Berlin Alexanderplatz
by Alfred Döblin(1929)
Novelc. 500 pages
“He stood in front of the Rosenthaler Tor, started walking again.”
One great work, every day
by Alfred Döblin(1929)
“He stood in front of the Rosenthaler Tor, started walking again.”
Alfred Döblin(1929)
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.