On Alexanderplatz, Fassbinder's Orphans

Nearly thirty years after Rainer Werner Fassbinder filmed the fourteen parts of his fifteen-hour epic, Berlin Alexanderplatz, which first played on German television in the fall of 1980, a remastered version has been made available on DVD. The DVD itself is welcome since the film, an unmistakable art-house success, had also become a typical art-house product, available only sporadically and difficult to schedule. The digital remastering has also clarifed the dark colors which had initially confused and frankly alienated television viewers, whose numbers decreased as the episodes followed. The new release, however, deserves a large audience. At the most basic level, Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz is an effective adaptation of Alfred Döblin's 1929 big-city novel not least because the strong narrative coherence that Fassbinder imposes provides a steadied ground from which to reread and reconsider the novel in all its dimensions. Especially in the classroom, Fassbinder will prove to be an excellent point of entry into Döblin's complex, layered text. However, Berlin Alexanderplatz is also Fassbinder's highly compelling appropriation of the novel, from which the iconoclastic director extracts and embellishes "the story of Franz Biberkopf" to recenter and psychologize the relationship between Franz and the gangster Reinhold over the course of the year 1927–28.

What Fassbinder finds in Döblin is a storyline about Franz, a former moving man, then a murderer, a pimp, and a small-time thief who is drawn into a love triangle with his Mieze, who supports him through prostitution, and Reinhold, the much more imperious Unhold, or fiend, to whom Franz is inexorably drawn and who eventually murders Mieze. Fassbinder dismisses the plot itself as something from a "dime novel," "not more than a series of strung-together yellow-press melodramas." Yet he needs this plot, which he cobbles together from Döblin's much more digressive and fragmentary text in order to explore what Fassbinder regards as "really great," which is the "how" in Döblin's narration: "In Berlin Alexanderplatz," writes Fassbinder about the novel in an evocative essay, "The City of Man and His Soul," which accompanied the conclusion of the shooting in spring 1980, "even the smallest and merely mediocre emotions, feelings, moments of bliss, longings, satisfactions, sorrows, fears, lack of awareness of the seemingly nondescript, unimportant, insignificant individuals are allowed; so-called 'little guys' are granted the same greatness as is usually in art only granted to the so-called great people." He is impressed with the tenderness by which Döblin represented the "almost unbelievable imagination and passion" of his brutal, yet sweet and pliant protagonist. Rainer Fassbinder's direct aim for Franz Biberkopf, who is tucked into the folds of Döblin's pages, and is much less visible in the novel than he is in Fassbinder's film, is autobiographical. By virtue of his barely conscious discovery of his love for Reinhold, one that Fassbinder regards as remarkably "pure," Franz provided Fassbinder an immediately recognizable literary alter ego; the character helped the filmmaker create some sort of identity for himself without having his own "agonizing fears" and "homosexual longings" completely break him to pieces: "this reading . . . helped me not to go to pieces [nicht kaputtzugehen]."¹ Franz Biberkopf, c'est moi.

Fassbinder's film centers on the psychological dramatization of the fear and desire that produce the unequal relations of power in the relationships between Franz, Reinhold, and Mieze. It is also about Fassbinder and in some ways it is Fassbinder: mercurial, expressive, long-winded, self-important, compelling. There is nothing wrong with appropriation, but the fact is that much of Döblin's "how" does get lost despite Fassbinder's emphasis on method. Döblin used Franz in order to question the stability and pertinence of identity; subjects are both dissolved and rearranged by the constant circulation of goods, notions, and stories in a city that finds no point of rest...