Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz, first published in 1929, has been acknowledged as one of the 100 greatest novels of the twentieth century.
The novel gives a vivid and multifaceted portrait of a working-class section of Berlin in the years leading up to the rise of the Third Reich. It is the story of Franz Biberkopf, "an erstwhile cement- and transport-worker" and World War I veteran who has just been released from prison for manslaughter.
Biberkopf is firmly resolved to lead a decent, responsible life, and at first he succeeds. But over and over again he is reduced by an apparently inexorable fate until in the end he "is most distinctly given to understand how it all came about." He is even given a prophetic glimpse into Germany's horrific future: "We tramp to war with iron tread, a hundred minstrels march ahead, red of night and red of day, deathward leads the way,"
Sprawling, both hyperreal and surreal, Berlin Alexanderplatz paints a hypnotic portrait of the outer and inner life of Weimar Germany. Its style and technique have been likened to that of James Joyce's Ulysses. But, using multiple points of view, sound effects, newspaper articles, songs, and speeches, it bears even more of an affinity with John Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy. It also looks forward to the monumental Red Wheel series of novels in which Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn depicts the excesses of the Russian Revolution.
Bruno Alfred Döblin (1878-1957) is reckoned among the most important German modernist writers. His collected works include over a dozen novels and amount to thirty volumes. Berlin Alexanderplatz is his acknowledged masterpiece.
The novel inspired a 1931 film version as well as a mammoth 14-hour 1980 television film by the noted German director Rainer Maria Fassbinder.
This edition, which reprints the original 1931 English translation by Eugene Jolas, a friend of James Joyce, reproduces the rich use of slang and working-class speech of the German original.
