1. See Kreutzer, pp. 71-81, 134-47; and Sebald, pp. 14-58. During Döblin's exile in Paris, Arthur Koestler and Manès Sperber are reported to have called him the "Konfusionsrat" (Counselor of Confusion). See J. Strelka, "Der Erzähler Alfred Döblin," in The German Quarterly 33 (1960), p. 209, quoted in SPG 509. [BACK]

2. See Sebald, p. 22, and Kreutzer, p. 76. [BACK]

3. See Kreutzer, p. 82. break [BACK]

4. The Ausgewählte Werke in Einzelbänden, begun in 1960 by the Walter-Verlag with new volumes still being added, is the standard edition of Döblin's works. Under its current editor, Anthony Riley, it is approaching the status of a complete edition. [BACK]

5. See Müller-Salget, pp. 12-15. [BACK]

6. This is reminiscent of a passage about engineers in Robert Musil's The Man without Qualities: "Why do they like to stick tie-pins adorned with stags' teeth or small horseshoes in their ties? Why are their suits constructed like the motor-car in its early stages? And why do they seldom talk of anything but their profession? Or if they ever do, why do they do it in a special, stiff, out-of-touch, extraneous manner of speaking that does not go any deeper down, inside, than the epiglottis?" Musil, The Man without Qualities, vol. 1, trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser (New York: Capricorn Books, 1965), p. 38. [BACK]

7. In January 1924, Döblin became a member of the "Gesellschaft der Freunde des Neuen Russland" (Society of Friends of the New Russia). See Meyer, p. 25. [BACK]

8. See Burton Pike, The Image of the City in Modern Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 8. Pike writes that the city has always been an image of extreme ambivalence in Western culture, but that the scales tipped toward a negative image during the rise of industrialism in the nineteenth century. Döblin's essay attempts to counteract this negative image. [BACK]

9. Pike, p. 88, points out that the topos of the city versus the country, conventional since Vergil, declines in importance in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The city becomes the primary setting of modern man. [BACK]

10. See Sebald, pp. 140-41. [BACK]

11. Biberkopf also represents an implicit critique of the bourgeois urban aesthete who is the typical hero of the nineteenth-century city novel, including Dostoyevsky's Raskolnikov. See Pike, p. 100. [BACK]

12. Quotations from Berlin Alexanderplatz will be referenced to both the German edition (= BA ) and to the English translation Alexanderplatz Berlin: The Story of Franz Biberkopf, trans. Eugene Jolas (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1976) = EJ. In some cases, it has been necessary to make changes in the Jolas translation. [BACK]

13. Volker Klotz, Die erzählte Stadt. Ein Sujet als Herausforderung des Romans von Lesage bis Döblin (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1969), p. 397, manages to compress the plot into one--albeit fairly complex--sentence. [BACK]

14. Theodore Ziolkowski, Dimensions of the Modern Novel: German Texts and European Contexts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp. 128-29, points out the probable travesty of Friedrich Hebbel's play "Gyges and his Ring," based on the legend of Gyges and Candaules in Herodotus. [BACK]

15. Keller, Döblins Montageroman, analyzes the montage technique in The Black Curtain and Wang-lun as well as in Berlin Alexanderplatz . [BACK]

16. Ekkehard Kaemmerling, "Die filmische Schreibweise," in Matthias Prangel, ed., Materialien zu Alfred Döblin. "Berlin Alexanderplatz" (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975), p. 185. Pike, p. 9, writes that it is natural to perceive a city as "a cacophony of impressions." [BACK]

17. Werner Welzig in his survey of the twentieth-century German novel arranges his material thematically and treats under the rubric "City Novel," his most meagerly represented category, only one work besides Berlin Alexander- soft

platz, Wolfgang Koeppen's Tauben im Gras (1951). Welzig, Der deutsche Roman im 20. Jahrhundert, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner, 1970), pp. 111-20. [BACK]

18. Pike, The Image of the City, p. 132, writes of the "stubborn spatiality of the city." [BACK]

19. This important distinction in point of view has been made by Müller-Salget, p. 295, and again by Keller, p. 145. The overwhelmingly chaotic impression of the first chapter has misled many commentators into treating it as the novel's primary mode for viewing the city. [BACK]

20. See Keller, pp. 143-52. Keller sees in the story the Jews tell Biberkopf a parable of central importance for the novel. [BACK]

21. Döblin's pronouncement in "The Structure of the Epic Work" that "It makes no difference and is a purely technical question, whether the epic author writes in present, preterite, or perfect tense" ( AzL 111) means only that choice of tense cannot be legislated and has no effect on the epic's "presence." Technique, of course, has a decisive influence on meaning. Müller-Salget, p. 120, points out the importance of the only narrative sentence in present tense in the whole of Wang-lun . [BACK]

22. To my knowledge, the only time Döblin uses the word "montage" is in a 1947 letter to Paul Lüth ( Briefe 377). [BACK]

23. Dietrich Scheunemann, Romankrise: Die Entstehungsgeschichte der modernen Romanpoetik in Deutschland (Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer, 1978), pp. 167-74, 182-83. [BACK]

24. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3, pp. 230-36. The two passages quoted below occur on pp. 232 and 233. [BACK]

25. Scheunemann, p. 176. [BACK]

26. While passages from this chapter are often cited in the secondary literature, it is treated systematically, to my knowledge, only by Klotz, pp. 375-80. In many cases, I have come to similar conclusions, but with differences in emphasis significant enough to warrant a second look. Müller-Salget, pp. 335-39, analyzes the montage at the beginning of book 5 as exemplary of all the others, because his main concern is to show how closely the "big city episodes" are related through theme, motif, imagery, and anticipation or recapitulation to the rest of the novel. Breon Mitchell, James Joyce and the German Novel 1922-1933 (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1976), pp. 131-50, argues convincingly that Döblin's reading of Ulysses influenced his technique in Berlin Alexanderplatz . On pages 138-39, Mitchell shows how Döblin changed book 2, chapter 1, after reading Ulysses . [BACK]

27. Müller-Salget, p. 121, points out the comparable natural rhythms of season in Wang-lun . [BACK]

28. Mitchell, p. 139, suggests that Döblin borrowed this device from Ulysses . Cf. James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: The Modern Library, 1961), p. 116. [BACK]

29. Marilyn Sibley Fries, "The City as Metaphor for the Human Condition: Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929)," Modern Fiction Studies 24 (Spring 1978), p. 44, notes this natural choice of a square to concentrate a fictional presentation of a city, while Klotz, p. 377, calls it "simultaneously the point of departure, arrival, and transfer." [BACK]

30. There are several feuilletons and short essays from the twenties in which Döblin treats this eastern quarter of Berlin. Their tone is consistently celebratory of the diversity and energy of its life, while not denying its darker side. One often encounters here motifs from reality which were later incorporated into the fictional city of the novel. Thus, in "Berlin und die Künstler" continue

(Berlin and the Artists) from the Vossische Zeitung, No. 180 (April 16, 1922): "in the Brunnenstrasse, the AEG: a delight!" (now collected in Zeitlupe 59). See also "Östlich um den Alexanderplatz" (In the East around the Alexanderplatz; 1923) in Zeitlupe 60-63, which includes as important a motif as a young man singing "Heil dir im Siegerkranz" in a back courtyard, as well as "Großstadt und Großstädter" (The Big City and its Inhabitants), Zeitlupe 225-44. [BACK]

31. They are not "pictorial symbols of the main facets of commerce in the city," as Mitchell calls them in James Joyce and the German Novel, p. 138. [BACK]

32. Klotz, pp. 375-76, calls them "a summary of the total city" and comments, "the epically organized city legitimizes itself through the officially organized city." Keller, p. 145, calls the city here "a thoroughly ordered whole . . . a community formed by the human spirit . . . a living alliance." [BACK]

33. Fries, pp. 46-47, seems to suggest that the list provides an arsenal of metaphor for the novel, and Klotz, p. 375, overstates the case when he says that the list "includes all possible institutions of this urban community." The emblem which seems most out of place both in the list and the novel, the Greek head symbolizing "Art and Culture," plays a humorously modest role when Biberkopf's friend Meck makes fun of him for joining a peddler's association although he has nothing to peddle. Meck says he may as well sell mouse traps or "plaster heads" and Franz answers, why not? ( BA 63, EJ 68). [BACK]

34. Again, connections can be made to Biberkopf. The building permit is related to the constant demolition and construction going on throughout the novel, and the license to hunt wild rabbits in the Fauler Seepark anticipates the refrain "The chase, the pursuit, the damned pursuit" ( BA 442-43, EJ 559-61) that runs through Franz's head just before his arrest. [BACK]

35. Biberkopf is later shown studying similar announcements on a Litfass pillar on the Alexanderplatz ( BA 186, EJ 226). [BACK]

36. Jürgen Stenzel, "Mit Kleister und Schere. Zur Handschrift von Berlin Alexanderplatz, " Text + Kritik 13/14 (June 1966), p. 43. Cf. Mitchell, pp. 137-38. [BACK]

37. Klotz, p. 379, asserts that the narrator here adopts his "omniscient role," but it is only a virtuoso pretense of omniscience, presented with a good deal of tongue-in-cheek. [BACK]

38. Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin (New York: New Directions, 1954), p. 1. [BACK]

39. Fritz Martini, Das Wagnis der Sprache. Interpretationen deutscher Prosa von Nietzsche bis Benn (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1954), p. 360. [BACK]

40. Ekkehard Kaemmerling undertakes to show specific cinematic techniques utilized by Döblin in Berlin Alexanderplatz, even claiming--without supporting evidence--that Döblin was directly indebted to the montage theories of Eisenstein and Pudovkin (Kaemmerling, p. 191). He says that only a "reader-cineaste" can fully understand all the cinematic techniques used in the novel (pp. 197-98). In contrast, Erich Kleinschmidt, the editor of Döblin's collected dramas, radio plays, and film scripts, has written that "for his epic theory, the formal possibilities of film had a fruitful, if not a decisive effect" (Kleinschmidt, "Nachwort," DHF 653). [BACK]

41. Klotz, pp. 381-82, states incorrectly that the chapter "ends with the conversation of two failures in a corner pub." [BACK]

42. Cf. Kaemmerling, p. 196, who describes a similar passage ( BA 267- hard

68, EJ 333) as "referring to its origin in a filmscript," without showing why it couldn't just as well have come from a playscript. [BACK]

43. Mitchell, pp. 138-39, argues convincingly through analysis of the Berlin Alexanderplatz manuscript that the chapter originally consisted of only section 3, and that sections 1 and 2 were added after Döblin read Joyce's Ulysses . [BACK]

44. Timothy Joseph Casey, "Alfred Döblin," in Expressionismus als Literatur. Gesammelte Studien, ed. Wolfgang Rothe (Bern: Francke, 1969), pp. 637-55, calls the novel "decidedly ordered by statistics" (p. 647). [BACK]

45. Klotz, p. 382, breaks off his analysis of this chapter after what I have called the second section, but treats the narrator extensively elsewhere. [BACK]

46. See SLW 142-70. [BACK]

47. Casey, p. 646, injects a word of caution: "The teacher has thrown out the baby with the bathwater, has denied the Furies of guilt along with those of fate." True, but Krause is also clearly posturing in this statement, and admits to having felt enough guilt to try to commit suicide. [BACK]

48. Hans-Peter Bayerdörfer, "Der Wissende und die Gewalt. Alfred Döblins Theorie des epischen Werkes und der Schluss von Berlin Alexanderplatz, " in Prangel, ed., Materialien zu Alfred Döblin, p. 169. Cf. UD 418. [BACK]

49. Döblin is here quoting the text of a socialist song, " Das sind wir Arbeitsmänner, das Proletariat ." [BACK]

50. Martini; Welzig; Erich Hülse in Möglichkeiten des modernen deutschen Romans, ed. Rolf Geissler (Frankfurt: Moritz Diesterweg, 1962), pp. 45-101. Roland Links presents a specifically Marxist variation on this interpretive line by defining Berlin as a capitalist metropolis ( Alfred Döblin, p. 124) and charging that the end of the novel, although urging solidarity with the marching masses, does not become sufficiently Communist in its call (p. 126). [BACK]

52. Bayerdörfer, p. 163, accepting the thesis of the city as chaos, nevertheless asserts that by the end of the novel, Biberkopf has achieved a political consciousness equal to that of the narrator. I would argue that urban and political consciousness reinforce each other. A politically aware Biberkopf will also be alive to the social potential of the city. [BACK]

53. Benjamin, pp. 235-36, implies that Biberkopf's loss of "fate" represents an aesthetic faltering which in the end degrades Biberkopf to the status of a hero in a bourgeois Bildungsroman . [BACK]

54. Keller, p. 144, interprets all the figures who appear in book 2, chapter 1, as parallel to Biberkopf in the sense that they are also trying to "conquer the city." This seems to me to go too far. It is only Biberkopf who has vowed to be decent and to survive on his own. If all these figures are "battlers, conquerors and failures," then the gesture of "conquering the city," which Keller interprets as Biberkopf's basic hubris and weakness, is reduced to simply an equivalent for "living." break [BACK]

55. See Prangel, Materialien , p. 54. While Döblin may not have written the dust jacket copy, he used the same phrase in an interview: Franz learns "that what's important is not to be a so-called decent person, but to find the proper comrade" ( SLW 180). [BACK]

56. At the same point in the novel, Death calls him "Pope Biberkopf" ( BA 479, EJ 605). [BACK]

57. Robert Minder, "Alfred Döblin," in Hermann Friedmann and Otto Mann, eds., Deutsche Literatur im zwanzigsten Jahrhundert (Heidelberg: Wolfgang Rothe Verlag, 1954), p. 295. [BACK]

58. Cf. Ziolkowski, Dimensions , pp. 120-31. [BACK]

59. See Sebald, pp. 89-91, who interprets the bread-baking metaphor as a mythical initiation into social conformity. [BACK]

60. See Müller-Salget, p. 310. [BACK]

61. See Kathleen Komar, "Technique and Structure in Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz," The German Quarterly 54 (May 1981), pp. 322-23, on the echoes of Ecclesiastes 4:9-12 in this last paragraph. As Komar notes, the biblical parallel tends to universalize rather than particularize the call for solidarity. [BACK]

62. James H. Reid, " Berlin Alexanderplatz --A Political Novel," German Life and Letters 21 (April 1968), p. 221. [BACK]

63. Bayerdörfer, pp. 156-65. [BACK]

64. Bayerdörfer, p. 163. [BACK]

65. Bayerdörfer, pp. 163-64. It seems wrong, however, to say that "In the final chapter Döblin has gone out of his way to make the constellation of contemporary political parties visible to the eye of the reader" (p. 164). This is precisely what he has not done, and it is the reason that the final chapter has caused such confusion. [BACK]

66. Minder, "Alfred Döblin," p. 295. [BACK]

67. Keller, p. 149. [BACK]

68. Links, Alfred Döblin , p. 115; Müller-Salget, p. 315; Keller, pp. 165 and 174. [BACK]

69. Ziolkowski, Dimensions , p. 129. [BACK]

70. Helmut Kiesel dubs these female figures "with a dual 'disposition' to erotic and religious redemption" Madonna Lisa , a phrase he borrows from Rilke (in the poem "Und du erbst das Grün" in the Stunden-Buch ). "The most complete realization of this type in Döblin's work, the synthesis of saint and whore from which all contradiction has been eliminated, is . . . Emilie Parsunke from Berlin Alexanderplatz " (Kiesel, p. 469). [BACK]

71. About Biberkopf's childhood we learn only that with his mother and siblings, he pasted decorations onto painted eggs to earn money ( BA 267, EJ 332). [BACK]

72. I have had to revise the Jolas translation considerably in this passage to make it conform to Döblin's original. Jolas follows Revelation 17:1-6 in the King James Version too closely and Döblin not closely enough. See Helmut Schwimmer, Alfred Döblin. Berlin Alexanderplatz (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1973), pp. 117--18, for a comparison of this passage with the Luther translation. Döblin's main changes are a switch from first to second person and from preterite to present. break [BACK]