Döblin Berlin Alexanderplatz Reading Order

Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) is the greatest German novel of the twentieth century and one of the supreme achievements of the European modernist novel — a work that does for Berlin what Joyce's Ulysses does for Dublin: uses the stream of consciousness, montage, and the full noise of the modern city to render the experience of a single man's consciousness. Franz Biberkopf, a man just released from prison for killing his girlfriend in a drunken rage, tries to go straight in the chaos of late-Weimar Berlin — working as a street vendor, falling in with criminals, losing an arm, losing everything, and being rebuilt. Döblin invented a technique of overlapping multiple voices, newspaper headlines, advertisements, street songs, and biblical passages in a roar of urban simultaneity that influenced Brecht, Fassbinder (who made it into a fourteen-part film in 1980), and the entire tradition of German social fiction.