Literary Article #2: Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz—Life, death, and the German spirit on a cliff’s edge before the rise of Hitler and Nazism and the Second World War

While all would agree that Berlin Alexanderplatz is Alfred Döblin’s masterpiece, the work itself has received far less attention in the years since its publication than The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann.  Mann’s novel was published the same year as Döblin’s in 1929, won Thomas Mann the Nobel Prize that same year, and is still required reading in many university graduate studies courses today.  By comparison, interest in Berlin Alexanderplatz tends to be much scarcer.  There is something almost sickeningly elegant about Thomas Mann’s novel, its blackening irony “spoiling” one’s experience of Mann’s limpid and scintillating prose.  One cannot describe Thomas Mann’s masterpiece as “beautiful,” but rather a sense of decay and even corruption within all once-beautiful forms is something that makes that work all the more difficult to endure the more aware one is of the events that would occur in Germany and eventually in the rest of the world over the fifteen years that would follow that novel’s publication.  And Döblin’s work?   It is simply a respectable mess of a tour de force, not ironic formally, but ironic situationally (unintentionally?  yes, but only after a point…), its very zeal embodying and expressing the convulsing German spirit mere moments before the stock market crash of 1929 and only a few years before the beginnings of the spectacular fall from grace of the German Republic under Hitler’s ascendancy.  Döblin’s work makes no attempt to be pretty but rather it is honest about what it is because of who and what it describes, the life of an everyman, a criminal everyman it is true, but an everyman who we know need make no apologies for who he is or how he lives, given how he can be only what any man of his times can be, a product of those times and of where he must survive, in this case, in a modern German “city-state,” that of Berlin.  Leaving aside Thomas Mann’s Nobel Prize winner, Berlin Alexanderplatz is a uniquely adventurous work of inspired human creativity and admirable interest in the human condition, something that fails at being a perfect work of art, but that, in failing at this and for setting out to be what it is beyond any expectation that it should ever have to succeed at being anything else, offers readers of late modernity a fascinating object of modern(ist) literary form; beyond this, it provides a vantage and perspective of its own witness in relation to German philosophy, and in relation to human wisdom more broadly, with actual human history beyond and after it providing the manifestation of true consequence of the German spirit’s death throes in that time nearing the end of history as it would soon be known. Berlin Alexanderplatz may offer something less rare than a perfect work of art, but only for being something just as illuminating, for offering a true myth of natural human life in the last stages of a dying civilization, a civilization still believing itself in that moment to be among the greatest that has ever existed.

Döblin’s novel is a work of the modernist school, utilizing innovative techniques in story-telling and the literary form for the purpose of developing a compelling narrative rather than telling a story in a way that is self-conscious or self-reflexive as narrative as perhaps an equivalent among postmodern novels would do.  Döblin’s novel is highly formally unique, idiosyncratic even.  For example, the narration evinces Döblin’s avid interest in early cinema, as, in places throughout, he uses a technique of narration similar to that other medium’s “montage.”  Nevertheless, the work wants itself to be read as a work genuinely striving for mimesis—it wants the reader to suspend their disbelief in the world it represents as a true reality–and this is significant because the events and the lives it depicts are meant to be read and experienced just as they are represented, in terms of how the narrative understands and represents Post-World War I Berlin through Franz Biberkopf’s coming of age following his release from prison where he was incarcerated for four years for manslaughter.  Thus, this is a novel in the tradition of the bildungsroman, with the protagonist trying to become a better man in an effort of establishing himself in his time and place as is typical of that genre, although this novel stands out as being unique among other, more conventional bildungsromans, especially for its time, for the protagonist, Franz Biberkopt, is from its outset a highly marginalized figure who spends much of the novel trying to avoid further involvement in Berlin’s criminal underworld.  It is the sincerity of the novel’s use of the literary form that sets it into an interesting and illuminating relation to actual history, as this novel can be regarded as disclosing and realizing “truths” within a perspective developed in narrative form that can be regarded as formally representing a worldview critically aware of its own time and place in the dimming light of which its own objects, philosophical, aesthetic, moral, social, psychological, cultural, economic, and theological, are held out, expressed, and defined.

With that all said, probably the most important characteristic of Berlin Alexanderplatz is its mythopoeic form and elements.  Döblin has attempted to write a truly modern myth, informed as the narrative is by over two thousand years of history and steeped as the world of his myth is in a time that is remarkable for the centrifugal forces at work on human beings in their ordinary lives.  As a myth, it has no centre but for the certainty of death, which stalks Franz with what becomes a repeated refrain, seemingly appearing at random throughout the novel: “There is a reaper, Death yclept, by Almighty God employed.  His blade he whets, it cuts much better, soon he will cut, and we must suffer.”  Death is a stalking figure in this work, appearing, appearing always suggestively, at times when all seems well, when all seems about to be lost, or simply when there does not seem to be any reason whatsoever for its appearance then and there.  Just as in life, Death is a being so natural to this human universe that it need only appear of its own mysterious volition, without apparent cause and yet as a familiar incantation of the same refrain, in order for it to be immediately sensed, recognized, and feared.  I will return to Death again, as Death itself appears “for real” at a pivotal point and as a matter of utmost significance in the narrative, and we will see then, at that time, that Death can actually be something more or less understood in terms of what it expects of us humans.  Angels are also present in this novel.  Franz has two guardian angels who appear at various times and they will also speak of their reasons for being present at Franz’s side.  Furthermore, they will speak of their reason for leaving Franz when they finally do.  Another important feature of this novel’s mythopoeic form can be found in what places it, as myth, in the Hebrew tradition, with biblical-verse-styled allusions to or citings of Hebrew scripture occasionally intervening, intermingling, or simply appearing in places throughout the narrative.  In spite of commanding of themselves a certain sense of respect and of eliciting in the reader the feeling that they may deserve a special effort of attention, they generally evoke of themselves the feeling that they fail to achieve any sensible connection to what is happening in the context around them other than perhaps being a sign of Franz’s own heightened anxiety, anger, or dread.  If anything, the verses and allusions to scripture certainly feel out of place, suggesting of themselves only blind fear and trembling as their likely correlate.  The narrative’s re-writing of the story of Job is an exception, although the insanity of Job’s vision in this version of his story, whether it is in communication with God, Satan, or an angel, is actually offered to be accepted as intended and earnest wisdom.  Could this be irony though?  That depends entirely on the reader.  Or, in the case of the lovely and adorable Mitzi, a familiar scriptural verse that is said often for its beautiful poetry is recited in her voice with ironic euphony, almost ecstasy, inspired as she is at this time by her love for her life, but only as she is unwittingly being led by her murderer to her death.  If this novel is a myth, then it is a “cracked” or “broken” one, and the presentation of religious scripture or sacred law tends either to be utterly without any sense of place within its context of modern experience, other than being something like a nervous quirk in Franz, and they tend, in their content, to reflect the brutality of life and existence in the world where they can possess any meaning at all.  This novel then becomes a myth in its own right for being a “truly modern” one.  And it becomes clear that the novel’s setting of late-1920s Berlin, in its expressing both the ethos and the topos of human activity, industry, dwelling, and life in a single “urban” space, “naturalizes” this myth in order to situate Franz Biberkopf in real and true history, in a real time and place, especially as a figure on the margins who often imagines, as he must have experienced in the terror of many sleepless nights in prison, the roofs of the city’s buildings sliding off and falling onto the heads of passersby. Does the city belong to the myth or does the city appropriate the narration as myth entirely of and for itself, subjugating to itself both narration and myth, bending and stretching narration and myth to itself because the city is utterly inescapable and need only live and exist as and for itself for narration and myth to have to include it–for the narration and myth must include it–on the city’s very own dreaded terms?

To summarize what we know so far, Döblin’s novel utilizes formal elements that create an unstable and fragmentary order of reality and he renders this world as mythic, not for the purpose of setting the world he creates outside of real history or in an imaginary time and place, but for a purpose that requires the opposite of this, for undercutting and unsettling the history of our true myths, those myths of a sacred, higher realm of being and existence.  What is truly mythic then comes to appear distortive and even repellent to our natural sense of wholeness or oneness (which the myths this invokes might otherwise promise or promote)—and this sense of what is now utterly aberrant finds its true cause in the urban sphere and in modern history, and this becomes the cause of the collapse of sacred myth into something like the dread, bewilderment, and disillusionment of the modern world.  I said just now that to achieve this he must do the opposite of setting the narrative in an imaginary time and place.  This brings us to the other important aspect of the work, the use of a marginal character, already perhaps damned for the killing of another person, his partner.  The use of a marginal character just released from prison means that the reader must experience a world that must already be highly tainted if not corrupted altogether in places.  While this might ordinarily weaken the novel’s effect as an argument, the novel is less interested in relying on its story or plot for this, but rather uses Franz’s own thoughts, his own conscious intentions and choices to make his experiences and life compelling.  It uses “who Franz is” as a person. This feels and is reasonable because Franz’s motives are actually quite pure, quite genuine.  He is certainly genuine in his desire to establish himself in a lawful occupation and in an honest life.  This desire of his, and probably his character as genuine and honest as a rule, becomes sufficient to render him more respectable as a human being, sympathetic as an “everyman,” and to make his trials seem all the more grim and unsettling for the terrible futility apparent from his sincere and reasonable efforts.  But the novel, as bildungsroman, becomes something more than just “the story of a modern everyman in a spiritually barren urban wasteland.”  The narration offers something like wisdom on the German spirit itself, for it follows Franz through life, through several little deaths, and then it represents the ultimate symbolic death of Franz, his death as a man who had yet, up to that point, to truly encounter his own German spirit, which is actually connected to, drawing on, something like the man’s own soul.  Only in symbolic death does Franz’s own German spirit, only in symbolic death does the spirit of Franz’s own time in modern German history, come for him, claiming him for what life he then can have.  That spirit also appears to us, this novel’s readers, and the novel then becomes something more than simply fiction.  It becomes something equal to that toward which its form as myth reaches—it becomes a flawed but highly interesting work of wisdom for a modern people that are about to encounter the spirit of their times in what will be a period of evil, death, and senseless destruction unlike any other ever before seen or experienced in human history.  Death will not be symbolic for hundreds of millions of souls, but utterly total and real.

I said near the beginning that Berlin Alexanderplatz is certainly not a “beautiful,” nor is it ever even a “pretty,” novel. Aesthetically, it seems to want to create a certain sense of Berlin in the 1920s as an ugly city.  A word I used above, a better word, was “brutal.”  The settings are all rather dreary, which include the rooming houses where Franz himself stays, with him “lying in,” drinking himself nearly to death whenever he suffers a blow or “hears alarm bells” in his mind, the bars where the conversation is often directed toward organizing people into political factions with everybody feeling that some form of direct action is necessary, and the tenements where “other, better sort of folks” dwell, residences whose people seem to exist with no connection to anywhere else other than their own rooms and into whose strained and difficult lives we get a glimpse when these places are not being “knocked off” by the robbers with whom Franz is associating in the area’s bars at these times.  People themselves have little that is good to say about anything, just the usual chirping, muttering, and cursing.  They are cynical, willing to “look the other way” if there is something in it for them, and depending on the reader’s own history, I wondered if some readers will actually understand these people better than others, not simply judge them, but know that their cynicism and their callousness, and even their “banal evil,” is what allows them to endure all the rest of it.  Berlin is not a cheerful place then.  I do not need to spend much time talking about the sections describing the city’s impressive infrastructure, its highly modern tram system and its engines of industry, as well as the daily news which we might realize in this context tends to sap the intelligence of most people in its making individual thought and experience a standardized and common resource for the marketing of goods and services, while also making anything one pursues beyond a purely economic aim seem entirely a matter of common opinion if it cannot be directed to some “civic cause.”  The slaughterhouse occupies as much time and space in the narration as anything else in the novel’s representation of Berlin.  The slaughterhouse is described down to the stains of animal gore and blood in the very grains of its stone and iron—and we must wonder to ourselves what exactly we are meant to think when we read exactly how the different animals (pigs, oxen, sheep, and cows) are killed there and we are then presented with the actual numbers of those poor beasts that are killed each week (numbering in the thousands).  This seems to me to engage with the reader to “test” them for themselves whether it is true that the numbers of the slaughtered matter far less than the brutality and senselessness in the killing of them.  But are these animals victims of cruel treatment or not?  Nevertheless, the images are meant to be “strong” in their effect on a person’s own will not to think anything at all.  The reader can decide.  There is a hope, I believe, in the narration that one will get a sense of both cynical indifference among people socially and a casual attitude toward violence industrially as being commonplace in Berlin at this time, and adopting a certain view of what is needed to survive in the city also seems to be what people can do to avoid actually thinking about it, down to the delicious meat they eat for their meals when they either decide to accept everything just as it is or choose to know nothing more beyond what they already know in their own daily lives and activities.  Perhaps many choose to do both of these things at once.

Told like a myth, this is the story of a man, but it is the story of a marginal man in a merciless city.  The story begins with Franz Biberkopf being released from prison and making his way back into Berlin.  We are told that he went to prison for “some stupid stuff”.  It turns out that he killed his partner.  He did not mean to kill her, but they had an argument, she said some things that angered him, he struck her once, twice, however many times, and then he hit her harder at some point, she lost consciousness, fell, and likely knocked her head up against the floor or something else, suffered a brain injury, and died instantly.  Franz spent four years in jail for manslaughter.  Considering the times and recent history in what we are reading, what are we to make of the narrator describing causing another’s death, someone the killer supposedly loved, “some stupid stuff”?  The narrator describes it as that, not Franz.  Is Franz actually reformed after leaving prison if that is how causing someone else’s death is being described?  Is that how he should describe it?  No, that’s how others are supposed to relate to it—the narrator is using the socially accepted parlance.  Franz is a sick man when he leaves the prison, dazed and terror-stricken at being released into the big city.  This is all conveyed with admirable realism and the reader can expect to often feel the need (to feel obligated?) to “stretch” or “assimilate” what ordinarily would be difficult to understand, much less accept, because the narration never betrays its principle of telling the story of the world of Berlin in the late-1920s through the mind and experiences of a highly marginal human being with uncompromising fidelity to what we somehow “know all of that” must be like.  What is Franz’s “second chance” like?  How does he do?  He has a friend on the outside named Mack.  Mack seems highly successful and respected, especially when compared to Franz.  Franz and Mack are talking about Franz joining a union.  Franz is presently labouring as a transport worker, but Mack has given him advice to get into trading goods.  Franz is likely eager to make something of himself by finding employment that’s better for him, that’s less physically taxing on him, so, following Mack’s example, he decides to join the traders’ union.  The following conversation between Mack and Franz is rather brief and seems rather non-significant, but in fact, it is one of the most important moments in the story, for it suggests precisely all that goes so horribly wrong with Franz:

“Franz, I need to have a word with you.  Otherwise I can’t walk another step.”  “Well, go on then.”  “Franz, I need to know who you are.  Look me in the eye.  Tell me you’ve been inside, and that you know what’s right and what’s just.”  “S true, Gottlieb.”  “Now then Franz, cross your heart.  What did they do to you there?”  “You can set your mind at rest.  Believe me: if you’ve got horns, you can take ‘em off.  Inside we read books and learnt stenography, and we played chess, and I did and all.”  “You can play chess?”  “Well, you and I Gottlieb, we can go on playing our skat, but you know, you sit around, not got much aptitude for reflection, we transport workers get too tired in our muscles and bones, then one day you say, damn you, leave us in peace, stay away.  Mitts off, humans.  What are the likes of us going to do with law and police and politics?  We had a Communist in the big house, he weighed more than I did, he was involved in the uprising of ’19 in Berlin.  They didn’t catch him, but he came to his senses later, meets a widow and joins her business.  A clever lad, as you see.”  “How did he come to be with you?”  “He will have tried a spot of fencing.  We always used to stick together and watch him getting roughed up.  But best give the others a wide berth.  Let them go.  Stay decent and keep yourself to yourself.  That’s what I say.” / “I see,” said Mack and looked at him coldly.  “Then we could all pack up, that’s pretty shabby of you, that puts the kibosh on everything.”  “It’s only those who want to can pack up, we’re not worried.”  “Franz, I’ll say it again, you’re a wet rag.  You’ll get your comeuppance.”

That will be it for Franz with Mack.  Mack will remain friendly, but Mack will also keep a safe distance from Franz, appearing only occasionally in Franz’s life and always only along Franz’s periphery.  The problem is not that Franz has spent time in prison, but that he remains a “lifer,” a man who believes only in “doing one’s own time.”  His indifference toward investing and involving himself in the social and economic domains of his city and country, his outspoken intentions not to actively pursue anything more than what he absolutely requires to meet his own needs, is something Mack will not tolerate, will not accept, not from any man.  It is this that we are later told is the true cause of Franz’s failure to escape his perpetual downward trajectory in his life, the reason his life becomes so awful for him in Berlin, even though it is offhandedly conveyed, seems harmless in itself, and is expressed only once, near the beginning of Franz’s return to the greater world.  This attitude of Franz’s and these intentions of his are also the reason that, eventually, Franz has no choice but to return to criminal activity.

Franz eventually becomes a pimp again and he even decides to embrace this without reluctance or hesitation.  He has resisted criminality up to this point, but his way was far from easy.  When he did find something to sell that could earn him a decent living, he was betrayed by a trusted business partner who discovered the location of Franz’s secret investor, a widow, raped her, and then stole all of Franz’s product from where Franz had stashed it in her apartment.  Franz was devastated, but eventually recovered.  Franz then happened to come into contact with some very bad people at the pub, becoming entangled with them in spite of managing to resist getting directly involved in their activities.  One night, he ended up caught up in the middle of a burglary they were doing, was forced into their car with them as their “prisoner” before one of them threw Franz out of the vehicle so that the car in pursuit of them ran over Franz’s arm, which then had to be amputated at the shoulder.  Some friends from Franz’s past were the ones who saved him, but being under their watch and care meant that he was only one step away from his old life of crime.  He resisted somewhat nonetheless, but by that point, he had no way into the labour force or into respectable work (although he attempted working many different jobs during this period, which either weren’t at all dependable or failed to provide him with what a person needs) and so it was then that he became the pimp of a woman he was introduced to by the sister of the woman he killed, the former still loving Franz for the same reasons we see him as the everyman we now recognize him from his story to be.  Franz, by this point, realizes he has no chance for survival without getting involved with the aforementioned bad criminals he had resisted and avoided before they caused him to lose his arm, and he ends up on his way down again, down to a point so low that his lover and partner feels she must get involved with the head of the gang in an effort to understand what’s really going on with Franz.  The head of the gang, who despises Franz, attempts to seduce this woman, she resists, and this man murders her, disposing of her body in a forest.  And that’s pretty much it for Franz.  He ends up drinking himself close to death in bars and “losing his angels” until he is arrested on a police raid, ends up in the hospital, and then meets his ultimate fate.

His fate is not death, but to “meet Death,” to die a symbolic death, to fall nearly all the way down, through himself, into “Death,” but then to be “caught by Death.”  To survive Death in this world.  In the hospital, he is semi-conscious, unresponsive, and without higher mental functioning.  Doctors cannot figure out what is wrong with him, although they initially call what they observe a “catatonic stupor.”  From within Franz’s mind and body, however, in something like this state, we observe him, experience him, as he encounters what he knows within himself is Death.  The ordeal of his dying is a lengthy one in which Franz screams and screams and suffers the pains of a man being chopped to pieces, for Death wields an ax.  When the worst of it is over, Death then becomes judge over him, telling him, essentially, that he should have made Death itself his end, that he should not have feared dying in life, for in doing so, he could not then know life for what it was meant to be—a realm of forms poxed and projected out from the ever-lurking presence and sense of Death.  He should not have been so reluctant and afraid to face life and the world as this, to think the world in these terms, in terms of what it expresses of itself of dying and death within it, to learn and to come to know all he needed to know about it in order to face Death in this way, to live toward everything as motley, as made up in form of both of life and death.  In short, Franz is accused of shirking what is most true and noble about life, that it is what it is because it is Death all along that shapes the changes and the prevailing forms in all that lives and all that is, for all forms in the living world are heterogeneous to this extent, and to know why or how something is as it is is to learn from and respect life and death for what they are, through and in everything in which they exist.  Is this an adequate summary of what Franz learns, experiences, and is told by and through Death?  I think so, but one further point: In Franz’s own symbolic dying we see that he himself is of a form in both life and dying that is highly heterogeneous, that he is made up of a multitude of experiences, memories, falsehoods, truths, people, angels, and demons.

Franz leaves the hospital a changed man.  He gets a job as a foreman and lives the rest of his days in a way he could not have before meeting his end.  He had help in this, it is true, but it became possible for others to help following Franz’s testimony at the trial of the man who killed Mitzi.  Is the wisdom Franz learns from Death adequate as wisdom?  To make Death a central part of life is very much in line with the tradition of German idealism, in so far as “that which cannot be known” in Kant and Hegel (such as Death) tends to be regarded as the primary shaper and instiller of change in all that lives.  Death cannot be known directly or “objectively” of course—nor can the spirit in change–but it must be encountered nevertheless over the course of one’s life, and one can perhaps better know it in so far as one learns the spirit in change in all that one needs to know, and one may even become wise in learning about what prevails over death and how it can do so.  So Berlin Alexanderplatz can be regarded as offering wisdom from a tradition of German philosophy responsible for shaping an understanding of German spirit.  Is it worth asking whether the rise of Hitler, the Second World War, and the Shoah renders this wisdom, the placing of Death in a principal place in and above nature and relating to it as the principal, albeit unknowable, force in change, unintentionally ironic?  To answer this question, we must return to a point made earlier, that Franz’s failure is represented as his refusal to assimilate himself, to participate fully, in the German labour force and in reputable circles of German industry and society.  The novel, and Death itself, tells us to make Death an end, but the other end we must make of ourselves, we are told, is to participate in spheres of civic life and civil society where we can perhaps contribute to what we prefer to see happening and existing in our country and the greater world.  The popular rise of Nazism, it is true, made of living by this latter imperative a grossly unfortunate barbarism, and the two together, participating in a German society and culture one prefers for oneself and others, and regarding Death as possessing of itself a place of supremacy in the natural universe while granting it a power of mystery over us as an unknowable “master signified,” certainly would not have qualified Berlin Alexanderplatz as a work that could have helped people survive the spread of Nazism and all that the Nazis inculcated into German people as superior about Germanness and Germany.  Nevertheless, the novel stands as a finished masterpiece of the modernist literary form and it has plenty of its own wisdom to offer.  It is German wisdom, it is true, and perhaps this is best now viewed under glass.  But among fictional works, there is perhaps no better novel in which to “experience” the German spirit in the most dreadful of times, to see it truly for how it was lived (and how it truly was), and that makes this work something more than being “of historical reference,” but rather a work that crystallizes both the spirit of a certain time and the topos of a certain place as something like the “real history” that truly might have been and that actually might now be.