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  • Berlin Alexanderplatz: Radio, Film, and the Death of Weimar Culture
  • Theodore F. Rippey
Berlin Alexanderplatz: Radio, Film, and the Death of Weimar Culture. By Peter Jelavich. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. xvi + 300 pages. $45.00.

If you understand "Weimar culture" as the "innovative, experimental, and left-leaning" textual production that gave us Döblin's 1920s masterwork, then Peter Jelavich wants you to know that this culture "was largely defunct by the end of 1931, the victim of a culture of fear that had gripped Germany ever since the previous autumn" (xi). That culture of fear issued from the brutal tactics of Weimar's extreme right, and in establishing this chain of causation, Jelavich essentially sets himself two challenges: to convince the reader that things did indeed unfold as he claims, and to imbue the premature death with cultural-historical meaning. Analyzing the three Weimar-era texts that bear the title Berlin Alexanderplatz and sorting through the tangle of contexts in which those texts were embedded, as the book's structure suggests, is an effective means of mastering both tasks.

The table of contents establishes the basic trajectory; we start with the novel, and things go downhill from there. Jelavich's first chapter offers a series of tight, compelling observations about how Döblin's structure and style do justice to the dynamism of the Alexanderplatz milieu and the profusion of interwar German mediascapes. In exploring the novel's intermediality and its polyvocal web of urban discourses, Jelavich traces how this epic project ultimately made dissolution of the sovereign subject (what Döblin called Depersonisation) inevitable, both for the characters and for himself. Jelavich argues, however, that giving up the "pretense of authorial autonomy" (25) did not mean that Döblin was "swept away completely by the discourses of the city" (25). In capturing the ever-shifting balance between assertions of individual control and the superindividual forces that resisted and curtailed such control, the novel reveals the contradiction, ambiguity, and instability essential to the times. The resulting amorphousness and volatility were primary factors in the book's political ambivalence (always distasteful to the doctrinaire left), and it prevented Döblin (should we take him at his word) from achieving any semblance of the narrative resolution one would expect from the traditional novel. Perhaps, Jelavich suggests, resolution would have come in a sequel epic, but instead of remaining in the realm of the book, Döblin transposed the story for the airwaves, a decision that led to the excision of the "political, sexual, and commercial themes," that had made the novel so complex.

Before moving to analysis of that radio version, Jelavich reconstructs the "Politics and Censorship at the Berlin Radio Hour" (chapter two) and "Cultural Programming and Radio Plays" (chapter three). Here we get an overview of important structures and people in Weimar radio's extensive content-control system, as well as a survey of [End Page 169] attempts to create a new kind of art for the airwaves. By decree, radio programming was to be überparteilich, and this term quickly became a lightning rod. Jelavich relays the leftist argument that non-partisan programming should achieve a pluralist representation of all views, and chronicles the right's demand to evacuate all politics from broadcasting (calling even for radio to refrain from endorsing the parliamentary system). With the development of musical and dramatic programming came the often uneasy commingling of aesthetics and politics, adding to the partisan wrangling in the always tricky game of textual interpretation. Jelavich traces the perceived emergence, over the course of the 1920s, of a listening public more capable of embracing a pluralist mass medium, but he finds that this genuinely republican Hörkultur remained ephemeral.

In his analysis of the Alexanderplatz radio play (chapter four), Jelavich examines the reasons for this. With The Story of Franz Biberkopf, Döblin sought to contribute productively to the effort to reconcile the differences of the bildungsbürgerlich programming elite and the masses of listeners who constantly demanded lighter, more entertaining fare. The brevity of the broadcast format forced a "massive compression" of the epic work, Jelavich notes, but Franz Biberkopf still "displayed many other elements...

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