Berlin Alexanderplatz in Read a book from each country

Aug 04, 2011 Jimmy rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: novel, male, nyrb, and-a-half-stars, germany, year-1920s

Franz Biberkopf is an antihero. And by antihero, I mean the pulling out your hair while thinking to yourself "don't do that Franz, you big Biberkopf, you schnauzer of a one-armed mongoloid, you! Don't you ever learn?" variety of hero. For in fact our protagonist is not a very bright bulb. He's quite average in many ways, and not particularly likeable to start. I mean, he murdered a woman years before the book even begins! Can he fall to lower depths? You bet, because Alfred Doblin is at the helm Franz Biberkopf is an antihero. And by antihero, I mean the pulling out your hair while thinking to yourself "don't do that Franz, you big Biberkopf, you schnauzer of a one-armed mongoloid, you! Don't you ever learn?" variety of hero. For in fact our protagonist is not a very bright bulb. He's quite average in many ways, and not particularly likeable to start. I mean, he murdered a woman years before the book even begins! Can he fall to lower depths? You bet, because Alfred Doblin is at the helm. Somehow, Doblin gets us to root for this failure who we don't even like that much, and somehow even though he fails us time and time again, we still hold out hope for him.

Weaving in and out of the narrative is the city itself, the place that Berlin Alexanderplatz (the book) is named for, the hustle and bustle and the sense of the place overwhelming the individual in all its multiplicities of voice, commerce, myth, and noise. It permeates the story and at times even overtakes the story, going on for pages at a time. Sometimes, it bubbles up right in the middle of the story, out of context, before being silenced again. I'm not surprised this was made into a 14 some-hour film, as the techniques Doblin used reminded me of the montage/quick-cut effects in film.

There's a certain whimsy to Doblin's style that makes his story a little more affecting, as it takes out any possibility of sentimentality. The harshness of his short sentences and the cutting rhythms of his prose sets a distance between the narrator's voice and the events that happen so that it's almost like he doesn't want you to relate to them. It's quite hard to fall into the mindset of these characters, but only observe them from afar, as facts, one of many, along with all the facts and figures of the city of Berlin aswim in the realities that follow one upon another in logical trajectories that do not end even when the worst has befallen. That something continues moving mysteriously onward, for even at the end Biberkopf is alive, though a "new" man again (how many times has he become a new man?) un-understanding of any deeper facts, un-understanding of the forces that move the facts. These facts arise out of nowhere, man's inhumanity is inexplicable, a force that carries out the worst cruelties without reason. So the drowned man avoids the river. Biberkopf detaches from the ways of the world, as that is his only solution to the something he doesn't understand. He is affected and unaffected at the same time, he lives by rules that affect him, those laws and regulations and city ordinances, and he lives by the laws of his own nature that affect him (also inexplicably, like his rising, occasionally violent anger), and he lives by rules he's adopted without knowing why (never rat on 'friends', as if some kind of senseless code of honor) and these rules keep him afloat, though not exactly alive, just afloat as another disconnected voice Biberbobbing amidst the hubbub of the Alexanderplatz. ...more

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