I’m recently back from a wonderful visit to Buffalo and, while clearing my desk of accumulated materials, found the January 17 issue of the New York Review of Books–in which I took great pleasure in reading Ian Buruma’s tribute to Berlin Alexanderplatz , Alfred Döblin’s 1929 novel as well as the film that Rainer Werner Fassbinder made from the book. Here, however, is Buruma’s tribute to the metropolis that lies behind those works:

Döblin has often been compared to Joyce, and Ulysses is sometimes cited as his model. Döblin always denied this, however. He wrote:

“Why should I imitate anybody? The living language I hear around me is enough, and my past gives me all the material I need.”

But he read Joyce after he had begun writing Berlin Alexanderplatz, and said that the Irishman’s work had “put the wind in my sails.”[3] In fact, both writers, living in the age of Freud and Jung, were attempting to do something similar, to break down the barriers between conscious behavior and subconscious drives by delving into the churning magma of their heroes’ chaotic inner lives.

But it is not just the human characters whose consciousness, or subconsciousness, is opened up for the reader, but the metropolis itself. Berlin Alexanderplatz is constructed as a collage of often random images that flicker into view, as though one were clattering through the teeming streets on an electric trolley, taking in advertising slogans, newspaper headlines, popular songs, bars, restaurants, hotels, neon signs, department stores, pawnshops, flophouses, cops, striking workers, whores, subway stations, and so on. Again, Fassbinder put this very well:

“More interesting than the question of whether Döblin was acquainted with “Ulysses” [is] the idea that the language in “Berlin Alexanderplatz” was influenced by the rhythm of the S-Bahn trains that kept rolling past Alfred Döblin’s study.”

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