Berlin Alexanderplatz, by Alfred Doblin

[Linda]

I'm about half way through and enjoying the story. Now that I understand the syntax and the world of 1920s Berlin, it's much easier. For all those wanting to quit.....stick with it!

[WndyJW]

I am flying (in the US during the govt. shut-down!) to San Diego for a week long vacation. I am taking Belladonna and Berlin Alexanderplatz. That will force me to give it a good try. (otherwise I’ll have to buy a book there. )

[Trevor]

I was looking at the table of contents for the forthcoming edition of Walter Benjamin's The Storyteller Essays , and right there, from 1930, is an essay entitled: "The Crisis of the Novel: On Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz." I have not read the entire essay, so I could be mistaken, but I read enough to see that Benjamin was not saying Berlin Alexanderplatz was demonstrative of the crisis; rather, it is the cure:

"Now, it is certainly true that few books have been narrated in this way; rarely has the reader's comfort been rocked by such waves of events and reflection, never has the spray of speech as it is actually spoken so drenched the reader to the bone. But we need not resort to technical terms, to speak of dialogue intérieur, or to refer to James Joyce. In fact, this is something altogether different. This book's guiding stylistic principal is the montage. There is a blizzard of petty bourgeois publications, tales of scandal and misfortune, sensational events of 1928, folk songs, and classified ads in this narrative. The montage explodes the novel structurally as well as stylistically and opens up new, epic possibilities, especially formal ones. The material of the montage is far from arbitrary. True montage is based on the document. In its fanatical battle against the work of art, Dadaism made itself an ally of daily life through montage. It was the first to proclaim, even if rather uncertainly, the absolute power of the authentic. In its best moments, film attempted to habituate us to montage. Here, for the first time, it has been placed at the service of epic literature. It is biblical verses, statistics, and song lyrics that Döblin uses to give authority to the epic narrative. They correspond to the formulaic verses of ancient verses."

I think that's some interesting stuff. But here is where Benjamin really had me nodding my head:

"This montage is so dense the author has trouble getting a word in. He has reserved the street-ballad-like chapter headings for himself; besides, he's in no hurry to make himself heard. (Yet he will eventually have his say.) It is astonishing how long he follows his characters before he risks confronting them. He approaches things gently, as an epic writer should."

[Janet]

So fascinating and as I was reading Berlin I wondered if I was reading snatches of song, and now feel confident that my reading was on target, at least in some sections. Also the idea of the montage makes perfect sense. Thank you for this, Trevor!

[Louise]

WndyJW wrote: "I am flying (in the US during the govt. shut-down!) to San Diego for a week long vacation. I am taking Belladonna and Berlin Alexanderplatz. That will force me to give it a good try..."

Enjoy your vacation Wendy and do give Berlin Alexanderplatz another try. It does get better.

[Emma]

Thank you!

[WndyJW]

I did not bring Berlin A, only because I don't want the book banging about if it isn't a good vacation read. I am definitely getting back to it when I get home though. I think almost everyone here agrees it is worth sticking with and now I will go into it understanding why it felt disorienting. It's possible that everyone of you is wrong about this novel and I am right, but it's not likely.

[Jeff]

Good luck, WndyJW! I hope you end up liking it.

Personally, I have no plans to pick it up again. I get the impression that most of the people here who initially struggled with it, but then came to like it, had trouble with the writing style. I never had a problem with the style--that's the one thing that I enjoyed from the beginning. In fact, I enjoyed some of the scenes or vignettes from which Franz was entirely absent very much. I just can't stand him. Or his friends. Oh, well. No book appeals to everyone.

[Louise]

WndyJW wrote: "I did not bring Berlin A, only because I don't want the book banging about if it isn't a good vacation read. I am definitely getting back to it when I get home though..."

It's definitely not a vacation read!

[Linda]

I'm finished! All 458 pages. Whew!!!! I'll be interested to hear the discussion when it starts in February. It was a hard read, and I didn't particularly like the subject matter. But there were parts I did like, and I feel good about reading it.

[WndyJW]

congratulations, Linda. I don't make myself read books I find a slog, Jeff, so if after another try it's just not resonating with me I'll put back on the shelf.

[Cynthia]

WndyJW wrote: "congratulations, Linda. I don't make myself read books I find a slog, Jeff, so if after another try it's just not resonating with me I'll put back on the shelf."

I gave it up but I'd really like to try again, also.

[Janet]

WndyJW wrote: "congratulations, Linda. I don't make myself read books I find a slog, Jeff, so if after another try it's just not resonating with me I'll put back on the shelf."

To everything there is a season.

[Emma]

sorry, I have to quit. I was at 25%, and had by then really the feeling of wasting my time

[Louise]

I found it hard going for the first 1/3, then it got much better. Around page 140 is where it turned around for me.

[Louise]

HERE WE GO!!!! All spoilers off. Let's dissect this thing.

Here is a review to get us started:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/review...

The review starts with: "One measure of the potency of an urban novel is the amount of pressure that it exerts on the reader." Do you agree or disagree with this statement? Did you feel pressure with this book?

[Antonomasia]

[Not finished the book]
I don't feel it as pressure on the reader, but it's clearly a pressurised and fast-paced environment, and I would agree with the phrase in the following sentence: one of "surfeit, cacophony, and split-second vicissitudes". I agree with what Randolph said earlier about the city as a protagonist. Franz may be rather a nasty piece of work, and he wants to be in control, but the urban environment is stronger than him; his economic position sees to that. He is not a bigwig with a lot of connections. It is not man versus nature (one of the alleged seven essential plots) but man versus city.

This is only apparent with historical hindsight (most eras look caught between old and new when you are looking back) but I see the people as under pressure from both new and old forces - there is much new technology and modernity increasing the pace of life and entertainment, but they also don't have key post-war Western developments that would change life, such as antibiotics, a welfare state and reliable, widely-used contraception. This was a time when the modern and new - modernism, futurism - was very fashionable and there was less nostalgic looking back on the past in art than there was a few decades earlier, or 50+ years later.

I find Franz's likeability or otherwise to be irrelevant. I found myself reading with exactly the same detachment I brought to fictional criminals since my teens when I read works by the likes of Irvine Welsh and Martin Amis and considered the point to be - other than knowing these talked-about books - that it was a good idea to have greater insight and understanding of these types of people to have a better idea of how to talk with them during work in public services or journalism (what I was expecting to do) and in life in general. Now I would be more cautious about whether fiction necessarily was a good guide to real people, especially depending on the author's background. But whilst there are some books I start reading, thinking a character sounds like someone I'd like, for a good many books that idea is simply not on the table as far as I am concerned and not the point. (i.e. For the reader, fiction may be a safe way to explore characters and environments which would be more challenging IRL or which they would not otherwise encounter - however I appreciate that reading about a character like Franz may be disturbing for some readers due to real experiences.)

I think the book also tries to address an issue which seems unpopular in the media now, but maybe 25 years ago was frequently mentioned as important in the news (as I perceived it) - the rehabilitation of offenders. (I guess it depends what you read and in some occupational areas people do see material about this regularly.) Nowadays I feel society, or perhaps rather social media and the media, is keen to show that a person has done something very wrong, but the issue of what offenders of various types are supposed to do with their lives afterwards is "not my problem" etc: the voice of the public is concerned with having people brought to justice and is shown to be too exhausted by the offence and the process to consider what lies beyond.

[Bryan--The Bee’s Knees]

Finished the book last night.

I'm interested in knowing what folks think of the ending. The beginning seemed like an allegorical birth to me, with Franz not even capable of communicating, and then slowly maturing in the dirt and grime of the modern city. Franz is a murderer and a rapist--no getting around it, but Döblin seems to want to present him as a person involved in a kind of metamorphosis in which life and fate work on him in order to move him past these baser impulses (if he's strong enough to withstand it), and thus he also seems to be a somewhat sympathetic figure.

Towards the end, Döblin seems to imply that Franz, alone, was blindly driven and nearly killed by fate because he was alone, because he was living like an animal, from impulse to impulse. My translation has, "Reason is a gift to man, jackasses replace it with a clan,'--clan here represented by the marching soldiers (which indicates to me that Döblin probably had a pretty good idea of what was coming in just ten short years). But man does need others--"Much unhappiness comes from walking alone. When there are several, it's somewhat different. I must get the habit of listening to others, for what the others say concerns me, too. Then I learn who I am, and what I can undertake."

These two ideas seem to me to be the crux of the book: man needs a society in which to develop his reason--but not a clan to do his thinking for him.

I'm not sure what the reviewer may have meant by the potency of the urban novel, but the question that stood out to me was whether or not the modern urban environment can still provide the necessary pressures for a person to evolve past their impulsive stage and become someone who reflects. Döblin's answer seems to be yes, but it ain't easy.

[Linda]

I'm not sure I understood the undercurrents of meaning in this book, but I did enjoy parts of it. The syntax was hard at first, but became easier as time went on. When the author writes what Franz sees, like advertisements, newspaper headlines, weather reports, etc., it made me think of the many words we see in our day and of reading them to ourselves. I didn't like Franz but I understood him. A normal person in a specific, but normal, environment trying to live out his life.

[Janet]

Louise wrote: "HERE WE GO!!!! All spoilers off. Let's dissect this thing.

Here is a review to get us started:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/review...

The review starts with: "One meas..."

I didn't so much feel pressure as I experienced, initially, a sense of disorientation -- I think many of us did in that we most of us remarked on how the story was hard to get into, for a while. Just as FB was disoriented on his release from prison, so too were we, the readers. This was the author's first brilliant gambit.

[Seana]

I didn't have all that much trouble with the book in the early days, but am getting a bit bogged down after the halfway point, so it may be a few days before I can really participate in the discussion. I am interested to understand Doblin's intentions in writing it better, so I will persist. Looking forward to seeing what you all have said.

[Emma]

I like the mention of jackhammers in the review. I feel this is exactly what Franz experienced in his brain, facing the over-stimulation and disorientation at discovering city life after so many years in prison.
Even though I DNFed the book at about 25%, I enjoyed a lot the beginning, and the way the author captured Franz's difficulty to readjust to "normal" life, by constantly going back in mind to the milieu he had known for years, thinking about the guys back there, what they would be doing at the time of the day, etc. The style used to convey that was very successful, I thought.

[Louise]

I liked the comment made by Walter Benjamin “It is rare indeed for the incidents and reflections to sweep over a reader and destabilize his comfort to this degree.” I can't speak to the rarity of it but my comfort certainly was destabilized as I read this book. Both in setting and with the characters. I still have not had time to watch Bassfinder's mini series but I wonder if I will feel the same sense of discomfort when watching as I did while reading.

[Janet]

Can we, at some point, talk about the physicality of FB? I'm
struck by his over-the-topness in a kind of animal , sensuous ( not sure that's the right word) way. Do you all read him this way? Bigger, louder, stronger? Doblin orients FB to all 5 senses:p. 8, sound, he sings in the Jewish courtyard more lustily than in prison.Taste, , p. 226, a truly wonderful conversation between FB and beer. Page 23, touch, his groping encounter with a streetwalker; p. 29, smell, and now he can smell her again, presumably Ida, the girlfriend he's killed? And sight, his visit to the cinema, p22. What's going on here? What are we to make of our Franz?

[Janet]

Bryan wrote: "Finished the book last night.

I'm interested in knowing what folks think of the ending. The beginning seemed like an allegorical birth to me, with Franz not even capable of communicating, and then..."
Bryan, I agree with you about FB undergoing a rigorous moral metamorphosis, so severe that in the end he almost dies, but comes back a changed man.
Question: are we to read his death as akin to Christ's death and resurrection? He has been, in a sense, baptized and goes by a new name. Doblin makes numerous biblical references, comparing FB to Job, makes reference to the whore of Babylon and the 7-headed beast several times , a topic for separates discussion, perhaps. But FB is truly a changed man, in the end. I agree with you that he is at last too wise to fall for fascism after his metamorphosis.

[Louise]

I read it on my Kobo and didn't notice any typos.

[Louise]

Review after review compares Berlin Alexanderplatz to Ulysses. Is it simply because of the stream of consciousness aspect, or are there other parallels? if so, what are they?

[Jeff]

The most obvious similarity between Berlin Alexanderplatz and Ulysses that I noticed (at least as far as I got in BA) was that the writing style would change, sometimes dramatically, from one section to another.

[Trevor]

Also the portrait of a modern city, I think.

[Louise]

Here is a blurb about Döblin that I read in The Paris Review that also mentions James Joyce's influence on Döblin.

Döblin was born in Stettin, Pomerania, in 1878. His introduction to Berlin was compelled by a personal catastrophe. His beloved father, a tailor, ran off with a younger woman, leaving his mother saddled with five young children. The family resettled in a seedy apartment on Berlin’s working-class Blumenstrasse, in the hopes of earning a better living in the city, but instead they lived in crushing poverty. Döblin, later, became a doctor, and he chose to practice medicine in a Berlin slum district for two decades. Throughout his professional life, he wrote steadily, first achieving notice with 1915’s The Three Leaps of Wang Lun, a novel which significantly influenced Bertolt Brecht. But while an outpouring of work followed—novels, plays, political tracts, poems, reportage—it produced little in the way of money. Döblin felt the bitterness of the prolifically unsuccessful. In 1928, due to flagging sales, his monthly stipends were cut off entirely by his publisher. The following year, his fortunes changed. Berlin Alexanderplatz was an unqualified critical and commercial triumph.

But how did a middle-aged medical doctor (and sometime psychiatrist) manage to write the ne plus ultra of city literature? Its creation was, for a time, something of a mystery. Döblin kept no journals, and any correspondence that may have referenced its composition was lost to time. This changed with the chance discovery of the Zürcher Fund, or “Zurich Trove,” a suitcase filled with the urban ephemera Döblin had marshaled for the writing of his great work: newspaper clippings, photographs, postcards, weather reports, personal letters, advertisements. “For a time,” Hofmann writes, “Döblin must have been a sort of literary cistern, inflow, outflow, and mysteries of drift and whirlpool and obscure current in between.” Like James Joyce, whose writing he admired, Döblin was fascinated by the individual soul that simmered within the fugue-like density of the metropolitan experience, a silhouette best glimpsed, if only obliquely, against the backdrop of the city itself.

[Janet]

A few other comparisons with Ulysses
Both are intimately place-based, peripatetic stories. Both authors drew from mental maps of their respective cities.

Both FB and Leopold Bloom can be said to be “Everyman” Although FB is arguably an anti-hero

Both have a magpie-like aspect to them in that each author is almost showing off a virtuosity in writing styles. (But Joyce seemed to have a structure or multiple structures he was working from) we know less about how Doblin put BA together

Both works expect the reader to work to fill in gaps, I think. More like working on a puzzle

[Seana]

Okay, I finished. Some of it was a bit of a slog, especially in the middle, where Willi makes his appearance. But I remain intrigued by this book, not put off by its harshness, and will post more.

Randolph, I definitely think Berlin could be viewed as the protagonist, but I don't think it's a one thing or the other kind of book. I also think it's about the trajectory of Franz BBK, and will have to delve deeper to see exactly what kind of protagonist he is meant to be.

A couple of my questions:

Why did this book, which is not particularly easy to read, become a bestseller. It isn't obvious to me. How did the Germans of his era respond to it? What bells did it ring?

Is this similar to other works of the time or not? I am thinking of the musical Cabaret, which I believe was based on a Christopher Isherwood work, and though I don't remember it well right now, I think it might represent something of the same zeitgeist. As I recall, Cabaret represents the era as a bit depraved. Is that what we're seeing here too, or not?

I would like to know more about how this representation of Berlin connects to the Nazi era which follows. Is it the cause? We are aware of the war before its period, meaning WWI. Does it presage the war that is to follow? I didn't find much evidence of that, but I may well be obtuse.

More tomorrow..

[Seana]

For those still reading on this thread, Literary Hub collected a bunch of reviews. Interestingly, all on the favorable side of the scale. I haven't read them yet, but look forward to doing so tomorrow.

https://bookmarks.reviews/reviews/ber...

[Louise]

Thanks for posting this Seana. I have not read them all, but of the reviews I have read so far, every single one has been hugely positive, yet it's not an easy read is it? I'd be curious to know how quickly it became a bestseller when first published in German, and did the English translation do as well? Some has said it is "untranslatable" so I wonder what has been lost in the translation.

[Antonomasia]

This book could do with a lot more notes. There is so much I'm sure I'm missing because of lack of them. There are things that can be looked up, but there are the things you can't tell need it, or which don't have useful search terms. Does anyone (whether because of having read more of the novel, or outside material) know in which year it's set / starts? I want to understand it in the context of what was happening politically and economically, but Weimar was a time of rapid shifts.

I started to watch the TV series yesterday - though didn't make it very far - and Franz looks nothing like I imagine him. (I see him as scrawny and still looking like he grew up with a very good idea of what it is to be hungry.) It's interesting in that it elucidates some aspects of the book whilst also retaining a dreamlike atmosphere.

[Louise]

I believe the book is set is 1929. I also watched the first 90min of the TV series. I'm not a bit TV watcher so I didn't find it that compelling. I got more out of the book.

[Liz M]

Louise wrote: "Review after review compares Berlin Alexanderplatz to Ulysses. Is it simply because of the stream of consciousness aspect, or are there other parallels? if so, what are they?"

I think there are some similarities between the two (as discussed by others above), but for me it's like saying two different food items are similar because they are both dessert. Ulysses is controlled and carefully constructed -- an elaborate 7-layer cake -- while Berlin Alexanderplatz seems more like an a sundae created from an all-you-can-eat place. It may be just as carefully constructed, but the result has a wonderfully cacophonous appearance and an odd blend of surprising flavors.

[Janet]

Liz M wrote: "Louise wrote: "Review after review compares Berlin Alexanderplatz to Ulysses. Is it simply because of the stream of consciousness aspect, or are there other parallels? if so, what are they?"

I thi..."

Well said, Liz. A very good analogy!
I have a question for the group. On p. 358 in Hoffmann's Afterword, he references the retelling of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra -- can someone tell me where that retelling is? Must have missed that.

Does anyone have a particularly favororite part, or one that keeps coming back to haunt them? I think, for me, it's the part where FB is protected by the Angels ...

[Seana]

Antonomasia wrote: "This book could do with a lot more notes. There is so much I'm sure I'm missing because of lack of them. There are things that can be looked up, but there are the things you can't tell need it, or ..."

I agree about the notes. As to the date, there are various external references as you go along that can pinpoint that, but in looking back at random, I found one on page 290 which specifically mentions an event taking place on August 14, 1928.

[Louise]

Does anyone have any favorite quotations from the book that they would like to share?

[Seana]

Referring back to a question farther back, I think my favorite scene is all the way back at the beginning, when the Jewish man looks out for Franz and takes him back to his place where he can finally compose himself. It's partly because he lets Franz sit on the floor because that is what he needs to do. And I do agree with another comment upthread that there is a lot of birth imagery in this scene.

But the fact is that Franz is not a baby, and has some heavy baggage, not just the war, but the murder of Ida. What's really interesting to me about this book is that for much of the book, this event is portrayed as if it was just a catalyst and not a severe moral failure. But if you make it to the end, you realize that neither Franz nor Doblin have forgotten about Ida at all, and I think a case can be made for Franz's whole trajectory being a flight from taking responsibility for that event. He often reassures himself and others that he has done his time, but there is a sense I think that he is aware that doing four years--or thirty--can't possibly absolve him of this. In the final passages, Franz is fully aware that he does have responsibility in Mitzi's death as well, because he knew better than to show Reinhold up by flaunting her and did it anyway. I don't think Doblin means this ending to be 'redemption' as much as coming into self-awareness, which Franz has clearly been lacking before.

That said, I really don't understand why people like Herbert and Eva and Mitzi are so drawn to him and want to help him.

[Liz M]

Janet wrote: "in Hoffmann's Afterword, he references the retelling of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra -- can someone tell me where that retelling is? Must have missed that...."

Using amazon's search inside feature, Agamemnon is mentioned by name on pages 89-91.

[Linda]

Louise wrote: "Does anyone have any favorite quotations from the book that they would like to share?"
I wrote in my journal, "Dear Fatherland, rest is easy, I'm awake, I know what's at stake".
The last chapter is, by far, my most favorite, especially in light of what happens less than 10 years later. Almost like Doblin knows what is coming. Fascinating.....

[Jonathan]

Louise wrote: "Does anyone have any favorite quotations from the book that they would like to share?"

One of my favourite passages from the book was at the end of the fifth book, coming just after Franz has been thrown out of the car by Reinhold.

   Let us be happy when the sun rises and its beautiful light is here. Gas light may go out, electric light, too. People get up when the alarm-clock sounds, a new day has begun. If it was April 8th yesterday, it is the 9th today, if it was Sunday, it is now Monday. The year has not changed, nor the month, but a change has occurred nevertheless. The world has rolled ahead. The sun has risen. It is not certain what this sun is. Astronomers concern themselves a great deal with this body. According to them, it is the central body of our planetary system; for our earth is only a small planet, and what, indeed, are we? When a sun rises like that and we are glad, we should really be sad, for what are we, anyway; the sun is 300,000 times greater than the earth; and what a host of numbers and zeros there still are, and all they have to say is this: We are but a zero, nothing at all, just nothing. Simply ridiculous, isn't it, to be happy over that.
   And yet, we are glad when the beautiful light is here, white and strong, and when it comes into the streets; and in the rooms all the colours awaken, and faces are there, human features. It is agreeable to touch shapes with one's hands, but it is a joy to see, to see, to see, to see colours and lines. And we are glad, now we can show what we are, we act, we live. We are also glad in April for that bit of warmth, how glad the flowers are that they can grow! Surely that must be an error, a mistake, those terrible numbers with all the zeros!
   So, go on rising, sun, you don't frighten us. We don't care about your many miles, your diameter, your volume. Warm sun, just rise, bright light, arise. You are not big, you are not small, you are happiness.

[Louise]

These are all great passages. Ultimately what is Doblin's message?

[Jonathan]

I'd probably be the last person in the world to detect any message in a novel. An author has to be pretty blatant for me to notice it. But I liked what Döblin was doing here; whenever we're ill or injured then simple things like walking about or seeing the sun rise become appealing. I began to enjoy these 'interludes' more as I progressed through the book. I was going to re-read parts of the book, especially the earlier parts; has anyone else been tempted to re-read all, or parts, of it?

[Louise]

I would like to re-read some parts for sure. It's a matter of finding the time. So many books I would like to re-read. I think if I were to re-read BA, I would probably re-read the first 50 pages and the last 50 pages. I think it got a little bogged down in the middle.

[Louise]

Did you learn anything new about the time period depicted in the book? What, if anything, surprised you?

[Merilee]

Louise wrote: "Has anyone seen the 15 hour television series?"

Yes, and it’s wonderful.

[Merilee]

Louise wrote: "Do we have any German speaking members here? It would be interesting to hear their opinion on the translation. I speak/read in French so I like to compare French translations to the real thing when..."

I just began the new translation and decided to get the original German on Kindle (only $15). My German is no longer so fluent, but I might dip in and out of the original, especially since there’s the free downloadable dictionary.