Berlin Alexanderplatz

Berlin Alexanderplatz is a novel published in 1929 by Alfred Döblin — not Fassbinder's soap opera, made fifty years later. The story follows Franz Biberkopf, a worker released from prison, lost in a noisy and unstable Berlin. Döblin mixes dialogue, announcements and street noise to imitate the rhythm of a city that seems to live faster than its inhabitants.

What are we talking about. Berlin Alexanderplatz is a German novel published in 1929 by Alfred Döblin. It is neither a film nor a series at the origin: it is a book, one of the great European novels of the twentieth century. The image visible here shows the cover of the first edition. The storyThe hero is Franz Biberkopf. Carrier of goods, he gets out of prison at the beginning of the story and tries to resume an honest life in Berlin. He fails, falls back into violence, poverty and depression. His individual journey takes place in a capital in the midst of an economic and political crisis, shortly before the collapse of the Weimar Republic. The idea of the novelDöblin does not tell Berlin as a mere backdrop. He wants to make the city itself feel: the subway, the crowds, the radios, the posters, the newspapers, the conversations heard on the street. For this, he borrows from the cinema a technique of editing: voices that overlap, abrupt cuts, documents inserted into fiction. The reader sometimes feels overwhelmed by the urban noise, just like the character. Why “living metro”?The metro and public transport symbolize this overwhelming modernity. Berlin becomes a "sound machine" that absorbs Franz Biberkopf. The city seems lively, almost organic, more powerful than those who live there. It is this sensation — being surpassed by the rhythm of the metropolis — that the novel seeks to reproduce. Not to be confused with Fassbinder. In 1980, director Rainer Werner Fassbinder adapted the fourteen-episode soap opera novel, which becamefamous in the cinema. This version is later than the book and is distinct from it. When we speak of the literary "Berlin Alexanderplatz", we mean Döblin's novel, published in 1929.