Written during what history revealed to be the final years of the Weimar Republic, Alfred Doblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz captures Berlin in a purgatorial state, just before the final descent into damnation. The ex-cement worker and day-laborer, ex-convict and passive pimp, Franz Biberkopf careens through the city, and novel, as a kind of lens through which the pulp and amorality of Doblin’s times can be refracted, pinpointed onto the page. The stray material of daily life is bent through this good-natured brute to capture the spirit of what was at the time the present. Text borrowed from medical journals and religious tracts, the news and advertising, pop ditties and folk rhymes, military marches and prison yard songs all intrude into what is ostensibly Biberkopf’s story, but is really Berlin’s, while Doblin himself routinely speaks down from above, from outside of the text, as the author outlining and re-capping, framing this fiction as a document, a collage of a city dizzy and lost at the tip of modernity. A nation retreating into a defensive ignorance, willfully blind to its own condition, as it sinks into the abyss of a future severed from the shame and humiliations of its past.
The novel begins with Biberkopf stepping through the gates of Tegel Penitentiary in North Berlin, a free man after serving four years for beating his girlfriend and bread winner, Ida, to death with an egg-whisk, in a fit of confused, jealous rage. He stumbles out into a city that has become uncanny in his absence. Near enough to what he remembers, the changes, the noise and clatter of a mechanized city life, the buildings that appear to loom larger on streets that appear more narrowed and cluttered, provoke a kind of vertigo. He stumbles around at the edge of madness, oscillating between public outbursts and states of near catatonia, until the sight, on a cinema screen, of a childish woman, sprawled and motionless in the grass after getting tipped violently out of hammock by her stern lover reawakens his four-year dormant sexual desire. He gathers himself around this urge. On the hunt, he falters and slips after, fails to perform with sex workers he picks up from the streets. His anxiety turns to anger as he begins to believe his impotence is a sign of a more permanent imprisonment. So, he pays a visit to Minna, Ida’s sister, to right the wrong Ida’s death has inflected on his life. He rapes Minna. And the orgasm clears his head and conscience, sets him back on stable footing. When he returns to her door the next day, sweetly bearing gifts, he cannot comprehend her disgust and anger, her rejection. His good feelings have relieved him of the burden of all responsibility. Her shame has absorbed his own. And with the kind of pity one might reserve for a child who hopelessly misunderstands, he leaves her and re-enters his life a redeemed man. A born-again innocent, who vows to live honest and clean.
Responsible for nothing, responsible to nothing beyond the maintenance of his own delusions, Biberkopf exists at the very tip of his present. The past lingers on only as the backdrop against which his rebirth can stand in relief. A new man constructed around the hollow of the vanquished old, Biberkopf bobs along the surface of his Berlin, a bauble in an eddy of the sub-working class. Unskilled sales work is seemingly the only legitimate work that exists in this world. And Biberkopf cycles through the rounds, hocking necktie holders and Nazi papers on street corners, shoelaces door-to-door.
It is the paper and the swastika armband he dons, in a bid for more authentic advertising more than any meaningful declaration of faith, that provokes his first confrontation with the historical and social realities he wishes to avoid. Cornered by a group of communists in the pub, he descends into a self-protective rage as he’s forced to explain himself, to defend his position. Saved by the first in a string of convenient lovers, Lina, just before he cracks up completely, he is introduced to the first in a string of petty schemers, the shoelace salesman, Luders, who recognizes an easy mark. Luders’ betrayal of Biberkopf’s naïve faith in the bonds of effortlessly acquired camaraderie tips the born-again Biberkopf into a psychological crisis. After the crisis provoked by his release, it is the second of the four Doblin’s novel is structured around. He drinks himself out of this one, in isolation, cleaning the slate for another go.
The third arrives with Reinhold, at the halfway point. Sipping his lemonade and coffee, the sober and seductive Reinhold seduces Biberkopf with his stuttering masculinity. An intoxicating blend of vulnerability and criminality, he lures Biberkopf into the mix of his love affairs, making him complicit in his cruel dismissal of the women he no longer desires. Biberkopf conspires with Reinhold to play act the role of bad friend by seducing the women Reinhold sends his way. The women are duped into accepting their role as the ones who’ve strayed, carrying the guilt for all involved, as Reinhold moves seamlessly on to the next.
Biberkopf mistakes Reinhold’s interest in keeping his hands clean as a sign of his desired decency. He views his affiliation with the Pum’s gang, thieves who pilfer goods for the black market, as a fixable character defect. Reinhold only needs the right guidance. Reinhold, for his part, despises Biberkopf’s self-righteousness. He recognizes the brutality hiding behind Biberkopf’s flaunted gregariousness and is irritated by his adopted innocence. So, trapped in the back of a getaway car with a whining Biberkopf, fleeing a job Biberkopf allowed himself to be tricked into, Reinhold kicks him out of the moving vehicle, in hopes he’d be crush to death by the car they believed was following them in pursuit. Biberkopf lives but loses his arm and innocence. His empty coat sleeve and stump, the final proof of his guilt and shame.
The second half of the novel, follows Biberkopf as he slips into his old routines. Protected and cared for by old friends, the sex worker and former lover, Eva, and her partner-pimp Herbert, who set him up with new girl, young Emilie from the country. Renamed by Eva in the city, she is introduced to Biberkopf as Sonia, only to become, under his care, Mitzi. A fresh, innocent Ida, she’s the foundation of his new-old life. Cut down, Biberkopf is at first shiftless, shamed. He abandons his plans for an honest life, accepting the money Mitzi brings in. He falls into old routines, old jealousies and new boredoms. To reassure himself of his own self-sufficiency, he fences stolen goods with the creep Willi and hangs around anarchist meetings. Eva, Herbert, and Mitzi conspire to pull him back into passive comforts. Politics, they fear, are too much for his cluttered, sensitive mind. And drunk, he agrees, slipping back into his stupefied nationalism, an echo of his response to the communists in the first half of the novel. Brute simplicity always lurking at the edges to comfort. Reunited with Reinhold, the balance in their relationship shifts. Power is now in Biberkopf’s hand, who, in his self-pity, remains blind to the true dynamics. Reinhold, who has abandoned his lemonade and coffee for booze and who has embraced his own brutishness, at first feels Biberkopf out to see if he’ll rat but later comes to resent his disinterest in vengeance, his seeming lack of need. His frustration with Biberkopf finds its final release in the murder of Mitzi, an act that displaces the guilt for Ida’s death, sending Biberkopf temporarily to the mad house where his mind and spirit are finally shattered completely. Reassembled and resurrected, his innocence assured, Biberkopf leaves the institute to stand guard on the factory floor. An assistant porter, he’s settled into life as an everyman. One with the masses, he stands at his post, listening to the drum beat of nationalism, the marching energy of war.
Though the signs of things to come were certainly there, Doblin, writing in the present, couldn’t know the full course of history. Hitler and the National Socialists were recognizably on the rise, but their rise to total political and social dominance was far from guaranteed. The horrors of the Third Reich were still to come. So, even if Doblin is outlining, with this novel, the contours of rotten culture and society, we abandon Biberkopf on an ambiguous note. He is not an outright brute, a fascistic anti-Semite, itching for violence and war. The image of the average Nazi that settled after the war. He is a neutered, quiet man. Anonymous, nose down, he shuffles off the mainstage, out of view of our interests. Of course, this is who voted for and who supported the Nazis in their ambitions. The everyman, driven through his day-to-day by self-interest. The quietly frustrated nationalist, waiting to be plucked for some higher purpose. A purpose capable of transforming private shame into a national cause.
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