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The main reason I didn’t like it was its heavy reliance on Berlin slang and colloquialisms, which tested my German skills greatly, and the mundanity of it all. Gloomy and oppressive like the U-Bahn below, the dialogue sometimes moves to the same monotonous rhythm. Normally, I like stream of consciousness fiction, and Virginia Woolf is my favourite novelist, but it was a struggle to enjoy this book. He is very much in and of Berlin and common, at one point considered a sort of ‘Vieh’ (in the contemptuous sense, animal or beast), a keyword throughout the novel, because humans are seen as little more than animals.Īlfred Döblin around 1930 (image from Wikimedia Commons) He lives in a grubby world of criminals and prostitution, with the lengthening shadow of Nazism falling over Germany.

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Despite this, because of his past and the community he is released into, he is unable to free himself from the criminal underworld which has been his life. Regarded as one of the greatest German novels of all time, it tells the story of Franz Biberkopf, a murderer who upon release from prison resolves to become a respectable member of society in 1920s Berlin. This is still the only available English translation of the novel.ĭust-Jacket of the first edition of Berlin Alexanderplatz (Berlin, 1929) YA.1988.a.21631

012554.dd.26), a work which was not well received at the time. Often compared to Joyce’s Ulysses, Berlin Alexanderplatz is amorphous and turbid and in many ways untranslatable, although Eugène Jolas did translate it into English in 1931 (British Library. The stream of consciousness technique has never been practised as much in German as in English or American literature but Döblin’s book is often seen in those ‘greatest novels of all time’ lists alongside other exponents of the genre, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner. Just a few pages in I realised this, partly because of the stream of consciousness nature of Döblin’s writing and partly because of the passages of colloquial language. Here former BL cataloguer Trevor Willimott reflects on his experience of reading the original work.įor someone reading the original text whose first language is not German, Berlin Alexanderplatz is a formidable challenge. Due to its faithfulness and deep appreciation of the material, this five-episode miniseries stands up against any other film or television adaptation, though Rintoul may not sets hearts aflutter the way Colin Firth did in the also excellent 1995 miniseries.The current season of films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder at the BFI has included his adaptation of Alfred Döblin’s ‘unfilmable’ novel Berlin Alexanderplatz. This superb BBC adaptation from 1980 zips along, thanks to lively performances, fluid direction, and a keen grasp of the wit of Austen's dialogue and her satirical characters, who range from clever and kind to utterly odious. Austen's novels are miracles of skillful plotting, fusing a rich understanding of psychological motivation with whimsical turns of chance. Darcy, that sets in motion the fate of Elizabeth Bennet, resolved only after a labyrinth of social and personal complexities. Bingley sends the Bennet household-with five girls of a marrying age-into a tizzy. In Jane Austen's classic novel Pride and Prejudice, the arrival of a young, well-off, eligible man named Mr.