Alfred Döblin, the physician/writer who in 1919 had been scandalized by bourgeois Berlin’s indifference to the brutal repression in proletarian Lichtenberg, gradually shifted from an outraged contempt for Weimar to a more objective, one might say medical, perspective. In 1929 he published his seminal work, Berlin Alexander-platz, a clear-eyed, unvarnished portrait of the postrevolutionary metropolis. Influenced by avant-garde film, newspaper reportage, cabaret reviews, and the works of James Joyce, the novel charts the adventures of a former pimp named Franz Biberkopf as he emerges from prison to begin his life anew in the big city. Accustomed to the security of prison life, Biberkopf finds Berlin a terrifying place, its crowds coalescing into one huge oppressive mass, its inanimate objects acting like dynamic beings. Riding the streetcar and wandering by foot, he notes:
Outside everything was moving, but—back of it—there was nothing! It—did not—live! It had happy faces, it laughed, waited in twos and threes on the traffic islands opposite Aschinger’s, smoked cigarettes, turned the pages of newspapers. . . . Terror struck him as he walked down Rosenthaler Strasse and saw a man and a woman sitting in a little beershop right at the window: they poured beer down their gullets out of mugs, yes, what about it, they were drinking, they had forks and stuck pieces of meat into their mouths, then they pulled their forks out again and were not bleeding. . . . The cars roared and jangled on, house fronts were rolling along one after the other without stopping. And there were roofs atop the houses, his eyes wandered straight upward: if only the roofs don’t slide off, but the roofs stood upright. Where shall I go, poor devil that I am, he shuffled alongside the walls of the houses, there was no end to it.
Alfred Döblin
Falling back among the gangster types of his preprison days, Biberkopf is literally ground down by the big city—he sheds body parts like an aging automobile— but his frightening urban odyssey finally redeems him and allows him to face the metropolis without panic. What emerges in this novel, then, is both a harrowing account of big city anomie and a celebration of the ways in which tough-minded urbanites can find a kind of spiritual sustenance in the daily grind. As one of Biberkopf’s mentors, the junky Krause, declares after losing his job and family because of his addiction:
A wife, a child, it looks as if that were the whole world. I have no regrets. I don’t feel any guilt about it, we have to take facts, like ourselves, the way they come. We shouldn’t brag about our fate. I’m an enemy of Destiny, I’m not a Greek, I’m a Berliner. . . . I enjoy the Rosenthaler Platz, I enjoy the cop at the Elsasser corner, I like my game of billiards, I’d like anyone to come and tell me that his life is better than mine.
Döblin’s Biberkopf had an ally in Jakob Fabian, the protagonist of Erich Kast-ner’s novel of 1920’s Berlin, Fabian. Die Geschichte eines Moralisten. Like Biberkopf, Fabian explores the seedy underside of Spree-Babylon, but he is too much the “moralist” ever to make his peace with the city, and eventually he returns to his provincial homeland and dies trying to save a drowning child. Before leaving Berlin, Fabian unburdens himself on the subject of the decadent metropolis to a young lady who imagines that it is not much different than her provincial hometown.
Almost like back home? You’re fooling yourself. The moonlight and the smell of flowers, the silence and the small-town kiss in the doorway—those are all illusions. Over there, in that square, is a café where Chinese, nothing but Chinese, are sitting with Berlin whores. In front is a bar where homosexual boys dance with elegant actors and smart Englishmen, strutting their stuff and naming their price, which in the end is paid by a dyed-blond old bag who’s allowed to come along and watch. Around the corner on the right is a hotel in which only Japanese reside, next to it a restaurant where Russian and Hungarian Jews rough each other up. In one of the side streets there is a Pension where young schoolgirls sell themselves to pick up a little pocket money. A half year ago there was a scandal that was hard to hush up. An elderly gentleman had rented a room for an assignation with a sixteen-year-old girl, but he found his own daughter waiting for him, which was not what he’d expected. . . . As an expanse of stone this city is more or less like it used to be but with respect to its inhabitants it has long resembled an insane asylum. In the east live the criminals, in the center the swindlers, in the north there’s poverty, in the west vice, and from all directions comes a sense of imminent collapse.
Life Was Not a Cabaret
The Berlin that Kastner described in Fabian was already menaced by the Nazis, who had been making their presence felt in the city since 1926, when Joseph Goebbels arrived to take over the Gau (Nazi district) of Berlin-Brandenburg. Before that moment the Berlin branch of the party had been divided and directionless. At first the oily little Rhinelander was not entirely pleased with his assignment. After walking Berlin’s nocturnal streets he wrote in his diary: “Berlin last night. A sink hole of iniquity. And I’m supposed to plunge into this?” But plunge he did. Aware, as he put it, that “Berlin needs sensations as a fish needs water,” he orchestrated a campaign of violence and intimidation designed to shock even the most jaded sensibilities. He immediately scheduled propaganda marches in working-class districts like Wedding and Neukolln. As they marched, members of the Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA, Stormtroopers) sang “Die Rote Front, schlägt sie zu brei / SA marschiert. Achtung, die Straβe frei (Beat the Red Front to a pulp. The SA is marching: keep off the streets).” To further goad the left, Goebbels advertised these marches with huge blood-red posters. Predictably, the Communists sought to defend their turf, resulting in bloody brawls in which both sides made ample use of blackjacks, brass knuckles, iron pipes, and even pistols. On March 21, 1927, a band of 600 to 700 SA men stormed a railway carriage containing twenty-seven Communists at the station in Lichterfelde-Ost. After beating the Communists, the Nazis marched into the center of the city and assaulted Jewish-looking persons on the Kurfürstendamm. In another provocative move, Goebbels founded a weekly newspaper called Der Angriff (The Attack), which took aim especially at the Jews. “This negative element must be erased from the German reckoning, or it will always soil that reckoning,” declared an editorial. In a piece in his journal on the area around Berlin’s Gedacht-niskirche, Goebbels blamed the Jews for the capital’s “asphalt democracy” and lack of a true German culture: “The eternal repetition of corruption and decay, of failing ingenuity and genuine creative power, of inner emptiness and despair, with the patina of a Zeitgeist sunk to the level of the most repulsive pseudoculture: that is what parades its essence, what does its mischief all around the Gedächtniskirche. One would so gladly believe that it is the national elite stealing day and night from the dear Lord on Tauentzien Avenue. It is only the Israelites.” The publicity generated by the Nazis’ provocations helped attract new members to the movement. The police estimated that in March 1927 the Berlin branch of the Nazi Party had about 3,000 members.
Joseph Goebbels, Berlins Gauleiter, 1932
Of course, for all their frenetic activities, the Nazis were far from turning Red Berlin into a brown bastion. In fact, the disruptiveness of their campaign prompted the authorities to ban the organization in Berlin-Brandenburg for an eleven-month period between May 1927 and March 1928. In the May 1928 Reichstag elections the party did poorly across the Reich and especially poorly in Berlin, where it won only 1.5 percent of the vote. Goebbels nonetheless remained determined to prevail in the city, for he knew it was crucial to the Nazis’ campaign for control of Germany as a whole. As he wrote in his memoir, Kampf um Berlin (The Struggle for Berlin): “The capital constitutes the center of all political, intellectual, economic, and cultural energies of a country. From it emanate influences which leave no province, small town, or village untouched.”