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6. Deconstructing Modern Subjectivity:On Berlin Alexanderplatz
- University of Michigan Press
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chapter 6 Deconstructing Modern Subjectivity: On Berlin Alexanderplatz True to its sensationalist style, in 1932 the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung described Alexanderplatz as “the setting for many tragedies in real life and in ‹ction. Here Berliners feel the heartbeat of their hometown most strongly.”1 Con‹rming this point, Eugen Szatmari, in an alternative travel guide to Berlin, declared that tourists would not learn anything about the city’s four million inhabitants by limiting their excursions to Unter den Linden and the Kurfürstendamm and advised his readers to venture into the residential neighborhoods to the north and east.2 Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz: Die Geschichte vom Franz Biberkopf (Berlin Alexanderplatz : The Story of Franz Biberkopf, 1929), the most famous German city novel and a celebrated example of literary modernism, simultaneously con‹rms and complicates such widespread views about Alexanderplatz as the center of working-class Berlin. At ‹rst glance, the story of Franz Biberkopf, a former cement and transport worker just released from prison, seems to bear out the area’s reputation as a hotbed of crime, vice, and illegality. Yet the centrality of Alexanderplatz to Wagner’s plans for the New Berlin also allows Döblin to explode the very terms that have de‹ned urban identity and space until that point and to rewrite the city text in accordance with the spatial manifestations of modern mass society. Doubly marked as other, extraterritorial within the class divisions of Weimar Berlin and anachronistic within the classless society envisioned for the New Berlin, Alexanderplatz functions as an instrument of construction as well as deconstruction—qualities that make the Döblin novel a particularly instructive text for an analysis of architecture, identity, and what I have been calling (following Soja) the sociospatial dialectic. The architectural principle of construction is central to the functioning of the novel on several levels. The intricate layers of realist description, 209 objective reportage, modernist montage, stream of consciousness, and mythological references present the modern metropolis as a construction site and make these principles of construction an integral part of urban representation and identity. At the same time, the metaphor of construction establishes a direct connection between the writing of the modern city novel and the making of modern subjectivity. As indicated by the full title, the novel has two protagonists: the square and the man who sets out to conquer it. When Biberkopf returns to the city’s eastern center after having spent four years in Tegel prison for the murder of his prostitute girlfriend, he gets off the streetcar at Rosenthaler Platz and slowly makes his way back to his old haunts: “The punishment begins”3 (‹g. 6.1). His plan? To start a new life and become respectable; in other words, to assert himself as an autonomous subject. As he soon learns, however, the existential struggle of “Biberkopf or Berlin”4 can no longer be resolved through categories of subject and object, self and other, that guarantee the autonomy of the bourgeois subject and guide his interactions with the world. In the almost deadly encounter with what Döblin calls fate, Biberkopf is subsequently beaten three times, a victim of his weakness, ignorance, arrogance, and hubris. At the end of the novel, we ‹nd him working as an assistant watchman in a small factory, having ‹nally recognized that “a man cannot exist without many other men” and “that much unhappiness comes from walking alone” (BA, 632–33). His thus becomes an example to all those “who, like Franz Biberkopf, live in the human skin, and, like this Franz Biberkopf, ask more of life than a piece of bread and butter” (2). The return of this ordinary man of the lumpenproletariat to one of the most contested and embattled sites in the New Berlin allows me to utilize the many functions of construction—as a literary motif, narrative technique, representational mode, and discursive strategy—for a critical perspective surprisingly absent from the extensive scholarship on Berlin Alexanderplatz: the novel’s contribution to Weimar discourses of class.5 As my discussion in the previous chapters has shown, the double crisis of modern subjectivity and urban space cannot be analyzed apart from its multilayered, multiperspectival, and multivoiced manifestations in textual practices. Döblin addresses this problem without succumbing to the universalism of bourgeois humanism or the determinism of proletarian literature . Instead he assumes the decentered perspective of the lumpenproletariat to imagine alternative models of modern urbanity and collectivity. Retracing the footsteps of his urban discourse, we...