Every major European city has its own modernist masterpiece. Dublin, of course, has Joyce's Ulysses. Paris has Proust, St Petersburg Andrei Bely's extraordinary novel simply entitled Petersburg. Berlin has a remarkable and impressive book published in the difficult days of the Weimar Republic, on the eve of the Nazi rise to power: Alfred Doblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz. The novel focuses on a small-time crook named Franz Biberkopf as he is released from prison. Biberkopf, who has a violent past, is intent on living a reformed and decent life but, returning to his old haunts in the Alexanderplatz area of Berlin, he finds it impossible to escape a world of prostitutes, petty thievery, thuggery and the emerging street violence of the times. Using interior monologue, Berlin slang, psychological insight drawn from his early academic training and cinematic techniques of jump-cutting and visual metaphor adapted for literary purposes, Doblin creates a rich portrait of Biberkopf and the Berlin he inhabits. As an evocation of the sprawling anonymity and dangerous maelstrom of the modern city, Berlin Alexanderplatz remains a remarkable achievement. It was influenced by Doblin's reading of Joyce (although he later became irritated by endless comparisons of his novel with Joyce's, Doblin admitted that 'his work was wind for my sails'). Doblin was a Berliner by birth and studied medicine and psychiatry before turning to literature. During the Nazi years he fled Germany (he was Jewish) and lived in France and then America, where he was an unlikely recipient of MGM's munificence, living in Los Angeles and earning money as a scriptwriter. He returned to Europe after the war and died in 1957. Doblin wrote other novels which grappled with themes of alienation and despair in contemporary life but none matched the experimental brilliance of Berlin Alexanderplatz.

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