About the work
Berlin Alexanderplatz: The Story of Franz Biberkopf is a novel by Alfred Döblin, published by S. Fischer in 1929; parts of it had appeared in advance from 1928 in outlets such as the Neue Rundschau and the Frankfurter Zeitung. Döblin knew the milieu first-hand: he had grown up in the working-class districts east of Alexanderplatz and later practised as a doctor in the east of Berlin. On stage the material is performed in various adaptations, for example the one by Oliver Reese that premiered at the Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin in 1999, directed by Uwe Eric Laufenberg.
Plot
After four years in Tegel prison, where he has served a sentence for manslaughter, Franz Biberkopf returns to Berlin determined to stay on the straight and narrow from now on. Yet life around Alexanderplatz keeps throwing him back: Otto Lüders cheats him, the crook Reinhold pushes him out of a moving car, costing Franz an arm, and later murders Franz's girlfriend Mieze. Broken, Biberkopf ends up in the Buch asylum; he leaves it transformed as Franz Karl Biberkopf and starts over as an assistant doorman in a factory.
Cultural significance
With its montage of newspaper reports, advertising, statistics, songs and snatches of speech, the novel is regarded as one of the most important and innovative works of the Weimar Republic and as the first major German big-city novel; in 2002 a poll of noted writers placed it among the 100 best books of all time. It was filmed in 1931 by Phil Jutzi, in 1980 by Rainer Werner Fassbinder as a 14-part television series, and in 2020 by Burhan Qurbani.