Made for West German television, yet released theatrically across the U.S. and Europe, Rainer Werner Fassbinder's monumental 15-hour adaptation of Alfred Döblin's novel Berlin Alexanderplatz sits firmly and insistently at the intersection of cinema, literature and theatre. Döblin's theme was the moral and financial stagnation of the German state during the 1920s; his protagonist, the portly Franz Biberkopf (a mountainous display of screen acting from Günter Lamprecht), a wifekiller released from jail after serving four years. Corruptible and mentally unstable, Biberkopf staggers out into an especially rundown corner of a Berlin disempowered by Versailles, inhabited chiefly by drunks, wastrels and prostitutes. Early encounters characterise Biberkopf as a big baby, voiding himself of any and all responsibility. After a turnabout at the prison gates that appears to signify some desire to return to the womb, he spends much of the first episode wailing on a rabbi's floor, before clamping himself to his lover's nipple; later instalments revise this interpretation to show the character as first a vampire - a fatter Nosferatu - leeching off those around him, no matter how sour the taste of the blood, then increasingly as a victim of blind allegiance, and a history hellbent on repeating itself.
With hindsight, we can see where all this is heading. The bread is being baked, the circuses gathering, but the Nazis don't arrive until episode nine (and, even then, remain a cursory presence), which allows whole parts to be devoted to watching Biberkopf sinking into a drunken stupor (episode four) or trading a succession of women for use as whores (the outstandingly chilly episode five, which introduces Gottfried John as a recurring face of evil). Yet Döblin's experiment was to show how the hearty, opportunistic Biberkopf - with his camaraderie, vows of reform and knowledge of the lines he must not cross - might be considered relatively heroic in a society as fatally compromised as this; the narrative keeps throwing him up against those whose souls are in a far shabbier condition than his own.
It's not that we aren't warned - the first episode bears the ominous subtitle "The Punishment Begins" - but the process makes for a long haul in the presence of characters who are both far from sympathetic and often intended more as symbolic avatars than recognisable, flesh-and-blood creations. Marked by the specific creakiness of period TV pacing and the more general torturousness that came easily to Fassbinder as both personality and director, it might, perhaps, have only been lapped up as it was by cineastes in the decade that gave the world Shoah, Dekalog and the first Heimat; even approached broken down as a DVD box set in our post-Wire era, Berlin Alexanderplatz requires some swallowing.
What may well compel you to stick with it is a rich strain of desperate, tragic gutter poetry - a strain that actually provides a valuable, grounded corrective to Reitz's made-for-TV project, which looks at Germany from the top down rather than from the pavement up. (The Heimats are all opera and mountain tops; Fassbinder makes his home amid the country's alleyways and puddles.) From the proliferation of prison imagery, extending outwards from caged birds and monkeys to the cramped claustrophobia of the studio sets, we derive that everyone on screen is wounded and trapped, marching round and round in circles, looking for someone to promise them release, ease their pain or point them in the right direction; watching it in the middle of another Depression, it hits you as an utterly pertinent parable of the mass derangement that can occur in the absence of social mobility.
Fassbinder's pressure-cooker aesthetic, coupled to a then-unprecedented attention to sound and music, allows scenes and performances to build to a pathological fever pitch, each movement of the camera another twist of the knife, until the unremittingly brutal diptych of episodes 11 and 12, in which a series of primal screams are followed by a protracted murder. Purged of any trace of humour, it quickly assumes a very Germanic weight, and you could say that, like its anti-hero, it could do with shedding a few pounds. (An extraordinarily bold epilogue, featuring a human slaughterhouse and the never-more-desolate strains of Kraftwerk's "Radioactivity", transports us to another place entirely, and merits discussion in its own right as a two-hour stab at Fire Walk with Me-like revisionism, reviving some characters even as it trashes its sets and all that has gone before.) Yet it's precisely that gravity that gives Berlin Alexanderplatz its remarkable quality of evocation: it would, I'd suggest, be impossible to come away from it without a profound and lasting sense of this time and this place; a sense that seeps into you like the damp, and which no history book - bound up with issues of objectivity and respectability - could ever give you. Bitter as it is, if you do make it through to the end, you will find it hard to leave these characters behind.
(November 2010)
Berlin Alexanderplatz screens in its entirety at London's ICA over the next two weekends as part of Iain Sinclair's 70x70 season. Full details can be found here.
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