Franz Biberkopf leaves prison determined to go straight, and Berlin swallows him whole. Döblin's 1929 novel uses montage, newspaper fragments, advertisements, weather reports, and slaughterhouse documentation to create a portrait of Weimar Germany as comprehensive as Joyce's Dublin or Dos Passos's Manhattan. The prose moves like a camera through crowds, through conversations, through the chaos of a city transforming itself. It was adapted by Fassbinder into a fifteen-hour film. The novel remains one of the great urban texts, capturing a Berlin that would soon cease to exist.