Berlin Alexanderplantz by Alfred Döblin
Reading Berlin Alexanderplantz, Alfred Döblin’s 1929 seminal work about Berlin and the doomed Weimar Republic, is an overwhelming experience. Strange, fascinating and shockingly violent, it is a great literary work.
The story reflects the complexity of the interwar period in Germany and Berlin in particular, which is presented as a hotbed of frenzied political rhetoric, immorality and criminality. Perhaps for this reason, while I was reading it, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis come into my mind. Both works show the decadence and debauchery of a big metropolis. In both works, the city becomes one of characters in the story, pulsating with rhythm and sound, keeping its dwellers on the alert of what the next day will bring. Döblin captures both the spatial and temporal characteristics of this pulse. We, the readers, become observers of this pulse.
The novel is about the story of Franz Biberkopf, an ex-convict, who balances between his past in the underworld and his wish to become a decent man. It’s fascinating to follow his path between a life of normalcy and a life of crime and violence. Frantz is naïve, violent, reckless and self-destructive. One moment you hate him, the other you feel sorry for him. He is the perfect anti-hero.
Amidst the chaos, the inflation and the depression, Döblin also presents in a truly brilliant and distressing way the myth of the “New Woman”. After the adoption of the Weimar Constitution in 1919, women were guaranteed a status of equality with men in terms of their enfranchisement and legal and economic status. So, the financially independed, sexually emancipated, fashionable and carefree “New Woman” was born. However, the reality was a bit different. The First World War left many women widowed in their 20s and 30s. In the worst economic times, women had nothing else to sell, but their bodies. In the 1920s, Berlin was a hub of sex tourism. In the novel, the “New Woman” is depicted as a sexual object for satisfaction of male desire. Sometimes, the price they paid for satisfying this desire was their own life.