Berlin Alexanderplatz and city literature

I’ve been spending my time in the 1920s, and the German Reading Month organizers kindly picked Alfred Döblin’s fragmented, jittery, pessimistic Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) for a readalong.  It is a member of an odd genre, the “city novel,” where the city is not merely a setting for the novel but part of is “aboutness.”  The city infects everything in the book.  A number of writers in the 1920s worked on these creatures.

Find me a piece on Berlin Alexanderplatz that does not begin with a lot of other books.  This post will not be much more than a list of books.  Ulysses (1922), Manhattan Transfer (1925), Mrs Dalloway (1925), “The Waste Land” (1922), for example.  Most commonly Joyce’s novel, perhaps because we can be sure everyone subsequent read it, which helps when claiming “influence.”  Nobody reading in English or German was reading Andrei Bely’s Petersburg (1913/16/etc.), which would have been an eye-opener.  Somebody writing about Berlin had read it – I’ll get to him.  Döblin actually read and reviewed Ulysses, in German, while writing Berlin Alexanderplatz, and specific aspects of the one book pretty clearly infiltrated the other.  That helps.

Eliot aside, the poets are not given enough credit.  They were exploring the cities first.  Charles Baudelaire demonstrated, or created, the link between the city and the new, the modern, soon to become the Modern.  City people were restless and uprooted.  They were constantly moving.  The city was constantly changing.  How to capture any of that in writing, or notes, or paint?  Lots of experiments; lots of different ways.

Some of the great New York writers were Yiddish immigrant poets, read by no one else, like Moishe Leib Halpern’s In Nyu York (1919).  Or they were European visitors, like Federico García Lorca or Blaise Cendrars.  I should write about Cendrars later, too.

Something changed with the introduction of film, too, especially montage, leading to pure narrative-free “city film”s like Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929).  How to represent the city – how about a little of this, a little of that, just glimpses seen from the tram window?  Collage changed things – why invent an advertisement when you can just paste in a real one?  Karl Kraus, in Vienna, would sometimes “write” pieces that were little more than him pointing at an appalling ad or article that summed up the age.  Look at how the set, nominally London, of the first scene of G. W. Pabst’s The Threepenny Opera (1931) has so much text, just above the people.

Part of the fun of Modernism is enjoying the dense and rapid network of ideas and techniques, with Picasso leading to Stravinsky to Eliot to Eisenstein, perhaps through something identifiable as “influence,” perhaps not – it is so vague to say that ideas were “in the air,” but “influence” is inadequate, often even false.  Artists of all kinds are looking carefully at the world around them, and looking at their materials.  Sometimes they see the same thing.  Sometimes they represent it similarly.

Tomorrow I will try to write about books, although not Berlin Alexanderplatz, and not just arrange them, however fun that is.  The reader might think “Not sure this guy has that much to say about BA.”  The reader might be right.  The reader who has gotten this far should probably skip this post and come back tomorrow.

Some German books I read recently - Rilke, Kafka, Brecht - In the dark times / Will there also be singing?

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), Rainer Maria Rilke, tr. Stephen Mitchell.

Let’s just assume that I did not understand this novel.  There are fragmented pieces about a young man in Paris.  He walks around and goes to museums and so on.  Paris is endlessly interesting.  Then there are other fragments about the narrator’s odd childhood in a castle in Denmark, raised among a group of eccentrics.  These pieces are also interesting.

How the two kinds of pieces fit together, I missed that completely.  Something to look forward to when I read the novel again someday.

The novel has quite a bit of French in it, translated by Mitchell in the notes.  Now that I am reading French, I can just grind through in the text, saving time and energy.  That is a joke; reading the note is easier and faster.  But I don’t read it, no, I must practice my French.

Diaries, 1910-1913, Franz Kafka, tr. Joseph Kresh, ed. Max Brod

I just finished “The Metamorphosis,” (1915), minutes ago, which I have read several times.  It is for me among the perfect fictions, with a central idea that is an outstanding fantasy taken literally but expands endlessly as symbol, metaphor, or allegory, with prose that is precise and elegant, and most surprisingly with at least one character as psychologically complex and “real” as in any other fiction I know.  My memory is that Kafka did not pull off the latter trick so often.

His little 1912 book Meditation (many possible alternative titles) is made up of little observations, or prose poems, or micro-fictions.  I am not sure what they mean, mostly, but reading the diaries I at least see what they are.  Much of Kafka’s writing in his diary, at least in these years, consists of the beginnings of let’s call them stories.  Story starters, except often the story does not start.  One line, a paragraph, then nothing.  And then, inspiration strikes, and Kafka spends all night writing “The Judgment” (1913).  He keeps searching for that magic.  Endlessly frustrating from his point of view.  Meanwhile, Max Brod says “Hey, c’mon, some of these are good – publish them!”

One year, 1911, takes up a third of Kafka’s diary writing, much of which is about Kafka’s love of a Yiddish theater company that set up in Prague.  Kafka not only went to performances but became friends with the actors, hung out with them, had crushes on one in particular.  This whole chunk of the book is of high interest.  Whether it helps me understand anything else Kafka wrote, I will see.  I continue my exploration.

Poems 1913-1956, Bertolt Brecht, tr. many people, ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim

Reading this book was a lot like reading a diary, or, given the 150 pages of notes, a biography of Brecht.  Each poem, published or unpublished, is placed in its period.  The early song-writer becomes distracted by unexpected success in the theater and becomes fascinated by cities, by Berlin.  But in the 1930s events intrude, as strongly as possible, and Brecht becomes a writer in exile, in multiple exiles.

Some poems are public, some are private, unpublished.  Some are blatant propaganda, negligible as poetry, sometimes dismaying, but sometimes not.  But mostly the poems are poems, from the beginning through the worst.

Motto

In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing
About the dark times.