Topography and Literature / Deutschsprachige Gegenwartsliteratur und Medien (PDF)

"Patrick Fortmann, University of Chicago Topographies of Transport: The Openings of Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (S. 125-126)

In a revealing introductory essay to a collection of Berlin photographs, originally written in 1928 – the year before the monumental Berlin Alexanderplatz: The Story of Franz Biberkopf was published – but significantly revised and expanded two years later, Alfred Döblin diagnoses the modernist inability to speak of, let alone to write Berlin.1 To illustrate his claim and to discredit the style of narrating urban space that Berlin had rendered obsolete, Döblin begins a familiar tale, only to interrupt himself in the second sentence, »The illuminated ads throw punches, the speakers rail nonstop, the goods pile up in heaps in displays, which used to be tactful and demure.

Gigantic autobuses from different continents speed through these strange streets, gleaming in international false luxury, while in the suburbs« (KS III 153).2 With the abandoned narrative (»while in the suburbs«), Döblin takes stock of the modernist repertory for perceiving, depicting, and representing the metropolis that had become the standard of the avant-garde of his time, the violent, almost physical assault on the senses that incorporates visual, audible, and tactile impulses, the all-pervasive commodification that dominates the publicsphere, the backward-looking lament that proliferation has replaced taste and restraint has given way to accumulation, and finally the omnipresent and dynamic traffic that cuts through rather than connects urban spaces.

Döblin does not denounce the techniques and the critiques of modernity that generate them as such. Rather, he dismisses a narrative that simply describes these techniques instead of harnessing them, and thus questions how suitable such a narrative is for capturing the reality of a Berlin that, according to the same essay,

Dr. Reinhard K. Zachau ist Professor für Deutsch und Film Studies an der University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, USA. Er ist Autor einer Reihe von Werken, u. a. einer Monographie über Stefan Heym und einer Einführung zum deutschen Film, sowie Studien über Hans Fallada, Heinrich Böll und Stefan Heym. Dr. Reinhard Zachau is Professor of German and Film Studies at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee (USA). He is the author of a number of books, among them a volume on Stefan Heym's work, introductions to German film and to Berlin's culture, along with studies on Wolfgang Koeppen, Hans Fallada and Heinrich Böll.