Cyberfriendships are one of the bizarre artifacts of contemporaneity, but without the prodding of one of my "amazon friends", I might never have gotten around to reading Berlin Alexanderplatz, one of the beacon masterworks of 20th C literature. Alfred Döblin is one of several German and Austrian writers who have not captured the attention of English-language readers as much as they deserve. Others include Robert Walser, Joseph Roth, Arno Schmidt, and Siegfried Lenz. Döblin, born in 1878, was a physician who lived and practiced medicine in the working-class district around Alexanderplatz (Alexander Plaza) in Berlin for more than twenty years, ending with his flight from Hitlerism in 1933. In the USA, he worked for MGM, but after the war he returned to Europe. Uncomfortable with the social currents in Germany, eventually he spent the last years of his life in France. After some decades of neglect, his work has now become iconic in Germany, his popularity boosted by the massive 15-hour film rendition of Berlin Alexanderplatz by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
Berlin Alexanderplatz is usually described as a "stream of consciousness" novel, the first to reveal the influence of James Joyce's 'Ulysses' in the German language. It was published in 1929, just a year before the American John Dos Passos published the first volume of his trilogy 'USA', also considered a seminal work of experimental fiction. If B-A is a "stream of consciousness" novel, however, it behoves us to ask whose consciousness is streaming. Unlike many such novels, B-A doesn't precisely trepan the mind of its principal character, Franz Biberkopf, to expose his flow of thoughts. Quite the opposite! This is a novel with an 'omniscient narrator' - a self-aware Schöpfer - and the consciousness streaming through its pages is the writer's own. And what a mighty stream it is! a Humboldt Current of history, mythology, religious iconology, front page news, gossip, weather reports, street-corner ranting and politics from right and left, the eternal and the ephemeral of German society all spewing over the life of the hapless "Everyman" Biberkopf. It is not, by the way, a jolly romp through the land of Bach and Goethe. It's a dark, almost revolting portrayal of the Lumpenproletariat - the under-class - of Germany in the years between the first act and the second act of the one and only Great War.
Seen from an older literary perspective, B-A is a "Totentanz" -- a Dance of Death -- or a Ship of Fools novel, a montage of the follies of mankind in which the fate of Everyman Biberkopf is analogous to the fate of Germany. Much of the 'stream of consciousness', in fact, dances to the tunes of old German nursery lullabies, army marching songs, and Lutheran hymns. This may be an obstacle for English readers, this rhythmic incorporation of song lyrics that have immediate allusive resonance for German readers but might not even be recognizable as such to Anglophones. For me, the swirling musicality of Döblin's prose was a major centripetal force, focusing my attention on the 'tale' of Biberkopf amid all the excursions and diversions of Döblin's consciousness, one moment recounting the tribulations of Job, another the trials of Odysseus among the Sirens, next a court transcript of an embezzlement, and then a drunken brawl between pimps. Without such a musical structure, A-P might have been a laborious book to read; as it is, I've found it as thrilling as wandering through an exotic, slightly dangerous, luridly sensuous carnival of life.
Alfred Döblin (1878-1957) studied medicine in Berlin and specialized in the treatment of nervous diseases. Along with his experiences as a psychiatrist in the workers' quarter of Berlin, his writing was inspired by the work of Holderlin, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and was first published in the literary magazine, Der Sturm. Associated with the Expressionist literary movement in Germany, he is now recognized as on of the most important modern European novelists.
