Berlin Alexanderplatz
‘What about this, comrade, open your eyes so I can tell you’re listening to me – t hat’s good, that’s all I need, I won’t betray you – what was your crime, did you kill one of the tyrants then, death to you, hangmen and despots, sing it. You know, you’re lying there all the time, and I can’t sleep, it keeps going voom voom outside, you hear it, it’ll knock the whole place for six anytime soon. Quite right too. I was doing sums in the night, how many times does the earth go round the sun in a second, I’m working it out all night, and I make the answer to be twenty-eight, and then I get the feeling my old lady’s lying by my side, so I wakes her and she says: don’t be cross, old man, but it was just a dream.
‘They locked me away because I drink, but when I drink it makes me angry, but angry with myself, and I smash everything in my path, because I’m not my own master. Sometimes I go to the office to pick up my pension, and there’s the officials sitting up there nice and snug, sucking on their pens and imagining they’re gentry. I tear the door open and say my piece, and they say: what do you want here, who are you anyway? Then I bang on the table: who asked you, I’ve got no business with you, Schögel’s the name, I’d like a copy of the phone directory, I want to talk to the governor. And next thing I know I’ve smashed the office to matchwood and two of the officials with it.’
•
Voom crash, voom crash, voom ram, voom gate bang. With heave and slam and crash and sway. Who is this deceitful fellow Franz Biberkopf, fever drop, lindyhop, let him wait till it starts snowing, then he’ll think we’ll be gone and won’t be back. Think, the fellow can’t think, he’s got no brains to think with, he wants to lie around and be uncooperative. We’ll settle his hash for him, we’ve got bones of iron, crash gate, look out, crash gate, hole in the gate, break in the gate, watch out, no gate, empty hole, cavern, voom voom, watch out, voom voom.
A rattling, there’s a rattling in the storm, in the midst of the howling gale there’s a rattling sound, a woman turning her head on a scarlet beast. She has seven heads and ten horns. She’s yacking away and has a glass in her hand, she’s mocking, she’s lying in wait for Franz, she toasts the storm powers: grr, grr, calm down gentlemen, one man’s not worth that much, there’s not much going on in him, he’s only got one arm, there’s not much flesh and fat on him, he’ll be cold ere long, they’re already putting hot-water bottles in his bed, and I’ve got most of his blood, he’s not got much left, he can’t throw his weight around much. Pish, I say, calm down, gentlemen.
It’s all happening before Franz’s eyes. The whore moves her seven heads, yammers and nods. The beast settles its feet under her, its head swings back and forth.
Dextrose and camphor injections, but in the end a different consultant is involved
Franz Biberkopf fights the doctors. He can’t tear the tube out of their hands, can’t pull it out of his nose, they pour oil on the rubber and the probe slides down his throat, and the milk and egg mixture lows into his stomach. But when the feeding is over, Franz begins to retch and vomit. It’s laborious and painful, but he can do it, even if they keep his hand tied so he can’t stick a finger down his throat. You can train yourself to vomit up everything, and we’ll see who gets their way, them or me, I won’t let anyone bully me again in this goddamned world. I’m not here for medical experiments, and they have no idea what’s wrong with me anyway.
Franz is winning. He is getting weaker and weaker. They try all kinds of things, talk to him, feel his pulse, lay him with head raised, lay him with head lowered, make up caffeine and camphor injections, squirt dextrose and cooking salt into his veins, enemas are discussed round his bedside, perhaps they should administer extra oxygen, he won’t be able to tear the mask of. He’s thinking what are these medical gentlemen bothering their heads about me for. A hundred people die in Berlin every day, and if someone’s ill you can’t get a doctor along to see them unless they can pay. Now here are all these clowns, but they’re not here because they want to help me. They don’t give a shit about me today just as they didn’t give a shit about me yesterday, but I’m a challenge to them and they’re annoyed with me because they can’t crack this case. And they’re not going to let that happen, not for all the tea in China, dying is against the rules here, it’s bad for morale. If I die they might get a carpeting, and anyway they want to haul me up in front of the judge over Mitzi and what all else, hangmen’s assistants is what these guys are, not even hangmen themselves, assistants, under-assistants, touts, and these people swan around in white coats and feel no shame.
There is a sardonic whispering among the inmates when the doctors have done their rounds and Franz is lying there same as before, and they’ve tried everything with him, injections up the keister, soon they’ll stand him on his head, just now they’re thinking of blood transfusions, but where are they going to get it from, no one here is so stupid as to volunteer his blood for that purpose, they should leave the poor guy alone, a man’s will is his own, if he’s set his heart on it that’s the way it is. The whole establishment wonders what Franz is going to get injected with today, and they snigger about the doctors, because whatever they try it’s no use on him, he’s a knothead, one of the hardest, he’ll show them, he knows what he wants.
•
The doctors change into their white coats in the consultation room, present are the senior registrar, assistant registrar, a couple of junior doctors and a medical assistant, and what they all say is: persistent vegetative stupor. The younger gentlemen take a particular interest in him, they are inclined to take Franz Biberkopf’s condition for psychogenic, his stiffness takes its start from his soul, it is a morbid state of inhibition and torpor that psychoanalysis would clear up, perhaps primal regression, if only – t he great if only, shame, but there you are – if only Franz Biberkopf would speak to them, and sit around the table with them and work at setting aside his conflict with them. The younger gentlemen have in mind a sort of Locarno Agreement with Franz Biberkopf. Of the younger gentlemen, the two junior doctors and the assistant come back to Franz in the little barred ward after each of the morning and afternoon rounds, and try as hard as they can to get some sort of conversation started with him. They try for instance to ignore him: talking to him as though he could hear everything they said, which happens to be the case, as if you could tempt him out of his isolation so that he would break through his barrier himself.
When that fails to work, one of the doctors brings along an electric shock machine from the main house, and Franz Biberkopf is faradized on the upper body, and finally the Faraday stream is applied to the jaw, the throat and the under-jaw. These are the parts that stand in need of stimulation.
The older doctors are hard-boiled men of the world who don’t mind walking out to the closed ward, and they permit all sorts of things. The senior registrar studies the case files in the consultation room, the nurse passes him the files from the left, the two younger gentlemen, the young guard, assistant and medical trainee stand by the barred window and chat. They have been through the list of sedatives, the new nurse has introduced himself and has stepped outside with the senior nurse, the gentlemen are closeted together, they browse through the protocols of the latest congress at Baden-Baden. The senior registrar: ‘Next thing you’ll be trying to tell me paralysis is psychically caused, and the spirochetes are lice on the brain. The soul, the soul, this modern myth! Medicine on wings of song.’
The two other gentlemen exchange a look and smile to themselves. The older generation talks a lot, but after a certain age calcium is deposited in the brain, and a man stops learning. The senior registrar smokes, signs another piece of paper, continues:
‘Electricity’s not a bad idea, better than your endless chit-chat anyway. But a low current won’t achieve anything. And if you apply a strong one, then hang onto your hats. We had that in the war, electricity treatment, by golly. Not allowed any more, reckoned to be torture.’ The young men pluck up courage and ask him what he would recommend, say, in the Biberkopf case?
‘Well, first of all, you make a diagnosis, and ideally the correct one. Apart from the immortal soul – and of course we’ve all read our Goethe and our Chamisso, even if it’s been a while now – there’s still things like nosebleeds, corns and broken legs. They need to be treated as a proper fracture or corn needs to be treated. Someone has a broken leg, and it won’t get better if you talk to it, it won’t even respond if you play the piano to it. What it wants is for you to apply a splint, and set the bones correctly, and then it’ll start to knit right away. Same with a corn. It wants you to apply ointment, or buy a pair of better-fitting shoes. The latter is the more expensive course, but in the long run it’s more effective.’ The wisdom of pensionable minds, intellectual pay grade zero. ‘So what should we do in the Biberkopf case, do you have a view?’ ‘Arrive at the correct diagnosis. In this case – according to my haha, superannuated skills – catatonic stupor. Unless there’s an underlying organic condition, a growth, something in the midbrain, you know, the kind of thing we ancients used to call a head cold. Perhaps we’ll see something mind-boggling in the post-mortem, wouldn’t be the first time.’ ‘Catatonic stupor?’ Needs to buy himself some new shoes, methinks. ‘Yes, anything lying there that rigidly, those sweating fits and occasional eye movements, he’s capable of observing everything we do, and doesn’t say a word, won’t eat, that all looks to me like catatonia. The faker or psychogenic eventually relents. Doesn’t take things as far as starvation.’ ‘And how do you work with such a diagnosis, sir, I mean, it doesn’t help him any.’ We’ll squeeze him here. The senior registrar laughs, gets up, walks over to the window, pats the junior doctor on the back: ‘Well, firstly, he gets some relief from you two, my dear colleague. He’ll be able to sleep in peace. That’s to the good. Don’t you think he gets a bit bored by the stuff you and that colleague of yours say to him? Do you know what I’d base my diagnosis on now, rock-solid? There, I’ve got it now. He would have gone for it ages ago, by Christ, if it had been his so-called soul. When one of those hard-boiled jailbirds but thinks, here come these young gentlemen who know bugger all about me – forgive me, but we’re amongst ourselves here – shey want to give me the talking cure, well, you’re what a fellow like that dreams about. He can cope with that. And what does he then do, would have done long ago? You see, colleague, if the man had had sense and rationality—’ Now the blind chicken thinks it’s found something: hear him kikeriki. ‘He’s inhibited, registrar, in our view it’s a kind of blockage, but triggered by emotion. Loss of contact with reality, following various disappointments and failures, and then infantile emotional demands, futile efforts to restore contact.’ ‘Spiritual moments, my eye. Then he would just go on to have different spiritual moments. Then he would give up his blockages and inhibitions in a hurry. He’ll make a present of them to you for Christmas. In a week with your help he’ll be up and about, God, some therapist you are, all praise to the new beliefs, send a wire to Freud in Vienna, a week later your man will be trotting down the corridors with your help, wonder of wonders, hallelujah; another week and he’ll know his way around the yard, and one more and with your help he’ll have scarpered while your backs were turned.’ ‘I don’t follow, registrar, but maybe it’s worth a shot.’ (I know everything, you know nothing, kikeriki, we know everything.) ‘But I do. You’ll pick it up in time. Called experience. So, I would stop tormenting him, take my word for it, it doesn’t do him any good.’ (I’m going over to building 9, these greenhorns, just let God do his thing, it must be dinnertime soon.)
•
Franz Biberkopf is unconscious and absent, very pale, yellowish, with swellings at the joints, hunger oedema, he smells of hunger, of sweetish acetone, anyone setting foot in his room realizes straight away something unusual’s going on in here.
Franz’s soul has reached a very low ebb, his consciousness is intermittent, but the grey mice who live in the attic understand him, and so do the squirrels and hares that go leaping about outside. The mice sit in their holes between the closed ward and the big central building at Buch. Then something blind flits from Franz’s soul, wandering and seeking and hissing and asking, and goes back to the breathing husk that is still lying in the bed the other side of the wall.
The mice invite Franz to eat with them, and tell him not to be sad. What’s upsetting him so. Turns out he doesn’t find it easy to speak. They insist, want him to call a halt. Man is an ugly animal, the arch-enemy, the most perverse creature on the planet, worse even than cats.
He says: it’s no good living in a human form, I would rather hide under the ground, scamper across the fields and eat whatever I can find, and the wind blows and the rain falls and the cold comes and goes, all that’s better than living in a human form.
The mice run off, and Franz is a field mouse and burrows with them.
In the closed ward he is lying in bed, the doctors come and hold his body there by main force, he is fading fast. They admit they won’t be able to hold onto him much longer. The animal part of him is running across the fields.
Now something slinks out of him and feels its way and seeks and frees itself, something he has only rarely and dimly felt in himself. It swims past the mouseholes, snuffles round the grasses, feels in the ground where plants conceal their roots and their seeds. Then something speaks to them, they can follow it, it is a blowing this way and that, a knocking, it’s like when seeds fall to the ground, Franz’s soul is giving back its plant seeds. But it’s a bad time, cold and frozen, who can say how many will take, but there’s room enough in the fields, and Franz has many seeds in him, every day he blows out of the house and scatters fresh seeds.
Death sings his slow, slow song
The powers of the storm are still now, another song has begun, a song as familiar as the one singing it. When he lifts up his voice to sing they all fall silent, even these who are most turbulent on earth.
Death has begun his slow, slow song. He sings like a stammerer, repeating every word over; when he has sung a chorus, he repeats the verse and begins again. He sings like a saw being drawn. Very slowly, carefully it commences, then drives deep into the flesh, screaks louder, higher and brighter, then with one tone it’s at the end and rests. Then, slowly, slowly, it goes backward, and scrapes, and higher and firmer is its screaking tone, driving into the flesh.
Slowly Death sings.
‘It is time for me to appear to you, because the seeds are flying out of the window and you are shaking out your bedding as though you weren’t going to lie in it any more. I am not a simple mower, I am not a simple sower, I have to be here because it is my duty to preserve. O yes! O yes! O yes!’
O yes! is what Death sings at the end of each verse. And if he happens to make a strong movement, then he sings o yea! too, because he likes to. But those that hear it, they shut their eyes, because they cannot bear it.
Slowly, slowly Death sings, wicked Babylon listens to him, the powers of storm listen to him.
‘I stand here and must record: the one who lies here and desires to give up his body and his life is one Franz Biberkopf. Wherever he is now, he knows where he is going and what he wants.’
A pretty song, certainly, but is Franz listening, and what does it mean anyway, to have Death sing? Printed in a book or read aloud, it is a little like poetry, Schubert’s songs are a bit like this, Death and the Maiden, but what is it doing here?
‘I want only to tell the pure truth, and this truth is: Franz Biberkopf hears Death, he hears this Death, and he hears him singing slowly, like a stammerer, with many repetitions, and also in the manner of a saw, cutting into wood.
‘I must record, Franz Biberkopf, your lying here and desire to come to me. Yes, you were right in wanting to come to me, Franz. How can a man prosper if he doesn’t seek Death? Actual, true Death. You saved yourself up your whole life. Saving, saving, that’s such a timid demand of humans, it means they stay in one place, and never get anywhere.
‘When Lüders cheated you, I talked to you for the first time, you w
ere drunk and you – you saved yourself. Your arm broke, your life was in danger, Franz, admit it, you didn’t for one moment think of Death, I sent you all I had, but you didn’t want to know me, and when you sensed me you grew wild and appalled and – you ran away from me. It never crossed your mind to reject yourself, and what you had begun. You gritted yourself and wanted strength, and the cramp still hasn’t cleared, it’s no use, you felt it yourself, it’s no use, the moment comes and it’s no good, and Death doesn’t sing you a gentle song, lays no choking band around your throat. I am the life and the true strength, at last, at long last, you are no longer trying to preserve yourself from me.’
‘What? What do you think of me, what are you hoping to do with me?’
‘I am the life and the truest strength, my strength is stronger than the biggest cannon, you will not live in peace from me anywhere. You want to feel yourself, you want to test yourself, life is worth nothing without me. Come, Franz, come closer to me so that you see me, see how you’re lying in an abyss, I will show you a ladder, and you will find a new way of seeing. You will climb across to me, I’ll hold it steady for you, you have just one arm, but seize hold, your feet will tread firmly, seize hold, step up, come to me.’