Berlin Alexanderplatz

Abstract

An outstanding work of literary modernism, Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz is one of the most significant novels depicting the modern metropolis. Published in 1929, the novel innovatively communicates an aesthetic that reflects the experience of urban space and mass culture as a multilayered and multi-sensual encounter with the city itself, thus reflecting the ‘citiness’ of late 1920s Berlin as literature. The novel tells the story of Franz Biberkopf’s battering journey from prison to life as a ‘free man’ on the bottom of the social ladder and takes a piercing look at the poverty-stricken eastern parts of Berlin, fracturing the capitol’s frequent depiction as the city of lights and seductive glamour. Inspired by Berlin itself – from the city’s modern traffic system and building boom to its cinema culture and foremost avantgarde movements of the Weimar Republic – it reflects perceptual conditions in urban space while drawing on cultural heritage from the Bible to folk songs, the canon of German-language literature, Franz Kafka and Arthur Schnitzler, James Joyce and John Dos Passos, Fritz Mauthner, Friedrich Nietzsche and Georg Simmel, but also Chinese philosophy, psychiatry, avantgarde theatre practices and contemporary Soviet film theory, innovatively suggesting a protagonist’s literary construction in constant competition with the surrounding masses and the city itself. Döblin’s novel is deeply representative of its time and both a masterpiece of German-language literature and a key work of urban literatures.