A masterpiece is always a mixed blessing: other things being equal – they aren’t – one would almost sooner not have one. Berlin Alexanderplatz is the one popular success in the large and extremely varied output, before and after, of its author; as Wilfried Schoeller, Döblin’s biographer, writes, it is the tombstone overlaying, nay, burying, crushing, obliterating the possibility of any interest in his other work.* When Döblin returned to Germany in 1945 from Californian exile (he was one of the more abject and less amphibian of the celebrated group that fetched up there, including the Mann brothers, Bertolt Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger and Franz Werfel), hoping to interest readers and publishers in his new manuscripts, the only thing anyone wanted from him was a new printing of Berlin Alexanderplatz, in 20,000 copies. Before that, there was only the glare of unsuccess, without, evidently, the masterpiece’s long but occasionally beneficent shadow. He wrote: ‘Despite my unstinting literary endeavours and having my name more or less constantly in the papers, the authorship of eleven volumes earned me less than 400 marks a month in 1924, and that of twelve in 1925, less than 300.’ What may look like black humour here – even more books, even less money – is probably a chance resemblance, and is nothing more than Huh! grievance and characteristic mordancy. It is a life full of breaks, rancour and invective. A literary magazine’s horoscope published on New Year’s Day 1926 – a comic, gossipy feature, but who knows, and Döblin, who went to palmists, certainly had time for such things – saw him with malign accuracy: ‘Alfred Döblin, born on 10 August, 1878, came into the world at a moment of deep psychic disharmony, through poorly aspected Moon in Capricorn. Venus is opposed: to him the goddess is no friend. The conjunction of Mars and the Sun gives rise to combativeness and discord and is an impediment to production.’
In 1928, Döblin’s monthly stipends were finally stopped by his publisher, Samuel Fischer, who had some time before been warned that his author’s talent exceeded his ability to manage either it or himself, in other words that he was liable to prove difficult and unpopular. He had turned fifty, an atheistical Jew (later to convert to Catholicism), he was married with four children (all sons), and he was running a second penurious livelihood as a doctor and psychiatrist with a practice in the working-class Friedrichstrasse district in the east of Berlin.
Sometime in October 1927, Döblin embarked on Berlin Alexanderplatz. He didn’t write about the process much, either at the time or afterwards (even before it appeared, he had, as was typical of him, ‘moved on’); correspondence, if there was any, has disappeared; then the chance discovery of a suitcase full of materials (the so-called Zürcher Fund or ‘Zurich trove’, clippings and documents and postcards and the author’s own photographs, many presented in the 1978 Marbach exhibition and catalogue) supplied hard evidence of the extensive work of pillage and improvisation and sampling involved in what was really for twelve or fifteen months almost a ‘live’ book. People talk airily about ‘jazz’ rhythms and forms, but this is the real thing: weather reports, articles on nutrition, local news items, personal interest stories, letters from patients, all incorporated into the novel. For a time Döblin must have been a sort of literary cistern, inflow, outflow, and mysteries of drift and whirlpool and obscure current in between. The work-in-progress of the book matched the work-in-progress of the city – one can imagine the former, too, with its own duckboards and drillings and tunnellings and detours and demolitions and temporary closures and promised improvements. In a Dantesque vignette, Wolfgang Koeppen remembers sighting Döblin at about this time, as a twenty-year-old (Koeppen, that is) in Berlin, in the Romanisches Café, frequented by writers and popularly known as ‘Café Grössenwahn’, the Megalomania Café:
Pale face, pointy nose. The features above the stiff collar could have belonged to a clergyman. Jesuitical, which I propose as a positive here. Learned, finical, ascetic, disciplined. But the eyes behind the spectacles, which were oval, and I seem to remember, wire-rimmed, they were tired, veiled, elsewhere, only half-intent on the board and the figures. Alert, like a huntsman, but somehow passively so. It was clear that he wanted to win the game, and in time he did win it. But straightaway it became a matter of indifference to him. Perhaps he was observing himself, seeing into himself, thinking, what am I doing here, I should be in Babylon.
Babylon was Berlin. Berlin was a Moloch. Berlin was the jungle, was Upton Sinclair’s Chicago or Brecht’s Mahagonny or Paul Bowles’s Wen Kroy, was any big rapacious modern city, but it was also the provincial – both senses – capital of Brandenburg. Döblin wrote: ‘And now Berlin. The chaos of cities. In the process of becoming a London of cosmopolitanism: first, a mix of people, now a mix of peoples.’ It was both what was outside and what was mythically and compulsively inside, the reality and the dream, the statistical facts and the caricature. A much younger Döblin had referred scathingly once to ‘the Brandenburg Nineveh’ or maybe ‘Nineveh-on-Spree’. There is a photograph of the time, a slightly elevated view of the Alexanderplatz, looking across at Hermann Tietz’s pincushion-cum-Pickelhaube department store; the dirty white or grey space of the square in the bottom half of the picture might be the sandy soil of some edge-town like Marrakesh or Tashkent, but seems actually to be snow, chewed up by tyre tracks; the tiny scurrying human figures and vehicles look like a combustible confusion of infantry and artillery; there seems to be a rickety wooden police watchtower of preposterous elevation; while bizarrely, the building facing Tietz’s has black smoke issuing from it, as though it had suffered a direct hit from a bomb or shell. It’s a picture of peace and prosperity, but it might almost be a war photograph. To walk or ride anywhere here in this camel encampment is surely to risk life and limb.
Throughout the twenties, Döblin wrote pieces about Berlin for the papers, almost unfiltered impressions, breathless, canny, fast-forward. A relay of nine writers was commissioned to write accounts of travelling on one of Berlin’s new omnibus lines. Döblin was given the section from Alexanderplatz to Schlossplatz. His ‘hood. ‘We stagger off, beetle off, shuffle off. The thing has a Maybach engine, is the size of a house, and runs like an eel. How would you like to wind up under something like that?’ The soon-to-be-notorious transcriptions of routes and tickets and prices and transport by-laws are deployed, zany little rhymes appear, wares, voices, pedestrians. Consciousness is in constant flux; the style is osmotic, adaptive, gauzy. Shoe shops, police, American-style milkshakes. ‘Six passengers get off, three get on, this is the Berlin bus, en passant.’ He is not so much a camera as a non-specific recording device, the involuntary ear as much as the selective or beguiled eye, in equal parts bombarded and hungry. Perhaps from there it is not so far to the idea of Franz Biberkopf, or as sometimes here (and why not?), ‘Frankie BBK’, a man playing catch-up, pinball to flipper, hero as anti-hero as victim, mammal restored to herd after technical timeout, because, as has been remarked, his antagonist in the novel is not so much the coffee-and-lemonade Reinhold with his furrowed face and strange strength and woollen sea-boot hose as reality itself, as the everything-that-is-the-case-and-then-some of the city hoisting itself onto the scales. On one of his earlier jaunts, in 1923 (’A sunny morning; I set off on a circumambulation of the Alexanderplatz’), Döblin encountered a busker:
From the entrance of one of the houses comes a sound of singing; people are standing around; I walk in. There in the courtyard, accompanied by all sorts of theatrical caperings, a rather down-at-heel fellow, no longer in the first flush of youth, is padding around, singing – yes, and singing what? Heil dir im Siegerkranz. Every verse; I last heard it in 1918, and am thunderstruck. There is some giggling, others are aghast; he just carries on belting it out.
Surely, as the critic Klaus Müller-Salget surmises, this scene, from an article in the Berliner Tageblatt called ‘Eastwise round the Alexanderplatz’, is the earliest germ of the novel: the veteran singing wartime songs in the courtyard for pennies.
Other things played into the book (as much as anything else, literature is about chance,
or is not without chance, or getting chance to work in your favour, and with the resolutely non-planning Döblin, rather more than most). A friend gave him a glossary of Berlin words and expressions, Der richtige Berliner. Now, Döblin had partly grown up with Berlin and its Schnauze or slang (among the principal elements or tendencies of which are criminality, the self-conceit of the capital city, Yiddish, a humour both grinding and flippant, and deliberately bad grammar, like the switching of accusative and dative); as an author and wordsmith he was attuned to it, and interested in it; and as a doctor he would have come across it all the time. But even so, seeing the 1925 edition, which Döblin worked with (or I could say, from), brings many shocks of recognition. Then he was asked to write the introduction to a collection of Berlin photographs by one Mario von Bucovich. Here, for the first time, he made an extensive use of statistics, claimed that brute scale rather than any particular characteristics defined the city, and argued that the essence of Berlin was invisible – an unusual argument to advance in a book of photographs, Schoeller notes, but it chimes with the auditory Döblin, in whom the visuals may be distorted, may be caricature, but the sounds are authentic. Perhaps one last bit of chance was Döblin’s reconciliation with his publisher, Samuel Fischer. Fischer, as said, had washed his hands of his author, but one of his editors, aware of Berlin Alexanderplatz and no doubt its unusual potential, persuaded Fischer’s wife Hede to invite Döblin to give a reading from the manuscript at the Fischers’ villa in Grunewald. Fischer was won over, and opted in again. He did insist, though, on the subtitle, ‘The story of Franz Biberkopf”; ‘Berlin Alexanderplatz’, for Fischer, was the name of a railway stop, not a title for a book.
Remains to describe the novel’s success, which was extraordinary for anything so adventurously composed and with, on the face of it, such a resolutely ignoble focus on murder, prostitution, theft, betrayal, drunkenness, poverty and crippledom: following its serialization (in excerpted form) in the Frankfurter Zeitung, it was reviewed, overwhelmingly positively, some 120 times; negative reactions, like the fury and disdain of Communist reviewers, who either disliked the self-professed petit-bourgeois author Döblin, or couldn’t see a proper proletarian role model in his criminal, and worse, apolitical hero, if anything helped further. The book quickly sold out its 10,000 first print run, and sales were quite soon pushing 50,000; an interesting radio adaptation followed the next year (with Döblin himself involved: like the single father in the tenement section of the novel, he loved the new medium); and in 1931 a more conventional film version starring the popular and imposing Heinrich George (not unlike Oliver Hardy on the poster) gave further currency to the title and the story (though ironically it did scant justice to the fluid, film-influenced techniques of the book – say, Walter Ruttmann’s 1927 documentary film Symphony of a City). In short order, translations came out in Dutch, English, French, Spanish, Italian, Danish, Swedish, Hungarian, Czech and even – in 1935, and in the teeth of continuing opposition from the German Communists – Russian. Still, it wouldn’t have been Döblin if it had all been roses and gravy ever after. The awarding of the 1929 Nobel Prize to Thomas Mann less than a month after publication (with a staggering 700,000 additional sales of a new popular edition of Buddenbrooks rushed out by Fischer, who also happened to be Mann’s publisher) all but crushed Berlin Alexanderplatz. With the coming to power of Hitler in January 1933, prospects for the book, any further payments to the author, and the possibility of a continued life in Germany all suddenly and completely ceased for the next dozen years. Warned by friends, Döblin left Germany the day after the Reichstag Fire.
•
Berlin Alexanderplatz has had time on its side. Which is to say that fiction, inasmuch as it has developed at all in the last ninety years, has gone its way: the way of greater chaos, absorptiveness, allusiveness, speed, a kind of interiority that is indistinguishable from exteriority (and of course vice versa). We know as readers that what we see and hear we are; we know the world is a violent and intoxicating place; we know that a lot of our lives is sub-rational, and that a lot of what we know is trivial or doesn’t matter. Hence, Beats, post-Moderns, a great deal especially of the American writing of the last fifty years, documentary fiction, experimental and difficult texts – but also simple and popular writing, crime fiction and so forth – all are in its debt or shadow. Döblin was long dismayed that writing addressed itself to such a tiny potential audience, or rather, that good books (heck, even bad books!) excluded, a priori, the overwhelming majority of people. He thought – in view of his reputation and the difficulty of reading him, ironically – that things should be made easier and more tempting for the reader. But simplicity, ease of access, folk-speech, they are in him as well.
I used to think of Berlin Alexanderplatz that it had good bones; I still do. The story of Franz as told in the little chapter summaries and episode titles – of how he comes out of prison; regains his bearings in Berlin; is cheated by Lüders; goes into a great alcoholic sulk; starts over; meets Reinhold; takes a turn to the bad; is run over and loses an arm; falls in with his old pals Herbert and Sonia; meets Mitzi and becomes her pimp; sees Reinhold again; forgives him; rejoins Pums’s band of fruit sellers, this time with real commitment; loses Mitzi; is distraught; is violently arrested; seeks, by starving himself into a cataleptic state, to die; and is finally restored to Berlin, given a middle name and a menial job and a new beginning – is an almost ideal blend of surge and turn, or oomph and twist. What took me longer to understand or appreciate were the extrinsic features of the book: the things that didn’t advance the story, or that were put there to amplify it, or provide a counterpoint to it. I was impatient with, or perplexed by, the biblical and mythological episodes, cosmic or cosmological connections, other narratives. So intent was I on Franz, and if not on Franz, then on his creator, that I was blinded to the fact that the novel was not primarily biographical, much less autobiographical (other than the conversation of the doctors in the ‘closed institution’ of Buch near the end, where Döblin worked from 1906 to 1908, it’s not easy to think what that might be), but documentary: not a slice but the whole pie.
The book contains a great deal that is simply there for its own sake. Robert Musil talked about Döblin’s ‘pursuing the principle of interest: an interesting idea, one immerses oneself in it, keeps out other things, and all done with panache’. And then: ‘Intellectually, it’s not enough, but it’s enough for the better kind of reader.’ There does seem to be a prodigality, an unworked-out-ness, a roughness-at-the-edges if not an outright scruffiness about Döblin, as he offers the reader not a biographical, but a kind of intellectual collage, put together from some of the diverse things he knew about and thought about. And there we see the one and the many, the interest in systems, in mass-explanations, both a scientist’s and a spiritual man’s sense of le tout, sometimes an almost touching wish to explain how things hang together, how they work: the law; the slaughterhouse; bread-making; Newton’s First and Second Laws of Mechanics; psychiatry; sugar and starch; trees; the avatars Adam and Abraham and Job; mythology; solar energy; weather; the city and mass-transportation; trades unions and politics; ventilation; communications from beacon to telegraph; manned flight; sexuality; storms; sacrifice and healing; angels and birds. The systems exist, they are not codified, there is no über-system, except perhaps the book itself, which is one of those vying (with, among others, Peter Rabbit, according to Malcolm Lowry, who was an early admirer) for the title The Great Book of Everything. Perhaps Musil is right, and Berlin Alexanderplatz does run on interest, on capacity, on variety, on a jostle of ideas as much as language and characters. Truly, the competing and the reinforcing explanations crowd the ether. In an unused preface for the book, Döblin wrote: ‘There are two paths in this world, one visible and one invisible.’ Franz Biberkopf, as Klaus Schröter says, walks both of them.† He is there from gutter to stars, though he may not always know it, he is (in one of the few myths not used or alluded to in the book!) both the earth-
hugging Antaeus and the Hercules who would pick him up and throw him away.
•
One of the ways in which things have moved Döblin’s way is that language – including the language of books – has become so much more demotic. It is hard to imagine a contemporary novel being taken to task for this, the way Eugene Jolas’s translation of Berlin Alexanderplatz was in certain quarters in 1931: ‘There is not a word known to our profanity, vulgarity, obscenity, slang and gangsterdom that is not found in it. . . It has been, however, a bit overworked; there was really no need of perfect indecency’.‡ Standard practice has, to some extent, caught up; we all talk more like thieves, and some of us write more that way too. Döblin got there early, and was waiting for us. Perfect indecency is more or less where we’re at. In a sense, it’s made him easier to translate now than when his book came out.
I admire the spirit of Jolas, who is remarkably wholehearted as a translator, and competes feistily with his author. In Anke Detken’s survey of some of the early translations of Berlin Alexanderplatz he usually fares best, certainly compared to the first Spanish version, which translates street names (the title is Plaza de Alejandro, if you will!), or the first French translation, which more insidiously antiquates, literarizes, cuts and domesticates – substitutes the inevitable City of Light for – the place Jolas is happy to leave as Berlin.§ I haven’t seen him be really badly wrong anywhere, and I have been grateful to take over almost word for word his translations of a hymn, a couple of rhymes and a ballad, for which I confess I lacked the application. If he has a fault for the English reader, it is that everything gets a little monotonous and strenuous, is like an exotic muscle or a fog or a pudding in a museum. Over the many years I have been working and not working on Berlin Alexanderplatz – it may be the only book I’ve translated that seems to have demanded anything like an ‘approach’ from me – it has gradually become clear that more normality, a slightly speedier rhythm (English is much less patient than German, never mind the talky, self-relishing, almost baroque Berlin dialect), and more of what I call ‘signalling’ is what I want to do. The worst thing, to my mind, would have been to leave the English reader quite at sea in this bitty, yeasty collage, which seems to have been how many people experienced the Jolas, which got a mixed reception when it came out, and seems to be widely and unfairly disliked now. But then it’s hard to think of translators other than Constance Garnett that are still well thought of a hundred years later.