Published in 1929 as the Weimar Republic was slouching toward extinction, Alfred Doblin’s existential metafiction, Berlin Alexanderplatz, has been categorized as a work of modernism, realism, futurism, and naturalism, drawing influences from Joyce, Zola, and Dickens.  Although these literary categorizations may seem disparate, they blend together seamlessly in Doblin’s world.  Subtitled The Story of Franz Biberkopf, Berlin Alexanderplatz is, on the surface, a narrative of one man’s search for redemption and meaning in the face of a collapsing culture, but a closer read reveals an author who sublimely merges content and form to explore the complex relationships between humans and the surroundings they are cast into.  Doblin’s literarily self-conscious epic is also about the reader’s relationship to difficult art forms.  The relationship of Franz to his environment and the relationship of the reader to the text  is never a comfortable one.

Berlin Alexanderplatz opens with Franz Biberkopf’s release from prison after a four-year sentence.  Convicted in the beating death of his girlfriend, Franz is thrust into a Germany undergoing drastic social and technological change as the Weimar Republic comes to a close and a certain charismatic leader begins his campaign of terror.  Intending to do well in the straight world, Franz is fully convinced of his reformation, yet societal forces compel him back to a life of crime, culminating in the loss of a limb and the murder of his girlfriend, Mieze, by a rival gangster.  Franz ends up a broken and cynical man, resigned to a life of poverty, petty crime and the realization that he is simply a mass of organic issue cast about the universe by fate’s cruel games.  Regardless of where his head is at, he has no power over his life’s circumstances.  Franz is merely another tragic example of how easily manipulated the German working class was after World War I.

The plot itself is not so complicated, but the manner by which Doblin reveals events is pure tour-de-force narrative structuring.  No experimental work published after February 22, 1922 can escape comparison to Ulysses, and Berlin Alexanderplatz is no exception.  Doblin didn’t try to hide the fact that he heavily revised his work after reading Joyce’s opus.  Much like Ulysses, the narrative is more to be experienced than simply read.  Long, poetic passages lull you into pastoral revelry or one is just as prone to be bombarded by quickly moving images of modern life and its subsequent brutality via newspaper ads, shouts in the street, speeding cars, muggings, or slaughterhouse techniques.  A brilliant survey of German life in all of its beauty, brutality, and sense of impending decay ebulliently pours out onto 400 pages.  Doblin’s combination of blunt honesty about the poverty, crime and facism pervading Germany mixed with experimental fiction technique paves the way for novels like Celine’s Death on the Installment Plan or Dos Passos’ USA Trilogy.  Sacred and profane, sublime and ridiculous, philosophical and laymanlike, Doblin conjures a wildly disparate cornucopia spilling over with dizzying effect.  The reader is jerked into the brutal, confusing and frightening world of Franz Biberkopf’s urban landscape and through the story of one man’s search for redemption, we come to understand that Franz’s search is both his and ours; and like the metaphor of pigs going to slaughter, we understand that our short and miserable lives are subject to random and profound suffering and joy at the hands of a cruel master fattening us up for a short meaningless life that will inevitably conclude in anticlimax.