What I Am Reading: "Berlin Alexanderplatz" by Alfred Döblin

This book, my Christmas vacation read and the last book of 2019, was originally on a mini-reading list I planned and aborted about a year ago, seeking to read the great novels of the metropolis. With my reading objectives satisfied for this year, I sought unsuccessfully to recreate that list, having been stymied by an inability to secure a copy of Manhattan Transfer from a library. Nevertheless, I persisted, and the book will pull double-duty as I dabble in the Weimar Republic for the first month of 2020.

The book is a fairly famous modernist novel and is the portrait of Berlin in its first, and some might say only, heyday. Set in 1928 (and published in '29), it is the story of a rather dull member of the lumpenproletariat, Franz Biberkopf, as he is buffeted by the winds of fate while navigating the criminal underworld, after his release from prison for the manslaughter of his girlfriend. The novel earns its modernist label through numerous random digressions into details on the city, its geography, public transit lines, copy from advertisements, song lyrics, weather forecasts, and the lives of its imagined (or perhaps collected) citizens, as well as biblical and mythological imagery. It is a dense text, and I appreciate the readable and lively English translation by Michael Hofmann. I am not a reader of German, so I can't compare, but he says in his afterword that he tried to capture the book's essence for English readers, replacing the literal with the identifiable when necessary (though immersing himself in the period enough to understand and try to relate Döblin's original meaning).

It is nice to see the Weimar Berliners on their own terms. I have read and watched modern treatments, which fixate (understandably) on approaching doom. The only other contemporary account I have read is Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin/Mr. Norris Changes Trains, the account (as Isherwood apparently lamented) of an outsider and voyeur. I enjoyed this novel for its story and for its dense, challenging text, but also for its peek into the ephemera of Weimar Berlin, fortunately if-fleetingly preserved by modernist art such as this or a Dadaist collage. This requires speculation on a chicken-or-egg scenario similar to the artistic output of the Spanish Civil War: are we more avidly interested in these glimpses of a decisively-vanished everyday life because they were fossilized in this way, or would we have been interested anyway and were just lucky that the participants were thoughtful enough to provide their scraps?