Berlin Alexanderplatz

Name: Berlin Alexanderplatz
Author: Alfred Döblin

Alfred Döblin · 1929

The German Ulysses. Doblin tells the story of a Weimar-era ex-convict's life in the Berlin underworld using montage techniques borrowed from cinema and radio: streams of consciousness, newspaper headlines, biblical allusions. Joyce praised it. Published in 1929, it captured Berlin's chaos in a form that matched it.

The case against

on the pace
“It is slow, disjointed, and frequently aimless”
a book blog
on the cockney translation
“he denatures the novel completely”
Mitchell Abidor · Jewish Currents, 2018
on Franz Biberkopf
“Biberkopf has few original thoughts, spends much of his time drinking and bellowing in bars”
a Substack review
on the opening
“an otherwise opaquely slow opening, Biberkopf meets two kindly Jewish men in the Scheunenviertel neighborhood”
Adam Thirlwell · The New York Review of Books, 2018