consciousness, which is to say that they choose to represent a hitherto neglected form of experience or reality that made no part of traditional, nineteenth-century realism. "Modernist Realism" would thus be distinguished from earlier realism by its move from the social environment of characters to psychological reality. It is precisely this difference , between "objective reality" and "experienced reality" that lies at the core of the famous debate between Lukács and Bloch.

Moreover, Döblin has repeatedly characterized his conception of the novel as a new form of epic, a form, in other words, that is generally associated with the representation of a totality, an integration between individual and collectivity. The modernization of the novel can only be achieved by going back beyond the forms of nineteenth-century realism...