June 2020. Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin
1929, New York Review Books Classics, 480 pages. Written in German, read in English
If I had to choose one word to describe this novel, dense would be it. It took me quite a considerable amount of time to plow through this book, which has a fairly basic and thin plot stretching through its 480 pages. Surrounding that plot are a dazzling variety of literary styles — some of which appear to have been invented for this novel. A montage of small different scenes around the streets of Berlin, that make you feel as if a camera has temporarily lost the protagonist and is frantically looking for him in the throng; full pages of stream of consciousness, snippets of repeated text, demonstrating the protagonist’s diminishing grip on reality; stretches of dialog, sentences immediately following one another without punctuation ore reference to who says what.
The simple narrative, that begins right away and gets lost in the hubbub of the Berlin streets right away, revolves around a Franz Biberkopf. He’s an indicted criminal who has finished his four years sentence in the Tegel prison and is reluctantly released. He makes his way into Berlin, apparently unattached, and little by little we learn of his attachments — to women, to acquaintances, to groups of criminals. He attempts a series of legitimate places of employment — some distinctly described, some hinted at — until he is drawn into participating in a break in with a gang of criminals. When he refuses to participate, he gets thrown out of and under a car, loses an arm and almost his life. The story doesn’t become any brighter — it involves a rape and a murder, incarceration in an insane asylum and the beginning of another cycle, oblivious to the previous one.
Only at the culmination of this novel I’ve realized what it was really about — Franz Biberkof, the protagonist, was just a chance character, someone whom our imaginary camera started following and couldn’t help but to continue. The real protagonist of the novel is the city of Berlin, or rather a part of Berlin that is constantly walking the fine line between existing, surviving, criminality, depravity. Biberkopf could have been easily replaced by any other person walking down the street at the same time, whose story would have been similarly sad, similarly inevitable.
The July selection for the David Bowie Book Club will be Black Boy by Richard Wright.
