Alfred Doblin Berlin Alexanderplatz Analysis

Alfred Doblin Berlin Alexanderplatz analysis.

Berlin Alexanderplatz is a bold and dazzling collage of a novel. Regarded as one of the greatest German novels of all time, it tells the story of Franz Biberkopf, a murderer who upon release from prison resolves to become a respectable member of society in 1920s Berlin. However, because of his past and the community he is released into, he is unable to free himself from the criminal underworld which has been his life. He lives in a grubby world of criminals and prostitution, with the lengthening shadow of Nazism falling over Germany. He is very much in and of Berlin and common, at one point considered a sort of ‘Vieh’ (in the contemptuous sense, animal or beast), a keyword throughout the novel, because humans are seen as little more than animals. The submissiveness with which the animals entered the abattoir shocks and packs a punch.

The novel has got the melodrama, the politics, his complicated sexuality, the abuse of power and much more. The most striking aspect in Döblin’s writing came from the darker side of life, for example his description of the slaughterhouse. In those days it wasn’t a bullet through the head; it was clubbing and hacking. The man, Franz Biberkopf, is one of many, his fate one of thousands. All around him are other people, voices, noises, news, the weather, the trains – he is surrounded by talking, singing, hissing, screeching and banging. Using the technique of montage, and in a radical new language, Alfred Döblin created a polyphonic world that captures the city and its life in a remarkable way.

But while the book is funny, shockingly violent, absurd, strangely tender and memorably peopled, its lasting resonance lies not in its hulking antihero or picaresque narrative beats but rather in its collage-like depiction of the city. Blended into or built around Biberkopf’s misadventures are newspaper articles, weather reports, Biblical stories, Jewish yarns, ancient myths, street noise and thick streams of consciousness. Threaded through his epic tale are fabulous digressions — on meteorology, scripture, collective politics, popular song, death tolls, advertising slogans, animal husbandry, the baking of bread — that function as a kind of urban chorus. The inanimate city is electrified into a field of contesting energies.