Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Digging Ourselves Out

It’s unlikely that any writer has been more described in terms of other writers - preceding and following - than Alfred Döblin. Joyce, Dostoevsky, Henry Miller, Bukowski, Martin Amis, Henry Fielding, Upton Sinclair, Céline, Burgess, Smollett, Isherwood, dos Passos, and Conrad among others have been mentioned frequently as influences or being influenced. It seems impossible to pin Döblin down to a definite style or technique. I find him an inspiration for William Gaddis’s JR, for example, in his ‘stream of conversation.’

Yet he is also unique in time and place. Weimar Germany is in social chaos. Work is hard to find, even before the Great Depression, especially for an ex-con. Pornography and the sex-trade in general are thriving, despite the Victorian (or more accurately the Wilheminic) era ‘blue laws.’ The historical class structures are being undermined by the same residues of the Great War that are affecting Britain. Politics has yet to work out its disastrous compromises, although the omens of the future are clear. And in a perverse way Berlin, despite its status as a conquered capital city, is the centre of a new global culture.

Perhaps this is why Döblin is so difficult to categorise or characterise. In this one book is all of not just Western literature but also Western culture, a literary Mahler’s Ninth. Franz Biberkopf is the new Everyman, even more so than Leopold Bloom. Bloom was up against tedium, boredom, and oppressive religion but at least Dublin was what it always had been. Biberkopf’s Berlin had no historical continuity. It was the far side of the moon, waiting to be discovered by the rest of mankind.

This new world is non-traditional. It demands the abandonment of habits in order to survive. Because the mores of ‘good behaviour’ have yet to be established, it feels like a prison in which a mis-step can have lethal consequences. Trial and error rather than best practice in everything from sex to career (the anticipation of Viagra is startling). So despite wanting to lead a life of stable conformity, such a thing is no longer possible:

“He swore to all the world and to himself that he would remain decent. And as long as he had money, he remained decent. But then he ran out of money, which was a moment he had been waiting for, to show them all what he was made of.”

This is the new man - the player, the scammer, the inside trader, the mobster, the exploiter of loopholes, the corporate boss. The entire foundation of social relations had been altered. Sociologists may not see that for decades, and even then not very clearly. But Döblin captured the whole event in Biberkopf as he caroms around the streets of Berlin. Almost a century later, it has become obvious to the rest of us how perceptive he was. After his release from prison Biberkopf realises that the world had changed in his absence. “I know I need to dig deeper,” he says. Indeed, don’t we all.

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