Berlin Alexanderplatz

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New York Review of Books, 2018 M03 6 - 480 páginas
The inspiration for Rainer Werner Fassbinder's epic film and that The Guardian named one of the "Top 100 Books of All Time," Berlin Alexanderplatz is considered one of the most important works of the Weimar Republic and twentieth century literature.

Berlin Alexanderplatz, the great novel of Berlin and the doomed Weimar Republic, is one of the great books of the twentieth century, gruesome, farcical, and appalling, word drunk, pitchdark. In Michael Hofmann's extraordinary new translation, Alfred Döblin's masterpiece lives in English for the first time.

As Döblin writes in the opening pages: 

The subject of this book is the life of the former cement worker and haulier Franz Biberkopf in Berlin. As our
story begins, he has just been released from prison, where he did time for some stupid stuff; now he is back
in Berlin, determined to go straight. 

To begin with, he succeeds. But then, though doing all right for himself financially, he gets involved in a
set-to with an unpredictable external agency that looks an awful lot like fate. 

Three times the force attacks him and disrupts his scheme. The first time it comes at him with dishonesty and deception. Our man is able to get to his feet, he is still good to stand. 

Then it strikes him a low blow. He has trouble getting up from that, he is almost counted out. And finally it hits him with monstrous and extreme violence.
 

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Contenido

Chapter One
3
tram into the city Still not there The example
17
escalope In which Franz swears to all the world
32
Franz Biberkopf enters Berlin Franz Biberkopf is on the
48
And all about the Frankfurt Topfmarkt Lina takes it to
67
The scale of this Franz Biberkopf A match for the heroes of
87
Yesterday on the backs of steeds Today shot through
106
anythingFranz on the retreat plays a farewell march
120
heart of Europe is unchanged Enough politics idleness
273
Chapter Seven
287
rainy Franz breaking and entering Franz not under
299
wheels hes in the box seat now hes made it Loves weal
328
Chapter Eight
341
Franz notices nothing and the world goes on its way A
350
with him Things come to a head plumber Karl gets caught
371
fortress is completely surrounded the last sallies
377

the Jews For as with animals so it is with man the
137
Chapter Five
153
will be even colderNothing for a while pause for rest
175
April 1928
188
Chapter Six
203
Crime pays The night of SundayMonday 9 April
219
feetThird conquest of Berlin Clothes make people
260
Battle is joined We ride into hell with a great fanfare
383
Police HQ is on Alexanderplatz
389
Chapter Nine
397
skipped Buch insane asylum closed ward Dextrose
410
involved Death sings his slow slow song And now Franz
432
Notes
445
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Acerca del autor (2018)

Alfred Döblin (1878–1957) was born in German Stettin (now the Polish city of Szczecin) to Jewish parents. When he was ten his father, a master tailor, eloped with a seamstress, abandoning the family. Subsequently his mother relocated the rest of the family to Berlin. Döblin studied medicine at Friedrich Wilhelm University, specializing in neurology and psychiatry. While working at a psychiatric clinic in Berlin, he became romantically entangled with two women: Friede Kunke, with whom he had a son, Bodo, in 1911, and Erna Reiss, to whom he had become engaged before learning of Kunke’s pregnancy. He married Erna the next year, and they remained together for the rest of his life. His novel The Three Leaps of Wang Lun was published in 1915 while Döblin was serving as a military doctor; it went on to win the Fontane Prize. In 1920 he published Wallenstein, a novel set during the Thirty Years’ War, which was an oblique comment on the First World War. He became president of the Association of German Writers in 1924, and published his best-known novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz, in 1929, achieving modest mainstream fame while solidifying his position at the center of an intellectual group that included Bertolt Brecht, Robert Musil, and Joseph Roth, among others. He fled Germany with his family soon after Hitler’s rise, moving first to Zurich, then to Paris, and, after the Nazi invasion of France, to Los Angeles, where he converted to Catholicism and briefly worked as a screenwriter for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. After the war he returned to Germany and worked as an editor with the aim of rehabilitating literature that had been banned under Hitler, but he found himself at odds with conservative postwar cultural trends. He suffered from Parkinson’s disease in later years and died in Emmendingen in 1957. Erna committed suicide two months after his death and was interred along with him.

Michael Hofmann is a German-born, British-educated poet and translator. Among his translations are works by Franz Kafka; Peter Stamm; his father, Gert Hofmann; Herta Müller; and fourteen books by Joseph Roth. A recipient of both the PEN Translation Prize and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize, Hofmann’s Selected Poems were published in 2009 and Where Have You Been?: Selected Essays in 2014. In addition to Berlin Alexanderplatz, New York Review Books publishes his selection from the work of Malcolm Lowry, The Voyage That Never Ends, and his translations of Jakob Wassermann’s My Marriage and Gert Ledig’s Stalin Front. He teaches in the English department at the University of Florida.

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