Berlijn Alexanderplatz : Franz Biberkopfs zondeval

When I decided to read this book I did not have any info about it. I decided just because of the title – “Berlin Alexanderplatz”. Usually, in 99% of cases I check the books before I’m taking my decision about reading them (especially those, which I can’t earlier open and at least look

Show More

through it). But those, who know me, know that I’m crazy about Berlin, and this square and its’ surroundings is one of my favorite places there. That’s why I decided on spec. First I could not find it anywhere, but one of my internet-bookworm-friends helped me and she borrow it for me :)

And that’s how my adventure with this book started. Honestly, I had a hard time during reading it! The story itself – the story of Frank Biberkopf – is compelling. We’re meeting him in the gate of the Tegel prison, from where (after spending there a few years for the murder) he is right now starting a new chapter of his life. Frank promises himself to live and to work honestly, avoid troubles and old companions. How will he manage? How the whole story will finish? What will the life bring to Frank during Just one year since this moment? I don’t want to tell much about the story line, but I will just mention that he will open and close a few more chapters of his life. Frank will be surrounded by more or less interesting characters, friends and enemies – how it’s usually in life. He will have a great deal of bad luck and quite much luck as well. But, at the end he will find out still that it’s better to live with other people, together, for each other. Then we know better what is good and what is bad. Will it be like that? I don’t know, but I’m willing to believe to Frank. That’s about the plot.

I had a hard time during reading because of the language and the style used in this book. In the foreword we are warned that this author like to “destroy the forms of the novels”. But I did not expect what I’ve got ;) Many times (especially during first 200 pages) I felt as I’m reading 10 different books in one + the newspaper with announcements. The plot is interrupted many times with small fragments, which doesn’t have any logical background and relation with the whole story. For example during one walk of Frank we’re getting to know how different plants are reacting for a cold weather. I need to admit that those fragments dishearten me often.

Berlin is very much settled in the plot of this book. We’re getting to know quite well many streets, squares, districts; we know how they looked like in the twenties of the last century. We get to know as well different information about architecture, transportation, economy, social relations etc. For me those descriptions of Berlin were an “added value”, because I could compare the look of the places which I know :)

To sum up – the story itself it’s interesting, but because of the style used I could not relish those 600 pages of reading.

Show Less

I have to admit, it was actually the part where the main dude comes back from the dead and turns out to be a kind of grace-lobotomized angel or bodhisattva that made me fully embrace this gritty, hilarious (I love when Germans are funny because no one else's humour has that manic edge of malice)

Show More

story of human damage in 1920s Berlin. Let me say again: the part that makes the book is where the protagonist turns out to be an angel. How fucking good a writer do you have to be to pull that off? Also, the gusto with which the dialogue is Englished and Twentiesed by Jolas is a major accomplishment on its own, good job Jolas.

Show Less

I read this through a number of mediators: in English translation by Hofmann working nearly 100 years after the fact, and in audiobook form. I also watched the 15hr movie from the 1970s which is useful for character, setting and plot details. The audiobook made it particularly challenging as the

Show More

words march robotically without pause for paragraphs or section break, the narrator was not kind this way. It made a demanding stream of consciousness novel even more so, though it enhanced the bewildering storm of information effect. I'm glad to be exposed to this kind of novel. The mix of documentary fact and fiction make it more real but it isn't realism, something more vital than a copy of reality. This was a followup to a book I read about Nietzsche, a deeper dive into European high modernism. Doblin would have been a teenager in the 1890s when Nietzsche became all the rage and I can see the influence of Nietzsche in this novel, the quest for moral direction in an age without personal moral authority; Doblin sees the role of fate as significant. It's also a great documentary view of 1920s Berlin, a libertine zoo the country watched with fascination and horror.

Show Less

An absolute masterpiece of writing!

The story of a small time criminal in the Weimar Republic is fairly interesting, but the slog through the many pages is not too rewarding. Still, it can be read in its historical context. I wonder if Hitler had it burned because it was outside the mainstream of literature at the time.

The translation by Michael Hoffman brings refreshment to this tale of low life Weimar Berlin. I compared it to dos Passos’ U.S.A. but it deserves to be hailed in its own right as a study of the individual embattled in the war to make good one’s place in an indifferent twentieth century.

1997 was a rushing tide of hefty novels sweeping under to revel in their wake: most of Pynchon and the Grass Danzig troika are dated here. Doblin's feat is an episodic steamroller, the estranged reader is as tethered as anyone by the mechanized operations of the strange, new Berlin. (Brave New

Show More

Bono, Beware)

I returned to the novel a few years ago after viewing the Fassbinder film. Doblin's novel remains a formidable feat. A few of my friends have recently made mediocre efforts. Looking aghast, I shook my head with the resignation of Arsene Wenger: even while Nietzsche was taking swings at folks at the asylum, he still valued a mazurka.

Show Less

This novel was first published in October, 1929, two weeks before Black Friday and the Wall Street Crash. It put modern Berlin on the literary map and it remains a modernist classic favorably compared with the not too dissimilar novels like Dos Passos' USA Trilogy and Joyce's Ulysses. It tells the

Show More

story of man who is as untied from any moorings as the world around him seemed to be. In fact, you might consider him the perfect anti-hero for the age.

The story opens as Franz Biberkopf is released from Tegel prison, where he served four years for killing his girlfriend in a drunken rage. Returning to Berlin, he decides to go straight. He begins to peddle bow ties on a street corner and drifts into selling other merchandise. At the same time, he starts an affair with Polish Lina and gets involved fleetingly with a bewildering series of political movements, ranging from homosexual rights to the Nazi Party. His wearing of the Nazi armband angers his worker friends, who expel him from his favorite pub. However, his real troubles begin after he enters into a partnership with Otto Lüders. After Lüders robs and assaults one of his customers, to whose apartment he gained access by using Franz’s name, Biberkopf is forced to flee to an obscure part of the city to avoid complications.

Much like a musical theme with variations, a few weeks later, Franz returns to his usual haunts taking a job as a newspaper vendor. He also begins to consort with a flashy miscreant named Reinhold who is adept at attracting women but cannot hold on to them. Each time Reinhold tires of a girlfriend, Franz throws off his current mistress and takes Reinhold’s latest castoff. When Franz becomes sincerely attached to Cissy, one of Reinhold’s rejects, he refuses to comply further. Indeed, he tells Reinhold’s girlfriend how things stand. This infuriates Reinhold, though he pretends to acquiesce in Franz’s attempt to reform him.

Yet another misadventure has Franz recruited by Fatty Pums, head of a criminal gang, which includes Reinhold. The gang is closely pursued as they drive away from a robbery, and Reinhold, given to psychotic rages and remembering Franz’s interference with his social life, pushes him from the speeding automobile. Franz is run over by the chasing car.

He awakens in a hospital, missing one arm. Bedridden, he is taken in by friends from his criminal days. Once Franz feels better further adventures ensue involving prostitutes and the usual suspect criminal element (you get the idea). At one point Franz ends up abetting his old friend Reinhold in a murder. Franz manages to continue his criminal enterprise alone, but is caught by the police. All of these events are told in a realistic and sometimes comic style.

Franz learns of Meize’s death and the hunt for him through the newspapers. Disguised with a false arm, he sets off to track down Reinhold. Eventually, tired and confused, Franz wanders into a nightclub that is in the process of being raided by the police. He is arrested. Reinhold, who got himself jailed under an assumed name, thinking prison is an ideal hiding place, is betrayed by a young man he befriended.

Above all else, the work’s narrative evokes the crowded and chaotic nature of Berlin in the Jazz age. Something of the rhythm and melodies of jazz music is conveyed through the frequent interspersing of the narrative with newspaper clippings, weather reports and political slogans, not to mention through its various diversions on topics as varied as astronomy, theology, and cooking. Döblin’s inclusion of the work’s principle setting as part of its title necessitates that the setting adopt a central role. There are a few fantastic episodes, meetings with angels and ultimately, after Frans has been confined in a mental asylum, a confrontation with Death, who recalls to Franz his misdeeds and charges him to start a new life. When he comes out of his stupor, he is changed. After he is released, he quietly becomes a gatekeeper, refuses to incriminate Reinhold at the killer’s trial, and avoids any bad associations. From then on, he is known by the new name Franz Karl Biberkopf, for he is a remade man.

Show Less

Implacable fate deals Franz Biberkopf three Mahlerian hammer-blows, but will it do him in? This is a novel that gathers confidence and momentum as it goes on; uncertain at first, the writing by the end is pummellingly intense and original. The collage effect works wonders; the biblical passages,

Show More

the slaughterhouse section, the tram trivia, all stewing into a rich and confusing brew. With its cascades of lowlife dialect and algal blooms of period colour, Berlin Alexanderplatz is as close to untranslatable as novels get. But despite the inevitable compromises in the translation (and it seems to me that Hofmann chose his compromises well), there is a spine to this story which keeps it staggering proudly along.

Show Less

A wonderful book, in a lovely translation; Hofmann has clearly read a bit of Joyce back into Doblin's prose, but that's just fine by me (trigger warning: if you get upset when characters in books use 'Anglicisms', you will be enraged by this book). The book has a great decline-and-fall plot, a cast

Show More

of horribles, and a melancholic understanding of the human species, which is easy to understand given the species in question. Very enjoyable, nonetheless, and probably the easiest way into modernism that I can imagine for those more used to the nineteenth century novels that people are still, for some reason, so fond of. And still writing.

Show Less

I read this after seeing Burhan Qurbani’s 2020 movie version, where he updates the story to contemporary Berlin and makes the hero an illegal migrant from Guinea-Bissau. I had some difficulty recognising any details from the movie’s plot in the novel, other than the protagonist’s arm

Show More

situation, but am glad to have read it, in any event. A modernist masterpiece. Michael Hofmann’s Afterword to his translation very interesting in its own right.

Show Less

I have a hard time with the stream-of-consciousness style. The translater, Michael Hofmann, argues that the random jumping around makes the novel evocative of 1920s Berlin, but I found it hard to imagine the setting, and the patter of Franz Biberkopf's thoughts were all surface level--he is just a

Show More

big dumb violent guy who falls prey to even violent men.

Show Less

The book reads too viscous. Actually, it has only 455 pages, but I thought the novel was much longer. I tormented myself a little while reading. I cannot say more negatives about Berlin Alexanderplatz”. Undoubtedly, it is an important book, especially for German literature history. And the topic

Show More

is very well implemented. A novel from 1929, which has remained up to the present day. Current content, linguistically rather not, as already mentioned. The story of Franz Biberkopf, who has just been released from prison and is now trying to live a better life, comes from the rain into the eaves. Döblin has created a figure that is credible and deeply sympathetic. Beaver head does a lot wrong himself, but not everything that happens to him is his own fault, he simply slides into a lot of things. Life happens. I really liked that Döblin does not give a lofty moral sermon. Berlin Alexanderplatz” is not a Greek tragedy in which the hero must inevitably fail because fate wants it. And it is not a book by Hermann Hesse, in which a fundamental good person is completely blameless by evil society. Franz Biberkopf has a chance to improve his life. But a very small one. For a criminal record, especially at that time, it was easier to return to the criminal milieu rather than find it in the bourgeois recognized life.

Show Less

My 2nd attempt to read this alleged masterpiece, this time as hörbuch.Indigestible. Lots of shouting drunkenness, talk of petty crime and prison. coming and humourless . Brecht covered the ground with more wit and aplomb.Gave up.