Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin - 1929 - translated from German by Anne Thompson

You can learn more about German Literature Month on their link page

http://germanlitmonth.blogspot.co.uk/

Berlin Alexanderplatz is one of the greatest works of 20th century German Literature, it is must reading for those into Weimar Germany, as I am.

I first read this great book for German Literature Month in 2015, I am felt well rewarded by my second reading.  In this reading I see Döblin structuring the work through the Book of Revelations, as his great acknowledged influence James Joyce structure Ulysses based on The Odyssey.  He treats Berlin in 1929 as at the end of days, Hitler, off stage but lurking, is the beast, the city is overwhelmed with much of the population of all sexes, surviving at least partially through prostitution.

I would suggest a pairing of this book with Blood Brothers by Eric Haffner, 1932,also set on the mean streets of Berlin, including the grandest of all mean streets, Alexanderplatz, for a very good look at Weimar Germany.  Blood Brothers is much shorter and an easier read so you might start there.

I have a collection of Döblin’s short stories and will read them one day, maybe for GL 2018.

Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin (1878 to 1957) is Weimer Germany's greatest literary work.  It is considered to be the first German literary work to use techniques of James Joyce, an influence acknowledged by Döblin.  Döblin was a practicing neuro-psychiatrist.  He left Germany just before his books were burned.

b. Aug. 10, 1878, Stettin
d. June 26, 1957, Emmendingen, near Freiburg im Breisgau 

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German novelist and essayist, the most talented narrative writer of the German Expressionist movement.

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Döblin studied medicine and became a doctor, practicing psychiatry in the workers' district of the Alexanderplatz in Berlin. His Jewish ancestry and socialist views obliged him to leave Germany for France in 1933 after the Nazi takeover, and in 1940 he escaped to the United States, where he converted to Roman Catholicism in 1941. He returned to Germany in 1945 at the war's end but resettled in Paris in the early 1950s. 

Although Döblin's technique and style vary, the urge to expose the hollowness of a civilization heading toward its own destruction and a quasi-religious urge to provide a means of salvation for suffering humanity were two of his constant preoccupations. His first successful novel, Die drei Sprünge des Wang-Lun (1915; The Three Leaps of Wang-lun), is set in China and describes a rebellion that is crushed by the tyrannical power of the state. Wallenstein (1920) is a historical novel, and Berge, Meere und Giganten (1924; "Mountains, Seas, and Giants"; republished as Giganten in 1932) is a merciless anti-utopian satire. 

Döblin's best-known and most Expressionistic novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929; Alexanderplatz, Berlin), tells the story of Franz Biberkopf, a Berlin proletarian who tries to rehabilitate himself after his release from jail but undergoes a series of vicissitudes, many of them violent and squalid, before he can finally attain a normal life. The book combines interior monologue (in colloquial language and Berlin slang) with a somewhat cinematic technique to create a compelling rhythm that dramatizes the human condition in a disintegrating social
order. 

Döblin's subsequent books, which continue to focus on individuals destroyed by opposing social forces, include Babylonische Wandrung (1934; "Babylonian Wandering"), sometimes described as a late masterwork of German Surrealism; Pardon wird nicht gegeben (1935; Men Without Mercy); and two unsuccessful trilogies of historical novels. He also wrote essays on political and literary topics, and his Reise in Polen (1926; Journey to Poland) is a stimulating travel account. Döblin recounted his flight from France in 1940 and his observations of postwar Germany in the book Schicksalsrei  - from Stanford University

Works I Have So Far Read for German Literature Month, November, 2017

1. “You’d Have Larvae Too” by Nora Wagener, 2016
2. Vertigo by W. G. Sebald, 1990
3. The Last Weynfeldt by Martin Suter, 2006
4. “An Earthquake in Chile” by Heinrich Von Kleist, 1809
5. Who is Martha? by Marjana Gaponenko, 2012
6. “The Legal Haziness of Marriage” by Olga Grjasnowa, 2015
7. “Aladdin, COB” by Isabelle Lehn, 2015
8. “The Last Bell” by Johannes Urzidil, 1968
9. The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald, 1995
10. Mona Lisa by Alexander Lernet Holenia, 1939

You can learn more about German Literature Month on their link page

http://germanlitmonth.blogspot.co.uk/

“The mother stands there and encourages her sons. At last she says no and she dies in torment. Death twirls his mantle and sings: O yes, O yes. The woman with the seven heads tears at the beast but it cannot rise. Marching, marching, we’re marching off to war, there’s a 100 pipers marching at our side, they blow the pipes and beat the drums, rat-a-tat-tat, a smooth path for one man, rough luck for another, one man’s still standing, the next man falls over, one man keeps running, the next’s silent for ever, rat-a-tat-tat. Shouting and rejoicing, they march on in sixes and in twos and in threes, the French revolution is on the march, the Russian revolution is on the march, the Peasants’ Wars are on themarch, the Anabaptists, they all follow along behind Death, exulting, they follow behind him, the path leads to freedom, to freedom we march, the old world must perish, arise, a new day dawns, rat-a-tat-tat, in sixes, in twos, and in threes, Brothers, to light and to Freedom, brothers rise up to the light, brightly from out of past darkness, the radiant future’s in sight12, now forward march, and right and left and left and right, rat-a-tat-tat. Death twirls his cloak and laughs and beams and sings: O yes, O yes. At last the Great Whore of Babylon drags her beast to its feet, it starts trotting, it tears across the fields, it sinks into the snow. She turns round, howls back at exultant figure of Death. Amid the uproar the beast tumbles to its knees, the woman sways over the neck of the beast.”  from the final chapter of Berlin Alexanderplatz

Berlin Alexanderplatz is one of the greatest works of 20th century German Literature, it is must reading for those into Weimar Germany, as I am.

I first read this great book for German Literature Month in 2015, I am felt well rewarded by my second reading.  In this reading I see Döblin structuring the work through the Book of Revelations, as his great acknowledged influence James Joyce structure Ulysses based on The Odyssey.  He treats Berlin in 1929 as at the end of days, Hitler, off stage but lurking, is the beast, the city is overwhelmed with much of the population of all sexes, surviving at least partially through prostitution.

I would suggest a pairing of this book with Blood Brothers by Eric Haffner, 1932,also set on the mean streets of Berlin, including the grandest of all mean streets, Alexanderplatz, for a very good look at Weimar Germany.  Blood Brothers is much shorter and an easier read so you might start there.

I have a collection of Döblin’s short stories and will read them one day, maybe for GL 2018.

The novel centers on Franz Biberkoff.  When we meet Franz he has just completed a four year prison term, for beating to death a woman using an egg beater.  Franz was a pimp and the victim was one of his prostitutes. Berlin Alexanderplatz is the story of Franz's futile attempt to "go straight" when he is released from prison.  Alexanderplatz was a street on the dark side of Berlin.  Viewers of German expressionist movies and Weimer art will relate well to this great novel.  Döblin does a wonderful job giving us the feel for Berlin using a wide variety of literary techniques.  There are ongoing voyages into the Book of Revelations and a recurring use of the figure of The Whore of Babylon.  Few pages go by in the novel without references to whores, a metaphor for the terrible decline and decadence that the loss of WW I brought about in Germany.   Everybody is either hustling, starving, has joined a cult or is revolted by what Germany has become.  There are a few references to the Nazi party scattered through the novel but it is not a focus.  

really enjoyed Döblin's use of newspaper pastiches and his slaughterhouse interludes.  We get to know Franz very well through the extensive and intensive interior monologues.  There are many refrences to places and people in Weimer Berlin.  

This book is for sure a masterpiece, a serious and self-conscious work of art. In my post read research I learned the biggest challenge in translating the novel was in conversations between Franz and other "street characters" and in his interior monolugues.  They are in a slang ridden argot.  Thompson makes use of what seems sort of a mixture of the 

dialects of London's East Side and movies from the 1940s about New York City criminals.

At first I did not like it but I got used to it and I guess the idea is to use a mode of speech outside the comfort range of most potential readers of the novel, to jar their sensibilites just as middle and upper class Berliners in 1929 would have felt about the everyday language of Franz.