Introduction

Alfred Döblin

Franz Biberkopf

Crisis of the Novel

Subject & City

Subject & Masses

The Place

ALFRED DÖBLIN'S ALEXANDERPLATZ

The Subject and the Masses

Döblin's novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1930) is commonly regarded as the first modern German novel to fully represent the experience of urban modernity. In fact, the central role of the city in shaping modern experience is a feature that Döblin's novel shares with an illustrious series of high modernist novels, such as James Joyce' Ulysses, Robert Musil's Man without Qualities, Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, to name just a few. Furthermore, with the latter two examples Döblin's novel also shares a general tendency to construct its modernist narrative upon the hollowed-out form of the traditional bildungsroman. In this sense, "Berlin Alexanderplatz. The Story of Franz Biberkopf," as the very title acknowledges, [1] combines the representation of the modern city with a (failed) narrative of personal development; a sort of bildungsroman manqué, as Walter Benjamin had already pointed out in an early review of the novel (1930):

And if this truth manifests itself most greatly and pitilessly in Education sentimentale, then this story of Franz Biberkopf is the Education sentimentale of the petty thief. The most extreme, dizzying, last, and most advanced embodiment of the old bourgeios bildungsroman.

It is useful to recall here some of the salient characteristics of the form of the bildungsroman, as elegantly described by Franco Moretti.[3] Typically, the bildungsroman is concerned with an individual's apprenticeship and an inward, often restless growth. For Moretti, this genre amounts to a "symbolic form" of modernity: "Modernity as a bewitching and risky process full of 'great expectations' and 'lost illusions.'" Most generally, the form is concerned with the task of relating individual development with the process of socialization. Especially in the great French examples of the genre, it is precisely the hero's encounter with the city that embodies the pressures of social modernity. Now, once we consider Döblin's novel within this tradition, we notice how the novel depicts a failed process of individuation, one in which the human subject—instead of mastering an apprenticeship—is reduced to pure nothingness and animality (a theme familiar from the writings of Kafka), a creature perpetually struggling for grace. Thus, the fate of Biberkopf is repeatedly paralleled with the story of the Biblical Hiob, as well as animals being led to the slaughterhouse. Biberkopf's successive, routinely frustrated attempts to become a "decent man" point to the overbearing power of forces larger than himself and against which his humanity must always be reaffirmed. Moreover, in contrast to the traditional bildungsroman, the perspective of the narrator does not coincide with the "developing" protagonist, but is in fact removed from him through a variety of distancing devices, notably the mock-epic commentaries and interjections. The narrator demonstrates that Biberkopf's distinctive social milieu is completely accessible to him, yet it is presented as a world all by itself.

In a brief discussion of Ulysses, Döblin has argued that alongside the influence of media (cinema, newspapers) it is the new forms of urban perception that propel the novelist to dispense with traditional forms of narrative and the norm of the isolated individual that stood at the center of such narratives:

To the experiential image of a person today also belongs the streets, the scenes changing by the second, the signboards, automobile traffic. The heroic, the importance altogether of the isolated event and the individual person, has receded substantially, overshadowed by the factors of state, parties, and the economic system. Much of this was already true, but now a person is truly no larger than the waves that carry him. A part of today's image is the disconnectedness of his activity, of his existence as such, the fleeting quality, the restlessness. The fabulating sense and its constructions have the effect here of the naïve. This is the core of the so-called crisis of today's novel. The mentality of the authors has not yet closed ranks with the age.--Alfred Döblin, Ulysses by Joyce

[1]      The double title goes back to a suggestion of Döblin's publisher Samuel Fischer who had objected to "naming a novel after a subway station."

[2] Walter Benjamin, "Krisis des Romans"

[3] Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture.