"Patrick Fortmann, University of Chicago Topographies of Transport: The Openings of Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (S. 125-126)

In a revealing introductory essay to a collection of Berlin photographs, originally written in 1928 – the year before the monumental Berlin Alexanderplatz: The Story of Franz Biberkopf was published – but significantly revised and expanded two years later, Alfred Döblin diagnoses the modernist inability to speak of, let alone to write Berlin.1 To illustrate his claim and to discredit the style of narrating urban space that Berlin had rendered obsolete, Döblin begins a familiar tale, only to interrupt himself in the second sentence, »The illuminated ads throw punches, the speakers rail nonstop, the goods pile up in heaps in displays, which used to be tactful and demure.

Gigantic autobuses from different continents speed through these strange streets, gleaming in international false luxury, while in the suburbs« (KS III 153).2 With the abandoned narrative (»while in the suburbs«), Döblin takes stock of the modernist repertory for perceiving, depicting, and representing the metropolis that had become the standard of the avant-garde of his time, the violent, almost physical assault on the senses that incorporates visual, audible, and tactile impulses, the all-pervasive commodification that dominates the publicsphere, the backward-looking lament that proliferation has replaced taste and restraint has given way to accumulation, and finally the omnipresent and dynamic traffic that cuts through rather than connects urban spaces.

Döblin does not denounce the techniques and the critiques of modernity that generate them as such. Rather, he dismisses a narrative that simply describes these techniques instead of harnessing them, and thus questions how suitable such a narrative is for capturing the reality of a Berlin that, according to the same essay, is »a poetic, not very colorful, but very genuine city« (KS III 153). Döblin then goes even further back in time and nostalgically quotes Balzac, whose portraiture of Paris is as irretrievably lost to later modernity as other nineteenth-century attempts to narrate the metropolis. Together with Balzac, Döblin also takes leave from, say, Dicken’s London or Dostoevsky’s Saint Petersburg, although he continues to admire at least the latter throughout his life.

But Berlin, he claims, is different. For the remainder of this essay, Döblin follows on the tracks of a typical tourist whom he imagines as leaving Berlin disenchanted, finding its historical monuments too eclectic, its distractions dull, and its architecture monotonous. The bored tourist on his sightseeing trip, Döblin finds, has gone astray for he has failed to ›see‹ Berlin. Döblin recommends that the visitor make a fresh start; that he take a different route, not leading right into the center but cutting through it from south to west, and that he, most importantly, change vehicles from tourist bus to express train.

Riding the train, the visitor might shake the fixation on certain buildings, images, or people. With his body in accelerated motion, his perception would float more freely, »But take eventually the express train into this sea of stone, perhaps late in the evening, and experience open-heartedly the staggering gaze of this city« (KS III 156). As the speed of the transport blurs the visitor’s visual field and as the train takes the tourist at once into the city and away from it, he may begin to take it in all at once, and thus be prepared to meet Döblin’s demand to see the whole rather than the parts,"