Berlin Alexanderplatz: A Review in 13 Chapters and an Epilogue

Chapter One.
“The Punishment Begins” is the title of the first episode of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s fifteen-plus-hour miniseries Berlin Alexanderplatz (A Film in 13 Chapters and an Epilogue), made for German TV in 1980 and now reissued in a Criterion Collection DVD box so bricklike, it includes an entire 1931 feature film as a supplement. As in Alfred Döblin’s 1929 source novel, Franz Biberkopf (Günter Lamprecht) is protagonist and packhorse — freighting the narrative along, and bearing the whips of a driver outside his field of vision. In the opening scene, Biberkopf is released from prison, into a Weimar Berlin where it’s every man for himself and God against all.

Biberkopf is dismantled psychically by the state, materially by the economy, and spiritually by the friends who betray him over money or women. He takes a few beatings and hands a few out — including, in traumatic flashbacks boiling periodically to the surface, the manslaughter of his girlfriend, which led to his initial imprisonment. Biberkopf is variously a rapist, a lover, a pimp, and a john; a bum, an odd-jobber, and a criminal. The dominant decorative motif is a caged canary, and the most-referenced parable is Job’s. Here, a character will live hand-to-mouth even after losing an arm.

Chapter Two.
The forbidding late-career landscape of Berlin Alexanderplatz will be familiar territory for Fassbinder acolytes, accustomed as they are to the ravishing bile of his relentless oeuvre. In a sense, it’s a return to an ancestral home.

“My life would have turned out differently, certainly not as a whole, but in some respects, in many, perhaps more crucial respects than I can say at this point, differently from the way it turned out with Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz embedded in my mind, my flesh, my body as a whole, and my soul,” Fassbinder wrote of the novel, which he first read in his early teens.