Berlin Alexanderplatz: Radio, Film, and the Death of Weimar Culture (review)

What an excellent idea: to take the most outstanding piece of German modernism, Alfred Döblin's 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz, and track its translation into the emerging media of radio and film over the following tumultuous years, in order to analyze the various capabilities of cultural genres, their regulation by the state, and their susceptibility to political events, including, most dramatically, the "breakthrough" of the Nazi Party in the September 14, 1930 Reichstag elections. Peter Jelavich pulls it off with panache and insight. While he points out with clarity the limits Döblin's novel placed on its adaptation into a radio play and then a popular film, he puts the emphasis not on "media aesthetics" but on "extra-artistic historical factors" (xii). In the end, "fear of outspoken right-wing politicians" transformed the cultural landscape of the Weimar Republic and caused the Berlin Radio Hour to drop The Story of Franz Biberkopf four hours before it was to be broadcast on September 30, 1930. Jelavich somewhat overdramatically identifies a "fear psychosis" which not only made government oversight boards for radio and censorship committees for film increasingly skittish about hard-hitting dramatic representations, but, more importantly, made cultural producers much more hesitant to pursue controversial themes. Since it was not the Nazis themselves that forced the decision to cancel Döblin's radio play or to make relatively innocuous the film adaptation of Berlin Alexanderplatz by Phil Jutzi, "Weimar's cultural death" has a lot to do with the self-assumed defensiveness of the writers and directors themselves—including perhaps Döblin himself, who is not portrayed as contesting the cancelation, something Jelavich does not explore. In any case, the print media in Berlin clearly did not censor their indignation at the government's weakness, and the Hollywood import, All Quiet on the Western Front, stands as a potential counter example to Jelavich's political analysis. What does become very clear, however, is the deleterious role played by the process of government regulation which, depending on the political winds, pushed radio and film more or less firmly toward the safeground of "nonpolitical," but basically conservative, viewpoints or of pure entertainment, and had done so since the mid-1920s. Jelavich is at his best as he explores how political interference restricted popular cultural genres.

A marvelous opening chapter introduces Döblin's novel and his literary intentions. In a fascinating argument, Jelavich persuasively demonstrates that Berlin Alexanderplatz had "more in common with the aesthetics of the nickelodeon than with Weimar cinema." "Kinostyle" was appropriate to represent the "dispersion of the psyche," but, what is more, the media that facilitated that literary strategy of representation were also causes of the "crisis of subjectivity" (18). This double bind, in which the means of representation provided both clarity and complicity, gives the novel its extraordinary strength so that it can be read back and forth without offering a final resolution. For this reason, the substance of the novel already anticipates some of Jelavich's conclusions about the media landscape of the Weimar Republic. It is too bad, however, that Jelavich does not make more of how much the subsequent fate of the radio play and the film is previewed in the media stories choreographed by the novel itself. Jelavich summarizes the difficulties of adaptation across genres: "The novel evokes how a human personality dissolves in the modern, media-saturated enviornment; but paradoxicially, when the story is recounted in precisely those media, Biberkopf is presented as a coherent, autonomous personality. In short, the very image of humanity that is supposedly dissolved by the modern media celebrates its resurrection in the modern media" (xii). But this important theme is not sufficiently developed. Moreover, isn't the pressure to "kitschify," to narrate "happy endings," to imagine the self as big and strong and lovely the partial effect of media productions? Doesn't the message conjured up at one end come out garbled...