Berlin Alexanderplatz

 By Alfred Döblin (Michael Hofmann, Translator), 1929

Franz Biberkopf is a weak man. He tries to make good in his life and to make the right choices, but he can’t succeed. Everything seems to work against him. Certainly, he makes some bad decisions, but in working-class Berlin in the 1920s his options are limited. I don’t want to make excuses for a man who, before the story begins, has drunkenly killed his girlfriend, and who trades girlfriends around like objects. He tries to make a living peddling, but he is ripped off by his friends. He commits thefts, although only from profitable businesses. And he pimps his girlfriend, although she is happy enough to make money for him. And yet in this story, Franz’s struggle to get by becomes a comic epic.

Döblin sets the story within the chaos of life, bringing in a wonderfully rich background of the sounds, sights and especially the texts of Franz’s time. Franz’s story would be quite pathetic without the rich background. He would be a sad-sack loser who stumbles along until he somehow has a miraculous conversion. By capturing the whole scene, Döblin makes Franz a kind of Everyman who has to face everything that the Fates choose to throw at him. He struggles doggedly, often making mistakes or falling prey to his own weakness, but coming back time and again to his effort to get things right. Ironically, his most epic and successful struggle occurs when he is motionless in a hospital bed after Death has written him off saying you only think about yourself and you don’t even deserve to die.

Although highly specific to one small area of Berlin in the 1920s, the complex literary references also shift it into a universal theme. While Franz struggles in his life, the narrator compares him to the biblical Job (I didn’t realize how terrible Job’s afflictions were until I read Döblin’s paraphrase) and comments on the contemporary political slogans and advertisements that Franz spouts.

The narrator is a key part of the book. He (a male in my mind – I wonder how it would sound in a female voice) tells us what a loser Franz is, and tells Franz to smarten up. In fact, he tells us the whole story in half a page at the beginning of the book, and again at the start of each section, so there is no mystery to the plot. The only question is what Franz will go through to get to the end. But while the narrator comments acidly on Franz and Berlin, he also has some remarkable lyrical passages. He is poetic about the thoughts of a calf waiting in the slaughterhouse. Other parts are like rants against the failings of the German republic: “parliamentary democracy merely prolongs the agony of the proletariat,” the narrator says. It is corrupt and preserves the bureaucratic state. “We aim to destroy all the institutions of state by direct action.” Although this is in quotes, it’s not clear who is saying this – the narrator seems to be voicing a sentiment that is in the air.

There is much about Franz and his friends that is ugly, not merely a question of bad choices. Women are secondary objects in this world of men, and most relationships with them are transactional. Although Franz and Mitzi develop a caring relationship for each other, he beats her badly when she embarrasses him. His friend Reinhold is a psychopath, who turns on him, as well as on the women in his own life. Their lives are shaped by a toxic masculinity that we would recognize today, 100 years after the book was written. They often turn to violence to resolve issues, and they are drunks and criminals. They are anti-Semitic, although the first generous exchange Franz has after getting out of prison is with a Jewish shopkeeper. They are nationalistic, although they don’t take Nazis, socialists or anarchists very seriously.

While showing the details of their behaviours and relationships, Döblin’s style places them in a holistic web of social influences. Their poverty and inability to see any alternatives come from the disintegrating society after World War I. It is specific to Germany but seems universal in the wild cultural soup that Döblin creates. It appears extreme, but in many ways it describes the confusion and futility that lead people today to authoritarian figures offering clarity. Somehow, in the end, Franz escapes this and finds a way out, but this is more like the satisfying conclusion of an epic story than a likely resolution.