Berlin Alexanderplatz: Radio, Film, and the Death of Weimar Culture 9780520931640

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BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ

WEIMAR AND NOW: GERMAN CULTURAL CRITICISM

Edward Dimendberg, Martin Jay, and Anton Kaes, General Editors

BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ

Peter Jelavich

Radio, Film, and the Death of Weimar Culture

Q3 University of California Press Berkeley

Los Angeles

London

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England

© 2oo6by The Regents of the University of California First paperback printing 2009 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jelavich, Peter. Berlin Alexanderplatz : radio, film, and the death of Weimar culture I Peter jelavich. p.

cm.- (Weimar and now; 37)

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-o-po-25997-3 (pbk : alk. paper). 1. Doblin, Alfred, J878- 1957· Berlin Alexanderplatz. 2. Germany- Politics and government- 1918- 1933· 3· Germany- Intellecruallife---T9J8- J9J3·

4· Radio

broadcasting-Germany- History- 2oth century. 5· Motion pictures--Germany- History- 2oth century. I. Title.

II. Series.

PT2607.0JjBjiJ!J

2006

8JJ 1 .9I2---dC22

2005005285

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11109876 This book is printed on New LeafEcoBook 6o, containing 6o percent postconsumer waste, processed chlorine free; 30 percent de-inked recycled fiber, elemental chlorine free; and

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The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book provided by the Ahmanson Foundation Humanities Endowment Fund ofthe University of California Press Foundation.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations Preface

ix

xi

I.

The Novel: Berlin Alexanderplat'{

2.

Politics and Censorship at the Berlin 36 Radio Hour

3·

Cultural Programming and Radio Plays

4·

62

The Radio Play: The Story ofFran'{ Biberkopf

93

).

Film Censorship in the Weimar Era

6.

Nazi Threats to Film

7·

The Film: Berlin Alexanderplat'{ Epilogue

240

Notes

249

Index

295

126

156

191

ILLUSTRATIONS

r.

Alexanderplatz, with police headquarters; postcard, ca. 1900.

4

2.

Alexanderplatz, with Tietz department store; postcard, 1910.

4

3·

Aerial view of the Alexanderplatz; postcard, 1924.

4·

Renovated Alexanderplatz; postcard, 193~.

5·

Ruins of the Tietz department store; postcard, 1945.

6.

Cover of first edition of Berlin Alexanderplatz.

7·

German radio stations and transmitters in 1927.

8.

Radio fan: Doblin at home, ca. I930.

9·

Doblin broadcasts his views at the opening of the Berlin Secession, I93I.

IO. I I.

14-

34 42

76

124 132

1.36

"The end of the film is the beginning of war": The Flute Concert z8o

The production team of Berlin Alexanderplat'{.

202

Erna looks for Max in the demonstration, from Mother Krause's Journey to Happiness.

I).

9

Censored scene of youths rioting, from Revolt in the

of Sanssouci.

13.

6

The massacre on the Odessa steps, in Battleship Potemkin.

Reform School. 12.

5

206

Newspaper salesman in Berlin, the Symphony ofthe Big City.

209

ix

16.

Biberkopf confronts the Pums gang, from Berlin Alexanderplat?_.

17.

Sound film novices: Maria Bard and Bernhard Minetti, in Berlin Alexanderplat?_.

18. 19.

218

Mieze with Franz, in Berlin Alexanderplatr

221

Poster advertising Berlin Alexanderplatl_, designed by Curt Arens, 1931.

224

20.

Franz leaves Tegel prison, from Berlin Alexanderplat1_.

21.

Franz hawks necktie holders on the Alexanderplatz, in Berlin Alexanderplatz.

22.

226

227

A suspicious Franz tells Cilly to return a coat, in Berlin Alexanderplatz.

229

23.

Doblin on the set of Berlin Alexanderplatl_, 1931.

24.

Reinhold seems unimpressed by Franz's singing, in Berlin Alexanderplatl_.

2).

230

23.3

"Biberkopf" joins the fascists, in Hit!erjunge Quex.

246

214

PREFACE

The arts of the Weimar Republic represented a wide range of views, from the extreme left to the radical right. But in scholarly parlance, the phrase "Weimar culture" usually refers to its innovative, experimental, and left-leaning components, such as the works of Alfred Doblin, Bertolt Brecht, and many others whose names populate the ensuing pages. 1 It is commonly asserted that this culture survived until Hitler's accession to power: only then did many writers and artists flee the country, and those that remained were scared into silence or brought into line. But in this work I will argue that Weimar's avant-garde culture was largely defunct by the end of 1931, the victim of a culture of fear that had gripped Germany ever since the previous autumn. Why should we care about this chronology, four generations after it transpired? Why does it matter whether Weimar culture died in '93 1 rather than 1933? It is important because it is a tale of how visions were effaced and voices silenced within a society that was democratically governed and that respected the rule oflaw. To be sure, the cultural terrain was contested throughout the 1920s, and much of the battle was focused on the two media that most directly experienced legal or de facto censorship-film, the only privately owned medium that was subjected to preemptive censorship in the Weimar era, and radio, a state monopoly governed by political oversight boards. But by the end of the decade, the give-and-take of politicians, pressure groups, and media professionals had established parameters that allowed a wide-indeed, a gradually expanding-latitude of artistic and political expression.

xi

Yet the fragility of those compromises became apparent after the parliamentary elections of September 1930, when the Nazis scored a surprising success, as they gained 18 percent of votes cast. The result was a "fear psychosis," in the words of a key member of the political oversight board of Berlin's radio station. During the winter of 1930 and the spring of 1931, in the face of sustained verbal (and at times physical) attacks by Nazis, managers of publicly owned radio stations and producers at the major, privately owned film studios consciously decided to depoliticize their offerings. They justified their choice-they gave themselves rhetorical cover-by claiming that the general public, burdened by the ever-worsening Depression, did not want to contemplate political issues: it desired distraction, "simply entertainment." What makes this tale so disheartening-but also so necessary to tell-is that Hitler's appointment as chancellor in January 1933 was by no means certain in 1931; after all, at that point the Nazis could claim less than one out of five votes in national elections. Nevertheless, in the radio and film studios, preemptive censorship was replaced by preemptive self-censorship, as the anticipation of a possible radical right-wing regime led to the sacrifice of specific works, and soon an entire culture, that embodied the values of the Republic. This is, in short, a cautionary tale about how fear of outspoken right-wing politicians can cause cultural production to be curbed and eventually eliminated as a critical counterforce to politics-all in the name of" entertainment." In this work, I will provide a number of examples of Weimar's cultural death. But in order to explain how it happened-to map out the multiplicity of forces that led to its demise-it is necessary to analyze specific cases in depth. I have chosen to focus on three versions of Alfred Dahlin's Berlin Alexanderplat1_: the novel (1929), arguably the most innovative work of Weimar literature; the radio play, scheduled for broadcast on 30 September 1930 but cancelled at the last moment due to fear o{ Nazi protests; and the sound film, which premiered on 8 October 1931. Indeed, one can speak of five versions, since the radio and film scripts differ significantly from the extant recordings. Why this focus? By comparing these works and recounting their fate, one can ascertain and analyze many of the aesthetic, technological, political, and commercial factors that at first sustained but later killed "Weimar culture"-a culture that counted Berlin Alexanderplat1_ as one of its pinnacles. This analysis is enabled by the fact that the three versions of Berlin Alexanderplat{ present striking aesthetic and thematic differences. The novel is considered a landmark of German literature for a number of reasons, most obviously its montagelike structure. There is a plotline in the novel, at the center of which stands the

xii •

P R E FA C E

character Franz Biberkopf; but the thread of the tale is continually interrupted and entangled by effects that one may, without hesitation, call "discourses." A major theme in the novel is the manner in which human thought and action are shaped but also confused by a variety of competing and often contradictory messages drawn from advertisements, commerce, fashion, journalism, politics, sexuality, religion, popular culture, and literature. These are relayed to the individual through mass media, via newspapers, journals, posters, phonograph, radio, and film. The novel illustrates how Biberkopf is constantly buffeted and confused by the profusion of what we would now call "info-bites": he sways between respectability and criminality, self-employment and willful unemployment, leftism and Nazi jargon, heterosexuality and bisexuality. Throughout the novel, Doblin radically questions the autonomy and the coherence of the human personality in the modern metropolis. Yet when this tale is retold in radio and sound film, the critical and innovative aspects are lost. The novel evokes how a human personality dissolves in the modern, media-saturated environment; but paradoxically, when the story is recounted in precisely those media, Biberkopf is presented as a coherent, autonomous personality. In short, the very image of humanity that is supposedly dissolved by the modern media celebrates its resurrection in the modern media. Furthermore, the political, commercial, sexual, and religious discourses that dominate the novel disappear in the radio play and film. In order to explain these discrepancies, I need to argue on at least two fronts: first, in terms of media aesthetics-in particular, the parameters of what was conceivable and presentable via radio and film in the Weimar era; and second, in terms of extraartistic historical factors-the political and economic pressures on the media after 1929. The two are related, since the changing conditions of production, which were reaching a state of acute crisis, transformed the manner of representation. Inasmuch as this book examines three versions of a common tale, it falls within the parameters of intermediality, a topic that has generated substantial scholarly literature. My study too addresses aesthetic issues pertaining to the different media. Some of the questions revolve around genre: what were the conventions of narrative and drama for these different arts during the 192os? In fact, there often were no such conventions because the technology was evolving constantly, especially in the acoustic realm: radio, in the form of public broadcasting, was introduced in Germany in 1923, and sound films arrived six years later. Literature, drama, and silent film provided generic precedents, but the very novelty of the "talking" media encouraged experimentation. Indeed, that was a major reason for Doblin's attraction to them. The totally novel genre of Horspiel (radio play)

P R E FA C E

xiii

allowed him the greatest leeway for innovation. By contrast, the Berlin Alexanderplatz sound film, over which Doblin had limited say, ended up being

much more conventional, inasmuch as it adhered closely to established narrative norms derived from traditional novels and silent films. As many studies of intermediality attest, the differences among the textual, aural, and audiovisual versions of a story may be related to differences of genre and the varying requirements of technology among the media. But my study seeks to highlight a further dimension that impinges massively on production--especially during times of crisis in an embattled state like the Weimar Republic. That dimension is one of politics, and it takes many forms, ranging from censorship, or the parameters of free expression determined by the state, to marketing, or the limits of free expression determined by the public's (perceived) taste and (perceived) tolerance for certain views. As we shall see, those parameters shifted dramatically between 1929 and r931 and radically shaped the radio and screen versions of the tale. In From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History ofthe German Film (1947), Siegfried Kracauer famously argued that a close reading of film, qua mass medium, could uncover the political unconscious of the masses during the Weimar era. That contention has been debated heatedly for the past fifty years, and I do not wish to recapitulate those discussions. But I do contend that there are other avenues by which one can not only detect but also causally explain the interstices of politics and media---nes that take very concrete forms, such as political oversight committees in radio studios, censorship boards for cinema, film industry reports on political pressures and public opinion, and rioters in cinemas. Conscious perceptions of the political situation, even if at times "imagined," were at least as real as the political unconscious and were themselves a discursive medium that shaped the media. For that reason, this book is as much a political history of radio and film in the Weimar era as it is an intermedial comparison of the three versions of Berlin Alexanderplatz. The book commences with a chapter on the Alexanderplatz as locale, on Doblin, and on his novel. It summarizes Doblin's radically antihumanist standpoint, his desire to transcend the "psychology" of characters and the "subjectivity" of authors. At the same time, Doblin sought to overcome the social divide between pretentious literature and the population at large. Subjectivism and elitism were embodied for him in the "classical ensemble," the cozy relationship of bourgeois society and high culture that he hoped to explode. That project took many forms, until it culminated in Berlin Alexanderplatz, arguably the outstanding work of German literary modernism. Pierre Bourdieu has contended that Gustave Flaubert's Sentimental Education "supplies the tools of its own sociological analysis," inasmuch as the

xiv •

PREFACE

"adventures of Frederic" trace "the structure of the social space in which its author himself was situated." 2 Berlin Alexanderplatr does not map the immediate cultural field in which Doblin and his fellow authors operated: indeed, its protagonists are totally ignorant of "literature." But the novel does limn the larger cultural space that "literature" would have to enter in order to survive, according to Doblin: a cultural space imbued with the products of mass media, intermingled with (and sometimes contending against) older forms of popular language and culture. My study then shifts to radio. The second chapter deals with the creation of German public broadcasting in 192 3 and governmental attempts to define its political parameters over the rest of the decade. Fear of undue politicization induced the state to monopolize the airwaves, and initially radio was a fully apolitical medium. But the need to transmit news, as well as to engage with the citizens of an evolving democracy, resulted in the gradual opening of broadcasting to political discussionsthough always under the watchful eyes of political oversight boards. In this context, the left had to fight a constant battle to voice its opinions, while conservative (though not radical right-wing) viewpoints held sway. The third chapter turns to cultural programming on the air. Initially, the members of Germany's educated bourgeoisie who dominated radio used it to dollop out huge servings of high culture. This practice soon led to a public backlash, which took the form of repeated demands to lighten up the programs. While that battle was being fought, the most innovative directors tried to nurture new forms of art for the new medium, such as the Horspiel, a type of radio play designed for purely acoustic reception. The fourth chapter discusses Doblin's contribution to that genre, The Story of Fran{ Biberkopf-a work that showcases artistic experimentation, but also bears the traces of the political constraints upon broadcasting that were exerted even in the best years of the Weimar Republic. Moreover, Doblin's radio play was the first victim of the panicked political climate after the Reichstag election of 14 September 1930: scheduled for airing at the end of the month, it was cancelled at the last minute. The fifth chapter turns to film, as it examines the creation of film censorship boards in 1920 and how their rulings over the ensuing decade created standards that governed cinematic production. As in radio, conservative viewpoints were considered a "nonpolitical" norm, while socially critical opinions often had to fight the censors for screen time. By 1930 the parameters for political discussion seem to have been stabilized, only to be torn apart by events that are discussed in chapter six. In the wake of their electoral success in September 1930, the Nazis sought a victory on the cultural front. Three months later they mounted massive demonstrations against the cinema that screened the Hollywood version of All Quiet on the Western

PREFACE

•

XV

Front, a work that had been approved without much discussion by Berlin's film

censorship board. That ruling was appealed, and under massive pressure from the Army, the Foreign Office, Germany's conservative states, and the Nazi rioters in the streets, the appellate film censorship board banned the work. That decision rocked the Republic's political supporters at home and abroad, since it was seen as a capitulation to theN azis. It also shook the film industry, which faced increasingly censorious film boards and continued political disturbances in cinemas during the spring of 193 I. Producers concluded that they needed to avoid partisan, controversial themes altogether if they wanted to have a chance of success. In that climate, Doblin's novel was filmed in the summer of 1931. The screen version of Berlin Alexanderplaq, the subject of the last chapter, was crafted by a number of people-

above all, the director, Phil Jutzi, whose previous work showcased artistic innovation and political commitment. Yet when the film was released in October 1931, critics could not hide their disappointment. On the surface, it was undeniably an estimable work with a number of worthy scenes; but fundamentally, its aesthetic compromises and thematic caution betrayed the commercial concerns and political fears that had been plaguing cinema since the previous autumn. Jutzi's Berlin Alexanderplatr can be read as a palimpsest of the dying Republic.

In the ensuing pages, I argue that censorship as well as the market were both constraining and enabling forces in the process of cultural production. Yet I would like to think, somewhat inconsistently, that my own financial sponsors have been wholly enabling. I commenced my research on Weimar media during my extended stay at the Arbeitsstelle fur Vergleichende Gesellschaftsgeschichte (now the Berliner Kolleg fur Vergleichende Geschichte Europas), which was sponsored by Jurgen Kocka and funded by the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the University Research Institute of the University of Texas at Austin. I wrote the bulk of this manuscript during my sojourn at the National Humanities Center. I am grateful to those institutions for providing me not only with funding but above all supportive and intellectually stimulating environments. This project is based primarily on materials located at the Bundesarchiv (formerly in Potsdam, now in Berlin-Lichterfelde), the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, and the Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz, whose friendly and efficient staffs expedited my research. Above all, I would like to thank Sally Clarke, Frances Ferguson, Sabine Hake, Vernon Lidtke, and Marjorie Curry Woods for their careful and critical readings of this work.

XVI

•

P R E FACE

ONE

The Novel: Berlin Alexanderplatz

Berlin's Alexanderplatz and its surrounding neighborhoods, where Alfred Doblin spent his youth and returned to practice medicine, represented the dynamism and instability of Germany's metropolitan capital. Bordering on areas populated by the very poor as well as the traditional working class, the Alexanderplatz itself was a site of modernity in all its variety, ranging from disciplinary institutions like the police headquarters to commercial establishments like department stores, and crisscrossed by a web of public transportation systems. For Doblin, this protean neighborhood was emblematic of the forces with which he and his fellow citizens had to cope. Disdainful of the self-satisfaction of bourgeois society and art, sympathetic to the lower classes and mass culture, Doblin rejected the ideology and aesthetics of classical humanism already before the outbreak of the Great War. He called upon his fellow authors to practice radical self-abnegation, according to his insight that the psyche of contemporaries was being invaded and destabilized by a barrage of commercial, political, and pop-cultural messages. By the middle of the 192os, however, Doblin began to impute greater powers to the spiritual resources of individuals-both citizens and authors-in their contest with the prevailing discourses. But the struggle remained hard fought, as seen in the tale of Franz Biberkopf, the labile protagonist of Berlin Alexanderplat{-a story over which Doblin himself was not fully in control.

SUBJECTIVITY IN THE CITY Alfred Doblin (1878-1957) was born in Stettin, where his father owned a clothing store. The Jewish family's secure middle-class existence was shattered ten years later when the father ran off to the United States with one of his employees. Doblin' s mother took her five children to Berlin, where two of her brothers offered them some support. Yet their life was hard, and they could afford quarters only in Berlin's poorer eastern neighborhoods. Having studied medicine in Berlin and Freiburg, Doblin worked in hospitals in Regensburg and Berlin before starting his own practice in western Berlin in 1911. But after serving as a military doctor in Alsace during the war, he returned to his childhood neighborhood east of the Alexanderplatz and opened a practice catering to low-income patients. 1 Berlin's Alexanderplatz had a reputation for impermanence, instability, criminality, even insurrection-all of the values, in short, that stood opposed to those embodied in the royal palace located a few hundred meters away. Throughout the eighteenth century the Alexanderplatz had remained outside the city's perimeter, as defined by the fortifications constructed after the Thirty Years' War. Those walls also accounted for the area's importance, since the Konigstor (royal gate) and the Konigsbriicke (royal bridge) that spanned the encircling moat were the major point of entry into the city, which was oriented toward Prussian territories in the east. The southern area of the future Alexanderplatz-the space beyond the Konigsbriicke--was known as the Paradeplatz, since it was used for military exercises. In the 1750s a poorhouse was built there, a further disciplinary institution that served not only as a soup kitchen and a make-work project for the unemployed but also as a debtors' prison. Offices of Prussia's judicial bureaucracy were added to the area in the 178os. But the space was used primarily for commerce and industry; several textile manufactures were established there, to provide clothing for the court and uniforms for the Prussian army. Livestock was traded as well; hence the area northeast of the Konigsbriicke was called the Ochsenmarkt (ox market). Only in r8o5 was the wide space beyond the bridge officially named the "Alexanderplatz" to commemorate a visit by the Russian czar. 2 Berlin's rapid growth during the nineteenth century, increasingly fueled by industrialization, led to the burgeoning of working-class suburbs north and east of the city. No longer at the outskirts of town, the Alexanderplatz acquired the form and function of an urban square. One of the major attractions was the Konigsstadtisches Theater, which opened in 1824 and remained one of the Berlin's most popular stages until it closed in 18)1. Though it also performed works of high culture, such as opera and drama, it became best known as a venue for popular

2

•

THE

NOVEL

comedies in Berlin dialect. It gave birth to the famous character Nante, an "Eckensteher" who (as the word implied) lounged on street corners, looking for (or

avoiding) work and commenting on current affairs-in short, a forerunner of Franz Biberkopf. The Alexanderplatz acquired a reputation for popular discontent in a much more concrete sense during the revolutionary upheaval of r848, when the largest barricade in Berlin was erected there. Constructed from overturned carts, cobblestones, and sandbags as well as stage sets and furnishings looted from the Konigsstadtisches Theater, it withstood an assault by royal troops trying to reach the city's center during the night of 18 March. During the last half of the nineteenth century, the Alexanderplatz maintained some of its earlier functions, though now updated to serve the needs of a booming metropolis. The poorhouse was torn down to make way for the vast, brickclad police headquarters replete with offices as well as an inner-city jail-"the grim, red Police Presidium," as Doblin called it (fig. 1). 3 As part of a citywide program to replace the numerous open-air markets with covered structures, Berlin's central market hall was erected to the west of the Alexanderplatz (at the location of the present television tower), and the former Ochsenmarkt was transformed into the city's central livestock market. As manufacturing industries moved eastwards, a variety of services took their place. Berlin's largest departmentstore chains, Wertheim and Tietz, opened branches on the Alexanderplatz after the turn of the century (fig. 2). The huge Grand Hotel dominated the eastern end of the square after the 188os, and numerous restaurants were founded, including the famous Aschinger, nestled on the ground floor of the former Konigsstadtisches Theater. The Alexanderplatz continued its tradition of popular entertainment with the opening in 1909 of the Union Theater, the city's first freestanding, upscale cinema. Needless to say, the transportation system had to be updated continually to accommodate the growing masses of employees and consumers attracted to the area. The moat surrounding the city was filled and covered with the tracks of the commuter rail system, which opened a station on the Alexanderplatz in 1882. On the eve of the Great War, Berlin's new subway system reached the square (fig. 3). In the early months of 1919 the Alexanderplatz, to a much greater extent than in 1848, became the scene of revolutionary upheaval and civil war, as communist and leftist forces seized the police headquarters in January, during the "Spartacus" uprising, and again in March, during the general strike. These disruptions were quickly and brutally contained. A very different form of turmoil soon characterized the Alexanderplatz, as its increasing commercial importance turned it into a

THE

NOVEL

•

3

FIGURE I

Alexanderplatz, with the "grim, red" police headquarters in center. Postcard, ca. I900.

FIGURE 2

Alexanderplatz, with Tietz department store on right. Postcard, I9IO.

FIGURE

3

Aerial view of the Alexanderplatz, bounded on the west by the commuter railroad (S-Bahn). Postcard, 1924.

major point of traffic congestion. For that reason, when Martin Wagner became director of Berlin's department of urban planning in early 1926, he immediately singled out the Alexanderplatz for a major overhaul; indeed, in one of his most famous statements, he contended that it (like other urban nodal points) would have to be rebuilt completely every twenty-five years. The first step involved the construction of a north-south subway line, so the Alexanderplatz was gutted to allow the construction of a vast underground station, the largest in Berlin- a mammoth process of demolition and excavation that plays a major symbolic role in Dahlin's novel. When it finally opened in December 1930, the station offered not only passageways connecting subway lines, commuter trains, and long-distance trains on several levels but also a variety of brightly lit stores amid the profusion of shiny, pale blue tiles covering the underground corridors. The Social Democratic Vorwarts claimed that it was "the most beautiful and modern subway station in the

world"- an exaggeration based not only on local pride but also on the fact that the project had been sponsored by a socialist city councilman, Ernst Reuter (who later gained worldwide fame as mayor of West Berlin during the airlift of 1947 and 1948). 4 The completion of the underground transportation connections was fol-

lowed by substantial revisions above ground, as car traffic was channeled into a

THE NOVEL

•

)

FIGURE

4

View of the renovated Alexanderplatz, with two office buildings by Peter Behrens. Postcard, 1935·

circular flow and the Frankfurter Allee was widened. Though the film B erlin Alexanderplat{ was shot after the completion of the subway, it still was able to show

numerous scenes of ongoing construction, such as the two new office buildings designed by Peter Behrens (fig. 4). This rapid pace of development gave the Alexanderplatz the reputation of being the most "American" part of Berlin.5 Despite its increasing importance as a center of commerce and transportation, the Alexanderplatz could never shake its image as a somewhat suspect locale. As Franz Hessel noted in Spa1_ieren in Berlin (Walking in Berlin, 1929), an account of the city from the perspective of a flaneur, the very fact that the square was in constant flux attracted a transient, often down-and-out population. 6 But even the more settled neighborhoods around the Alexanderplatz were home to the lower and often impoverished classes. The spaces between the two major streets radiating east of the city, the Frankfurter Allee and the Landsberger Allee, were filled with workers' housing tracts. This was the area where Doblin had his medical practice and from which he drew his clientele. A very different and even poorer image was projected by the ScheunenYiertel (literally, "shed quarter"), named after the barns and woodsheds erected there after a seventeenth-century decree prohibited such

6 •

THE N OVEL

fire hazards from remaining within the city walls. Already in the nineteenth century, the neighborhood acquired a dubious reputation as an area where prostitutes and criminals congregated. Toward the end of that century, it became home to hundreds of impoverished Jews fleeing pogroms in Russia; thereafter, the area was dubbed "the ghetto of Berlin. " 7 At the turn of the century the city undertook a major project to "clean up" the neighborhood. Numerous ramshackle buildings were torn down to make way for new structures surrounding the Biilowplatz, including the imposing Volksbiihne, which Doblin dismissed as "pompous." 8 At the end of World War I, a renewed wave of Jewish immigrants swept into the Scheunenviertel. It was they who became the victims of pogromlike assaults on 5 and 6 November 1923, at the height of the hyperinflation. Although the disturbances were touched off by reports that the price-control board had increased the cost of bread, anti-Semitic agitators directed popular anger not against the responsible officials but rather the impoverished Jews of the Scheunenviertel. For two days stores were sacked and individuals were stripped naked, beaten, and stabbed to shouts of "kill the Jews!" The police did little to protect the victims and even denied that the attacks were motivated by anti-Semitism. 9 Doblin was shocked by these "outright pogroms," as he described them: "The police, lax toward the attackers, arrested members of Jewish self-defense organizations. The incident was breathtaking. Regardless of the reasons given, it was doubtlessly an outburst of the old, now massively fomented hatred against the Jews." 10 After the pogroms, Doblin-who until then had scant sense of Jewish self-identity-began to spend more time in the Jewish quarter, and he attended some Zionist meetings. A year later he embarked on a journey to Poland in order to visit its Jewish communities, which he described in Reise in Polen (Journey in Poland, 1926). Two years later, he composed the opening passages of Berlin Alexanderplatf_, wherein N achum, a resident of the Scheunenviertel, is the first person to take care of Biberkopf after his release from jail-an act of hospitality for which Franz remains grateful, until he starts to sell Nazi newspapers. 11 In the popular imagination as well as in Dahlin's novel, the Alexanderplatz and its environs comprised a variety of contradictory images. On the one hand, it represented the modernity of Berlin, with its department stores, cinemas, hectic traffic, and constant construction. This aspect was summarized in Walter Benjamin's review ofDoblin's book: "What is the Alexanderplatz in Berlin? That is the place where for two years the most violent changes are taking place, bulldozers and drills operate continuously, the ground quakes from their blows and from the streams of buses and subways, where deeper than elsewhere the guts of the big city have been

THE NOVEL

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laid bare." 12 On the other hand, the Alexanderplatz signified poorer sectors of the population: proletarians, part-time workers, unemployed, criminals, prostitutes, Jewish immigrants. If both aspects of the square implied instability, it was because they were related: the processes of modernization brought with them massive social and economic change, which offered employment to some but made other jobs redundant. This general trend was exacerbated by conditions specific to postwar Germany, such as the fiscal rigor imposed in late 1923 to harness the hyperinflation. The tight-money policy kept unemployment relatively high even in 1928, the "best" year of the Weimar Republic, during which the events of Berlin

Alexanderplat;_ transpire. There were many Franz Biberkopfs scrambling for work during the most glittering of Weimar's "golden years," and many of the jobs that they found were regarded as "criminal." But Doblin, who came into contact with such people through his medical practice, was unable to discern a clear division between respectability and illegality: "When I encountered these people and those like them outside my office, I had a strange image of our society: how there is no strictly definable line between criminals and noncriminals, how at all possible points society--or rather, that part of it which I could see-is undermined with criminality." 13 Doblin did not wish to glorify the actions of such people, but he believed that the truly evil and pernicious forces lay elsewhere. As he surveyed the devastated Alexanderplatz in 1947 (fig. 5), he noted, "But the destruction did not emanate from this square and its people. Here there was the pulse of peaceful life, such as human life is, with weaknesses and vices and corruption .... There was nothing excessive and violent in it.... This was not a home to the abyss." 14 Dr. Dahlin's daily contact with inhabitants of the Alexanderplatz and adjacent areas-the Rosenthaler Platz and Scheunenviertel to the north, the workers' quarters along the Frankfurter Allee to the east-nourished his appreciation of the Berlin argot and provided a wealth of personal stories upon which he could draw for works like Berlin Alexanderplatz. It also revealed to him, again and again, the inequities of society. In 1928 he noted that his patients consisted almost exclusively of workers and the lower reaches of salaried employees: "Rarely does anyone from the higher classes lose his way into my office. And I must admit, that doesn't make me sad." 15 Among that clientele, he realized that the medical help he gave was of limited use as long as the living conditions of his patients were not improved. Often he could lend at most a sympathetic ear to problems that were beyond his ability to ameliorate: "I cannot give them coal or get them another apartment or another wife or a job." He viewed the role of health-plan doctors like himself as a mixture of

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FIGURE 5 Ruins of the Tietz department store on the Alexanderplatz, viewed from a Behrens office building. Postcard, 1945.

"pastoral care and social welfare work," and he recognized that his practice was a safety valve helping to maintain the status quo: "We are all just private social workers with medical experience. If I see it correctly, we are placed at a critical point, though not publicly visible, as a quiet buffer between the social forces known to everyone." 16 Doblin never aspired to the trappings of the bourgeoisie, even when his dual professions of doctor and author would have allowed it: "I have not adopted bourgeois values like so many of the little people who want only to make a higher salary and a better living-I am disgusted by 'refinement,' by affluence with its made-up, satiated people; I loathe the socializing of the rich, their impudent and revolting way of abusing art as evening entertainment." 17 He disliked not just the German bourgeoisie but also what he dubbed "das klassische Ensemhle," the elitist culture that it flaunted and used to justify its social hegemony. In 1922 he wrote of the profound links between the two: "For a long time the tame classical ensemble remained completely outside my purview. It was alien to me. Goethe did not enter my mind at all. Slowly I made a connection between the classical ensemble, including schools and teachers, and the obtuse bourgeoisie. The same elements ... that run

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the state politically also publish newspapers, collect paintings, build museums, go to concerts and theaters, look at actors' photographs-boring, often despicable elements that can only be resisted. I saw that the same bourgeois strata are the ones who worship the classical ensemble." 18 Bourgeois notions of aesthetics had become so dominant that Doblin repeatedly rejected the label "Kunst" (art) for his own works. In February 1928, while he was composing Berlin Alexanderplat:r_, he wrote that "I never have considered my literary works to be works of art in today's conventional sense," and two years later he again denied "that my books have anything to do with art in today's sense." 19

Berlin Alexanderplat:r_ itself continually underscores the irrelevance of the "classical ensemble." Over the course of the novel, Franz Biberkopf is swayed by a number of discursive spheres and a variety of media, but he remains completely ignorant of the corpus of classical literature. The dark and disturbing flashback describing Franz's fatal beating of Ida, which also draws on the language of forensic medicine and Newtonian physics, contrasts his lack of conscience with the Furies' pursuit of Orestes after he kills his mother. The narrator sarcastically notes that the Furies do not hound Franz since "the times have changed" and the story cannot be retold: whereas Orestes sought refuge in a temple, "today you have to look hard to find a church that's open at night." 20 Later in the book, the same myth is recalled dismissively after Reinhold pushes Biberkopf out of a speeding car: "Pangs of conscience, where are the pangs of conscience, Orestes and Clytemnestra, Reinhold doesn't know either of these gentlemen even by name." 21 Even the narrator's recollection of classical culture flags at times: "I can't describe exactly the shield with which Achilles was armed and adorned as he strode into battle, I can remember only vaguely something about arm guards and leg guards. But how Franz looks, who is now going forth to a new battle, that I have to tell you." 22 Not only is the Greek but also the German classical tradition parodied in the novel, most obviously in the send-up of Heinrich von Kleist's nationalistic play

Prinr_ Friedrich von Homburg. Appalled that Franz is hawking gay magazines, his girlfriend "Lina Przyballa from Czernowitz" hurls them at the supplier in a scene that is liberally spiced with quotes from the drama. 23 Berlin Alexanderplatz is peppered with citations from (or parodistic variants of) German classical authors, especially Goethe; but these games are played by the narrator, since the whole corpus of elite literature is totally foreign to Franz and his friends. Among the characters, classical allusions are voiced only by a former teacher, whose morphine addiction cost him his job: "You shouldn't make a big deal about your destiny. I'm an opponent of fate. I'm not a Greek, I'm a Berliner." 24 But those words, spoken by

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someone who used to uphold the classical tradition in the classroom, further underscore its irrelevance for everyday life-especially in Berlin. Doblin's rejection of classical culture dated to his schooldays: "I confess that I didn't know what to make of Goethe or Schiller, I began to open up to Goethe very late, but he never became my man." 25 As a youth he much preferred the works of Dostoevsky, which seemed to him "completely unliterary" and full of "resistance, energy, revolution." Novels like Crime and Punishment and The Idiot "heaved me decisively out of school and aesthetics. I was driven into an undefined, but strongly felt offensive against the aesthetic clique." 26 Further ammunition was provided by popular and mass culture. As a child of ten, he eagerly read the weekly installments of penny dreadfuls, whose scenes of "noble deeds, gruesome tortures, and especially perfidious murders" made him "terribly excited." 27 He also had a disturbing encounter with a Moritat, a type of gory ballad about violent crimes, sung and illustrated by fairground performers. In a third-person account of his youth, Doblin recalled, "Once at a fair he saw a Moritat painted on the side of a stall, a garish canvas with a horrible murder scene; the boy ran home, he couldn't shake the image, it scared him immensely; for many years the terrible impression would not leave him, as much as he tried to escape the torment." 28 Ultimately, he put the experience to productive use. Just as Frank Wedekind and Bertolt Brecht inserted Moritat-like songs into their plays, Doblin scripted ditties to introduce various sections of Berlin Alexanderplat{-doggerel that critics like Walter Benjamin compared to the Moritat. 29 By the time he was a young man, Doblin had abandoned most forms of traditional middle-class culture and turned to the popular arts for diversion. In 1910 he noted that "I have become accustomed to quench my artistic thirst Jaute de mieux in cinemas, variety shows, and circuses." 30 The ''faute de mieux" is telling, since Doblin's love of popular entertainment was not unalloyed. Indeed, his first sketch on cinema, "The Theater of the Little People" (1909), has ironic overtones. To be sure, much of the irony is aimed at an imaginary "man of higher education" (der Hohergebildete) as he responds to popular amusements with a combination of horror and disgust. But the article also gently mocks the lower-class arts. It begins by noting that "the little man, the little woman," having no knowledge of literature, wander the streets at night in search of strong sensations: "they want to be touched, excited, horrified; to burst out laughing." Hence they turn to curio shows, waxworks, and nickelodeons ("Anatomietheater, Panoptika, Kinematographen"). The first two offer images of the Imperial family and of Bismarck as well as giant potatoes and dissected sturgeons, but the instruments of torture and the portrayal

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of a deranged mother frying her baby draw the most attention (although, ironically, it is actually the "man of higher education" who is most intrigued by such grisly sights). 31 Cinemas likewise offer a motley variety of attractions. They can be found all over Berlin-"in the north, the south, the east, the west of the city"-but Di:iblin devotes most of his account to describing the proletarian nickelodeons in the northern suburbs. There, in unventilated rooms, crowds of sickly men, women, and children absorb minidramas that are alternately violent ("with a dozen bodies") or sentimental ("the blind dying beggar and the dog that expires on his grave"). The one genre that this audience does not swallow is the nationalistic newsreel: "warships; no patriotism at the sight of the Kaiser and the army; a hateful staring." The last comment is particularly interesting inasmuch as Di:iblin repeatedly makes the point that the lower classes crave violent attractions. In the cinema, ''panem et circenses is realized: amusement as necessary as bread; bullfighting a popular need." However, when the violence threatens to become real or to be yoked to the nationalist cause-as is the case with the Imperial army and navy-the audience shies away. Di:iblin concludes by appealing for indulgence: "Don't deprive the people and youths of trashy literature and the flickers; they need this very bloody meal without the bland pablum of folkloristic literature and the watery sauce of morality." 32 Di:iblin's essay of 1909 humorously evoked a very serious battle over popular culture that had been fought on various fronts for several decades, a defensive war waged by the Bildungsbiirger (Germany's educated elite, who had received rigorous training in Greek and Latin in the Gymnasia, the "classical" high schools). For much of the nineteenth century, the Bildungsbiirger had enjoyed a central, often hegemonic role in German society, owing to their prominence in the civil service, the judiciary, the legal and medical professions, journalism, politics, and not least of all the arts. But the social dominance of the Bildungsbiirger and their classical culture crumbled toward the end of the century. On the one hand, within the bourgeoisie itself, those with business acumen and technical skills gained not only financial power but also increasing social prestige. On the other hand, wide sectors of the working and middle classes-and increasingly, the bourgeoisie itselfbecame appreciative consumers of the myriad forms of mass culture. The Bildungsbiirger continued to enjoy nominal respect, but they could not ignore the

fact that classical culture and humanistic education were increasingly irrelevant in an age of rapid economic, technological, and scientific developments. Instead of adapting themselves to these new conditions, they clung to their old ideals and battled what they considered the "materialism" of the age. As part of that struggle,

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they persistently criticized the increasingly commercialized "unculture" of the "masses." They launched a litany of invective against "trashy" popular novels, "sensationalistic" tabloids and illustrated magazines, "obscene" postcards, and "kitschy" vaudeville and variety shows. After the turn of the century, it was time to take on film as well. That battle too was waged within the ranks of the middle class, since the producers of film-its entrepreneurs, directors, technicians, and performers-were drawn largely from its members who lacked university training. Heide Schliipmann has provided what is perhaps the best summary of the situation: "Cinema and film production developed in Wilhelmine Germany largely independently from the Bildungsbiirgertum. They were based on all of those middle-class elements that felt excluded from 'culture': the productive forces came from groups involved in technology, business, variety shows, and fairground displays, as well as actors, while the public consisted of women of diverse backgrounds, the 'little people,' the workers and salaried employees." 33 Within this context, Doblin's appeal for indulgence toward cinema was a slap at both classical culture and the bourgeois elites. He allied himself with those middle-class forces that defended popular taste, though he did not himself produce works with popular literary appeal. Far from it. Some innovative artists tried to fuse elements of popular and classical culture into a vital synthesis that would enjoy commercial success with a middle-class public; in the realm of theater, this was true of playwrights like Frank Wedekind, directors like Max Reinhardt, and practitioners of cabaret. But others, like Wassily Kandinsky, were inspired by popular culture to create an avant-garde aesthetic that had, paradoxically, no popular audience. 34 In his early years, Doblin belonged to that category; indeed, it was only after 1928, as he wrote Berlin Alexanderplaq_ and became involved in radio programs and film production, that he

consciously attempted to reach a larger public. Before that, while he defended the populace's right to enjoy its "trashy" arts, he himself promoted a decidedly unpopular aesthetic, even though his "Berlin Program" called upon authors to adopt a "cinema style" (Kinostil). Doblin's "Berlin Program" (1913) was a radical attack on individualism and humanism in the arts. He laid waste everything associated with "psychology," especially the notion that an author could create figures with motivations and feelings that accurately reflected human nature. Conventional portrayals of character development and thought processes were for Doblin "pure abstract phantasmagorias," "poetical glosses," or simply "hot air" (Schaumschliigerez). Doblin pleaded for "psychiatry," which he claimed "long ago recognized the na"ivete of psychology,"

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inasmuch as it limited itself to "taking note of the order of events" but refrained from asking "how" or "why." At that time, Doblin clearly remained under the influence of his decidedly anti-Freudian Doktorvater Alfred Hoche, who advocated a purely descriptive psychiatric approach that avoided causal explanations. Doblin contended that words like "hate," "love," or "contempt" existed "only for practical communication"; they designated "observable complexes," but they could not be used "as guiding threads of a plot modeled upon life." He demanded that such notions be purged from the self-conception of the author as well as from literary products. In place of subjective impressions, writers should strive to provide exact descriptions of objects; in place of psychologically motivated plotlines, they should chronicle sequences of events, as if they were medical case notes. "The hegemony of the author must be smashed; the fanaticism of self-abnegation cannot be pursued far enough. Nor the fanaticism of renunciation: I am not I, but the street, the lanterns, this and that event, nothing more. That is what I call the stonelike style [den steinernen Stil]." Doblin also called this a Kinostil, which he equated with "highest

concentration and precision" in the depiction of events and "extremes of plasticity and vitality" in the use of language. "The dawdling of storytelling has no place in the novel; one doesn't tell stories, one builds." Doblin demanded "paucity, economy of words" and a "rapid succession of events" recounted "simply, in brief cues." He insisted that "the whole must seem to be not spoken, but rather present." 35 Di:iblin's concept of a Kinostil was based on the aesthetics of the nickelodeons, venues that were disappearing rapidly when he wrote the essay in 1913. Two years earlier, narrative feature films had begun to conquer the cinemas, often using popular novels as bases for screenplays; hence it was highly paradoxical that Doblin told his fellow authors to develop a self-consciously antiliterary style based on a type of cinema that was already passe. In the nickelodeons, "story" films never lasted more than a few minutes, so no complex tales could be told. The young medium reveled in its visual potential, as it explored the physical world: techniques like close-ups and slow-motion photography allowed audiences to see their material environs in completely new ways and brought unobserved details to light. Moreover, early cinema programs consisted of a variety of shorts, lasting three to fifteen minutes, replete with diverse and often contradictory moods and genres. As late as 1910, the Lichtbildbiihne, a film trade journal, reported that a typical program might be composed of the following parts:

"1.

Musical piece.

2.

Current events.

3· Something humorous. 4· Drama. )· Something comic. 6. Nature scenes. 7· Something comic. 8. The big attraction. 9· Something scientific.

10.

Boisterous

comedy." 36 In "The Theater of the Little People," Doblin referred in passing to

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more serious works like nature films, stories by Manzoni, and historical scenes like "the burning of Rome" as well as to lighter fare, such as comics, farces, or adventure stories with chase scenes. 37 Early cinema thus presented a chaotic mixture of fact and fiction, science and nonsense, tragedy and comedy, moral and immoral tales. What this diverse assemblage shared was a focus on the visual, the object, the physiognomy. When stories were told, they were too short to be more than vignettes that lacked character development. Early film programs were, in sum, similar to long stretches of Berlin

Alexanderplaq_. Though composed some fifteen years after feature films had taken over the screen, the novel has more in common with the aesthetics of the nickelodeon than with Weimar cinema. At many points, the work consists of a bricolage of unconnected anecdotes and reports. Such early commentators on the novel as Erich Miihsam and Walter Benjamin called this a "montage" technique, and the appellation has stuck, though Doblin himself never used that word to describe his mode of composition. 38 Nor did he employ montage in the manner of, say, Sergei Eisenstein: namely, as a calculated juxtaposition of contrasting shots and sequences within the framework of an overarching narrative, with the intent of heightening tension and elucidating social differences. Indeed, Eisenstein politely corrected speeches by Doblin and others at a banquet in his honor in August 1929, saying that they did not understand the essence of Soviet films. 39 The montagelike passages of

Berlin Alexanderplat'{_ reflect, rather, the much more chaotic, unstructured, and motley juxtapositions of the nickelodeon era. Benjamin himself evoked that jumble when he described the building blocks of the novel as "petty bourgeois pamphlets, tales of scandal, accidents, sensations of '28, folk songs, advertisements, ... bible verses, statistics, hit songs. " 40 Doblin concluded his "Berlin Program" with a call for "denial, renunciation of the author, depersonization [Depersonisation] . ... Let go of the human being! Have courage for kinetic fantasy ... !" The essay comprised a number of opinions that Doblin himself soon modified, but its basic issues continued to concern him until the end of the Weimar Republic and beyond. It challenged conventional notions of individualism and humanism; indeed, it proclaimed what has come to be called "the posthumanist subject." On the one hand, works like Berlin Alexanderplat'{_ would question the stability and autonomy of the self, suffused as it was with external discursive influences. On the other hand, Doblin challenged our ability to understand human subjectivity: the words and narratives that we use to describe ourselves and others, our motivations and feelings, were nothing but "literature," a term he used dismissively.

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This viewpoint is nowhere clearer than in Doblin's book of 1924, Die heiden

Freundinnen und ihr Giftmord (The Two Girlfriends and Their Murder by Poisoning). The short work deals with the events behind a much-publicized trial from the previous year: a woman who was profoundly estranged from her abusive husband began a lesbian relationship with a neighbor, and the two murdered the husband with arsenic. The bulk of the book describes, in an "objective" tone replete with psychiatric terminology, the changing emotional states of the women and the man; this is matched by visual depictions, consisting of seventeen graphics and one chart, illustrating their psychological dispositions at various phases. But after having explained the case in a "scientific" manner, Di:iblin did a breathtaking about-face in the epilogue, where he proclaimed that we do not really understand the events at all: "It happened like this; even the actors believe it. But it also did not happen like this." Still subscribing to Hache's psychiatry and the principles of the "Berlin Program," Di:iblin denied our ability to comprehend the actors: "We know nothing about psychic continuity, causality, the substance of the soul and its cathexes." He deplored the "terribly unclear words," the "summary, stupid words" that we are forced to use to describe emotions: "affection, aversion, disgust, love, revenge." Such words are "a mishmash, a mess, made for elementary practical communication. We've slapped labels on bottles without checking their contents." Where do such flimsy notions arise? "Newspaper reports and novels, which narrate such life stories, have caused us, through frequent hearing of such tales, to be satisfied with such empty words. Most explanations of the psyche are nothing but novelistic literature." 41 Whereas realist and naturalist authors claimed to follow the scientific psychology of their day, Di:iblin implied that, conversely, psychologists merely parroted the language of nineteenth-century literature. Di:iblin launched the epilogue of The Two Girlfriends with these hammer blows against all attempts, including his own, to comprehend the human subject, but he ended on a moderately conciliatory note: "I wanted to show the difficulties of the case, to erase the impression that we can understand all or the majority of such a massive slice of life. We understand it, on a certain level." 42 This wavering heralded an important shift in Doblin's views over the ensuing years, as he came to assign more power to the human self and the human psyche than he had previously. A decisive role was played by his trip to Poland in 1924, when he was deeply impressed by the Jewish communities' profound commitment to spiritual values: "The spirit lives .... They are a symbol of the one thing that harbors the future, birth, creation: the spirit and the power of the self [den Geist und die Kraft des

Ich]." 43 Previously, in the "Berlin Program," Doblin had called for authorial

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self-denial by claiming that "I am not I, but the street, the lanterns," yet now he conceded, "The electric tram, I know, is not more real than what I feel." 44 At the same time, Dahlin responded more positively to the works of Freud. In 1926 he celebrated Freud's seventieth birthday with a lecture before the German

Psychoanalytical Society, and in 1930 he successfully lobbied to have Freud awarded the prestigious Goethe Prize. 45 Even then, Dahlin did not fully accept Freud's theories, but he also abandoned Hoche's purely objective-descriptive approach. Indeed, he parodied both Hoche and Freud in the extended scene in Berlin Alexanderplatz where the doctors at the Buch clinic debate the proper way to

treat Biberkopf. The younger, Freudian doctors try to coax the mute Franz into talking, since they are convinced that his condition is "psychogenetic, ... perhaps a reversion to his earliest psychic states." The head physician dismisses such talk as pure poetry-"medicine on the wings of song" -and insists that Franz suffers from "catatonic stupor," probably caused by a cyst, for which no treatment is available.46 Ultimately, both parties to this amusing discussion are proven wrong, as Franz heals himself through his own inner spiritual resources. Besides marking the beginning of a shift in his views on psychology and the psyche itself, Dahlin's lengthy analysis of a lesbian relationship prefigured the recurring theme of same-sex love in Berlin Alexanderplatz. Franz ostensibly considers homosexuals ludicrous: during the short phase when he sells gay magazines, he attends a gay meeting, yet soon "he couldn't take it any more, he had to split, the cause and the little guys were too funny, so many queers [Schwule] in a heap and he in the middle, he had to leave quickly and he laughed all the way to the Alexanderplatz. " 47 But then Franz meets Reinhold, for whom he feels an erotic attraction, which is undiminished even after Reinhold tries to kill him by pushing him out of a speeding car. While at a ball, Franz's affections become apparent: "And he loves most intensely, as he dances with Eva, he loves two people: the one is Mieze, whom he would have liked to have there, and the other one isReinhold."48 It takes Reinhold's murder of Mieze to break the thrall. But other characters as well move freely among sexual orientations. Reinhold becomes totally enamored of a young man whom he meets in prison: "They become deep and true friends, such as Reinhold never had, and even if it's not a woman, but just a boy, it's still nice." 49 And when Eva tells Mieze that she wants Franz to father her child, Mieze covers Eva with kisses "on the mouth, nose, ears, neck" and nuzzles her breast-which leads Eva to ask, "Man, are you queer?" 50 The theme of samesex attraction is central to the story inasmuch as it helps explain Biberkopf's counterintuitive attachment to Reinhold. But at the same time, the various allusions to

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gay and lesbian affairs are not highlighted in the tale: they are treated as if they were natural, not worth extraneous commentary. Like Freud, Dahlin obviously considered bisexuality-with homosexual desires generally latent but omnipresentto be the normal condition. It was one more index of the multiplicity of personalities that constituted every individual. In the epilogue to The Two Girlfriends, Dahlin contended that even though the story could be told as if it were "without gaps," the reality looked more like "a fabric consisting of many individual scraps, from cloth, silk, also pieces of metal and clumps of clay. It is mended with straw, wire, thread. In various places the parts lie loosely next to each other. Many fragments are bonded with clay or glass." 51 These starkly material metaphors, employed to evoke the incoherence of our knowledge of the human subject, look back to the Kinos til as well as forward to the bricolage aesthetic of Berlin Alexanderplatz. Yet Dahlin did not believe that the fragmentary state of our knowledge was alone to blame for the partiality of our insights. He contended that the psyche itself was fragmented-that the subject was subjected to an active process of dispersal. In the "Berlin Program," he suggested that modern media, such as an object-fixated Kinostil, provided means of representing that crisis of subjectivity. But in other works, Dablin began to argue that such media were causes of the crisis as well. To gain a fuller understanding of Dablin's project as it evolved toward Berlin Alexanderplatz, we need to examine his views on the impact of urban life upon the individual and the role played by language and media in the constitution of human subjects as well as art.

MEDIA MAKE THE CITY Dab lin never tired of highlighting the importance of Berlin for his thought and writing. In an early autobiography, written during the Great War, he said of himself: "Lived only in two cities, Stettin and Berlin, actually only Berlin, from age ten on .... He was a Berliner with only a faint inkling of other places and climes." 52 Five years later he reported that "the excitement of the streets, shops, vehicles is the heat that I need to drive me when I work, that is: just about always. That's the gas that fuels my motor. " 53 After the publication of Berlin Alexanderplatz, he noted that "my thought and intellectual work belong, whether explicitly or not, to Berlin." 54 Much was inexplicit because many of his major literary works were set in past ages and distant lands about which he had only a "faint inkling." But these works too, he claimed, were imbued with his experience of Berlin. He wrote that "one of the themes that I chose and drew from this stony soil" was "how the individual

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disappeared here, how there were only active and suffering masses here: the great collective, a mass of people in a revolutionary movement to cast off its poverty, that was the theme of my first book, even before the War." 55 That book, Die drei Sprilnge des Wang-lun (The Three Leaps of Wang-lun, 191 ;), was set in China.

Only with his next book, Wad{eks Kampf mit der Dampfturbine (Wadzek's Battle with the Steam Turbine, 19r8), a tale of competing industrialists, did Dahlin write a novel set in the "stony soil" of Berlin. Thereafter he turned to the past with Wallenstein

(1920),

his voluminous riff on the Thirty Years' War, and to the very

distant future with Berge Meere und Giganten (Mountains Oceans and Giants,

1924),

which took the theme of collectivism, masses, and technology to new extremes. But even readers who had come to expect the unexpected from Dahlin were stunned when that unwieldy tome was followed by Manas (1927), an epic poem based on Hindu mythology. To be sure, these wide-ranging peregrinations were due in part to Dahlin's reluctance to examine himself, as he noted in

1922:

"I can't say any-

thing about my spiritual development; since I myself practice psychoanalysis, I know how false every statement about oneself is. Besides, I'm psychically a don'ttouch-me, and I approach myself only via the distance of epic storytelling. Hence via China and the Holy Roman Empire r63o." 56 But behind these tales of selfavoidance lurked the Alexanderplatz. The missing literary links between these works and Dahlin's experience of Berlin may be found in the dozens of essays that he wrote for newspapers in Berlin, Frankfurt, Vienna, and Prague. Many of them provide vignettes of the metropolis, particularly the areas where Dahlin lived and practiced medicine: the lower-class neighborhoods north and east of the Alexanderplatz. Often he depicted Berlin as an amorphous mass that could be evoked only by an asyntactic listing: "it rebels, conspires, broods on the left, broods on the right, demonstrates, renters, landlords, Jews, anti-Semites, the poor, proletarians, warriors in the class struggle, profiteers, seedy intellectuals, small girls, demimonde, high-school teachers, parents' associations, trade unions, two thousand organizations, ten thousand newspapers, twenty thousand reports, five truths." 57 Dahlin often used such iterative and ungrammatical passages to evoke the immensity and unresolved contradictions of the metropolis, but he balanced them with more focused vignettes that gave individuality to its inhabitants. That back-and-forth was echoed in the full title of his novel, Berlin Alexanderplat{: Die Geschichte vom Fran{ Biberkopf (Berlin Alexanderplatz: The

Story of Franz Biberkopf). 58 In the process, he analyzed the multiple and conflicting forces that shaped the city's inhabitants-above all, the means of communication, ranging from the most modern media, such as radio, film, and gramophone;

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to older print-based media like newspapers, handbills, and posters; and ultimately to more archaic forms of oral culture, including storytelling, commonplace sayings, and song. Several of these media transmitted advertisements, which are both a theme and a linguistic glue in Berlin Alexanderplatr Doblin's concern with them dates to the early years of the Weimar Republic. In an essay entitled "Posters" published in July 1919, he noted, "Things are stuck on buildings. A city like this cannot stay silent, it's not enough for it to speak via trams, cars, hurdy-gurdies." In the "eastern streets" people stroll and "stumbling, read newspapers; if they lift their heads, they gawk at the walls with pictures, letters; every third, fourth house bears a sign, the city sweats out its secrets." 59 Doblin's initial reaction to advertising was hostile. At the outset of his futuristic Mountains Oceans and Giants, composed during the worst year of the hyperinflation, he described how our civilization will become corrupted by words and images that arouse a lust for commodities: "Like swarms of demons," aggressive merchants "crossed the continents of Africa America Europe. Those were men and women who aroused people with things that they offered-aroused, tempted, goaded against each other." People who used to be satisfied with being "fed clothed warmed moderately entertained" were transformed into beings with insatiable appetites for ever more goods. This demand was stimulated in every corner of the world via a medium that had not yet been invented when Doblin wrote: television (Fernbilder). "Television transported the images of people, of objects. Every new attraction became a conflagration, a spark that became a fire consuming entire neighborhoods and cities. In distant lands, on mountains, on wild rivers of raging water, on tropical steppes deluged with heat and swarming with animals, there were people, tribes, that were sufficient unto themselves. To them came the attraction the word the image. The pictures appeared before them, came to them again and again, clawed at them .... Like a shovel under a heap of stones that has become covered with moss, this arousal dug into humans, tossed them up, dislodged them." 60 While phrased in much less apocalyptic terms, the seductive potential of commodities and advertisements carried over into Berlin Alexanderplatr.: "All houses are full of stores, but it only looks like they are stores, they are really a lot of calls, mating calls, chirping, knick knack, chirping without a forest." 61 But while continuing to caution against their siren calls, Dahlin came to believe that the language of advertisements offered creative opportunities to authors. For better or worse, they embodied the lingua franca of the day, and hence could provide building blocks for a new literature, such as Berlin Alexanderplatr. itself. In his essay on "Advertising

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and Literature" that appeared in August r 929, a month before the novel was serialized in the Frankfurter Zeitung, Di:iblin asked what sort of language could be truly effective in the present. He proceeded to argue that "advertising is a good contemporary manner of speaking, form of speaking for today. Whoever does not take a close look at it, whoever does not employ it, will not be able to capture the big city of the present .... I suggest: take note of advertising and leave Stefan George and Rilke behind." 62 Dablin regarded advertising as an appropriate linguistic medium because it spoke directly to the average person in pithy and often witty slogans and verses. The brevity of the messages matched the speeded-up nature of life in the metropolis, while the humor and the rhymes served as mnemonic devices that lodged in consumers' minds. Those same virtues were to be found in popular music: Dahlin praised current hits above the works of Bach and Wagner, owing to their "cheeky, resolute cheerfulness" and their proximity to everyday experience. 63 Designed to be "catchy" in the most basic sense of the word, advertisements and pop songs-along with traditional rhymes, which provided a model for bothpopulate the minds of people like Biberkopf, sometimes obsessively. 64 Di:iblin's positive assessment of advertisements in the late 1920s did not contradict his indictments from earlier in the decade, inasmuch as Berlin Alexanderplaty illustrated their deleterious impact on gullible figures like Biberkopf. But Dablin had come to believe that, despite their potential dangers, they provided the linguistic and symbolic forms most appropriate to evoke everyday life in the modern metropolis. Moreover, authors had to avail themselves of advertisements, hits, popular sayings, and local dialects in order to overcome the increasingly great divide between "literature" and the general public. In late 1929, when Berlin Alexanderplaty was published, Di:iblin caused considerable consternation among

some of his fellow authors when he publicly called for a "lowering of the general level ofliterature" (Senkung des Gesammiveaus der Literatur). This was necessary for

authors to break out of their "culture cage" (Bildungskafig), which had led the broad public to perceive "literature" as something exclusively for "high-class people" ifeine Leute). 6' Dahlin was not calling for a "dumbing down" ofliterature, though his phrase was misperceived as such; rather, he appealed for a new "naturalistic" style-radically different from the pseudorealism of the old one-that would address current issues and be accessible to the general public. The trick for modern writers was to employ the vernacular styles of popular and mass culture, and even be carried away by them, in a productive and critical manner. Di:iblin already had laid out that project in "The Construction of the Epic Work," a talk that he had delivered in December 1928, at the time that he was

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composing Berlin Alexanderplatr_; indeed, it reads like an aesthetic manifesto for that novel, as Walter Benjamin observed. 66 Doblin argued that a work of literature is determined largely by the type oflanguage chosen by the author: a "well-selected language ... is a productive power in itself," one that offers modes of thinking as well as contents of thought. By the same token, each linguistic style also imposes limitations on the author, which can become "catastrophically destructive and constraining." Doblin called for greater awareness of both aspects oflanguage: "There is a productive power and a compulsive character inherent in every style oflanguage, in

both a formal and an ideational sense." Indeed, the writer's dependence on language is so great that he or she becomes its vehicle. In a prefiguration of the theories of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, Doblin contended that "you think that you are speaking but you are being spoken, or you think that you are w'riting but you are being written." 67 This assertion reflected the personal experience of Doblin, who wrote compulsively and voluminously throughout his life. Already in

1921

he noted: "A product

develops during production; this statement might seem funny, but it's certain that a product is at most intuited before production. In the process of production, the forces of the material, of the word, the sound, the concepts, associations, the souls of humans first make their appearance." 68 It seemed to Doblin that once he began a process of writing, much of what followed escaped his conscious control. In

1916

he happened to see an image of Gustav Adolf's fleet plowing the Baltic Sea, and his obsession with that vision led him to read numerous primary accounts of the Thirty Years' War-and to compose Wallenstein. He contended that he was not interested in that epoch as such, nor did he seek an empathetic understanding of the historical characters in order to revive them for modern audiences. 69 Still subscribing to the self-denying aesthetics of "Depersonisation" from his "Berlin Program," he refrained in Wallenstein from attempting any psychological understanding of his characters, and he placed great emphasis on external, material descriptions, often copied nearly verbatim from his sources. Dahlin's experience with that novel was one of "being written." That mode of composition carried over into Berlin Alexanderplat1_. InN ovember 1928

Doblin noted in a public discussion that he did not start with a "seed" that

sprouts into a plotline. Rather, he described a cumulative process of "apposition": "The initial idea [Einfal~ gets the thing going. You can do a few things with the first idea, but then you need a second one and a whole lot more. For instance, in my current Berlin novel, at first I only knew: the man wants to go from Tegel prison into Berlin, so he takes a ride there; as for what happens next-that requires some

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more ideas, which carry the story along for a while." 70 But Doblin no longer stressed the passivity of that process. Just as he had come to give greater weight to the spiritual resources of individuals, by the end of the 1920s he had modified his account of authorship, as he called upon fellow writers to exercise greater choice, to intervene more creatively into their process of composition. In particular, he encouraged them to be more conscious of their use of vernaculars. An awareness that different linguistic registers permitted varying insights-that subsets of a language were enabling and constraining in different ways-would increase an author's ability to find adequate expression for a rapidly changing world: "Only the layman believes that there is a single German language and that one can think whatever one wants with it. The connoisseur knows that there is a variety of linguistic levels on which everything has to move. " 71 According to Doblin, most professional authors had not advanced beyond the layman's insights. He faulted even respected masters of the literary craft like the Mann brothers: "Heinrich Mann dares to write about chemistry using the old novelistic style. But it ends up looking like a pedestrian without skates who ventures onto an ice rink. Thomas Mann from the beginning used his immutable style with few options for variation. Today there are different conditions, economically as well as politically. Our voices resound with different words, which reflect a completely new life. Advertising, streets, newspapers. What the Manns write does not interest us anymore.'m Doblin blamed "the book" for this situation, in which writers were divorced from spoken language and from a face-to-face audience: "We suddenly don't have a voice, they take our voice away from us and give us in exchange sorry print fonts. How can fonts influence the rhythm of our language, since it is actual speech, the actual inhaling and exhaling, the cadence of the voice according to the meaning that constructs the sentence and puts the sentences in order." Of course, Doblin did not believe that the nature of the book medium alone caused this "completely catastrophic situation." 73 It was reinforced by other trends in modern society, such as the atomization of individuals, especially authors and readers, within the metropolis. Already in 1921 Doblin had noted, "Earlier-much earlier--epic poets sat and stood before their audience: they spoke, they had an impact, they were alive. Thrust provoked counterthrust, they knew that they were there: they saw, heard, felt those for whom they were there. The cities have destroyed everything. Now everyone sits in front of his sheet of paper and pens away; he feasts on the scratching of his pen." The resulting products are lost in the vastness of society; they reach at best a small circle of readers, and rarely do authors actually encounter someone who has read their works. 74 The social reality represented by "the book"

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was an isolated writer composing for a public that was both small and invisible. Indeed, if an author interacted at all, it was not with people, but with other hooksa process that furthered the development of an autonomous literary language increasingly distant from everyday speech. The result was a decline of the medium, a process noted sarcastically by the narrator of Berlin Alexanderplat{." "New books? Even the old ones don't sell, and in the year '27 the sale of books fell by so-and-somany percent compared to '26." 75 Since Doblin believed that "the book is the death of actual language," his slogan was "Free yourself from the book" (Los vom Buch). 76 To a certain extent, he meant this literally, as he turned to theater, radio, and sound film-genres and media that employed spoken language. But he also envisioned a means whereby the author, sitting alone at a desk, could imaginatively incorporate the audience into the productive process. Repeating his account of the genesis of Wallenstein, Dohlin asserted that after devouring numerous documents on the Thirty Years' War, he began to formulate standpoints; yet it was not an isolated, atomistic "I" that operated here but rather one that was "suffused with thoughts, with the values of the entire milieu, the society, the class, the populace, the people." Once he began to impose order on his materials, "from this moment on the author carries the people

[ Volk] in himself." Doh lin argued thatto be a truly" epic" writer under current conditions of literary production, the author needed to assume not only the position of "the old wanderer and storyteller" but also "the role and the function of the people" before whom the ancient poets had performed. 77 But how was this to be done? One option was to adopt forms of speech that people employed in their everyday lives, since the pithy phrases of popular expression transmit the insights and values of popular thought. That was the recipe that Doblin employed in Berlin Alexanderplatt, which was replete with Berlin argot as well as the languages of advertising, pop songs, newspapers, and other media that suffused the city. In an interview published at the beginning of 1931, he asserted that Berlin's dialect had given birth to his novel: "Form can bring forth content. It can develop content just as content can demand a style and a form. Berlin Alexanderplatt is one such formal work. There it's the normal language, the lan-

guage of people as they speak it. A Berlin-ish, simple language. All of Berlin must be here." 78 That aspect of Dahlin's novel was recognized by Walter Benjamin: "The book is a monument of Berlin's language .... Berlin is his megaphone. Its dialect is one of the forces that is turned against the self-containment of the old novel." 79 Doblin's love of Berlin argot, its inflections and cadences, was noted by a critic who attended one of his public readings in that city. While the audience was

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only moderately interested in his recitation of passages from The Three Leaps of Wang-fun or one of his philosophical treatises, the mood changed when Doblin

turned to Berlin Alexanderplatt: "Here the contact to his like-minded local public was established immediately. It is a pleasure to hear Doblin speak the Berlin dialect, to watch him as he listens in on his characters, as he samples their mental climate, as he loses himself completely in the work." 80 Obviously, such public readings allowed Doblin to recreate, in however diluted a form, the face-to-face experience of ancient epic poets with their audiences. Doblin used Berlin dialect as well as snippets from various media not simply to explode the self-containment of conventional literature. More importantly, he employed them to evoke and to analyze the penetration of the individual by the multiple voices of the city. This phenomenon was highlighted in an insightful review by Efraim Frisch in the Frankfurter Zeitung, the same newspaper that serialized the novel before its publication as a book: "With the words of posters, of electric-light ads, of newspaper headlines, with the verses of hits, inner developments are brought to the surface and exterior events are cast as signs into the interior. [Doblin] does not scorn the cliche, for the cliche is the means whereby impressions imprint themselves onto people in the big city." 81 As urban discourses colonized the psyche, the inner mind could be evoked by quoting them. This aspect was highlighted by Bertolt Brecht on the occasion of Doblin's sixty-fifth birthday: "I have learned more from Doblin than anyone else concerning the nature of the epic. His epic and even his theory of the epic have strongly influenced my playwriting .... I also am thinking of his innovative handling of psychology. The deepening of the introspective method through development of an extrospective [extrospektiven] one." 82

In Berlin Alexanderplatz, Doblin employed the languages of the city to represent the decentering, the "Depersonisation," not only of the novel's characters but also of himself qua author. By letting his work "be written" by the cliches and slogans of the day, Doblin gave up the pretense of authorial autonomy. At the same time that he himself succumbed to the voices of the metropolis, he evoked the manner in which they constructed popular consciousness through his portrayal of Biberkopf. Granted, Franz is unusually susceptible to being swayed by outside voices-his gullibility is recognized, criticized, and exploited by other characters in the novel. Conversely, Doblin obviously did not let himself be swept away completely by the discourses of the city; he remained in control of much of his material. One could regard Doblin and Biberkopf as two poles of a spectrum depicting the invasion of consciousness by metropolitan voices: citizens can be more or less selective, but no

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one can remain deaf to their messages. Indeed, the author of Berlin Alexanderplatr_ explicitly considered himself as inhabiting the same space as his characters. In "The Construction of the Epic Work," Dahlin contended that writers "can and should and must" leap into their own epic works, and he cited approvingly the fact that Dante placed himself within the Divine Comedy. 83 Indeed, in the manuscript of Berlin Alexanderplatr, there is a passage (eventually deleted) where the narrator

stresses the veracity of a (fictitious) event with the phrase "as sure as my name is Alfred Di:iblin." 84 The unconventional, not to say unstable, nature of the narrator of Berlin Alexanderplatr-sometimes seemingly omniscient, often not; usually distant from

the action, but sometimes in dialogue with the characters--evokes the crisis of subjectivity with which Di:iblin had been wrestling for a generation. Of course, one should not equate the narrative voice of the novel with its author; at the same time, Di:iblin invites us to do so. The conventions of literary analysis demand that we conceptually separate the author Di:iblin, the narrator of his novel, and the protagonist Franz Biberkopf. And yet, while reading the work, the three often seem to be conflated. That impression is due to the effect-authorially intended, to be sureof having the author, the narrator, and the character be "written" and "spoken" by the languages of the city.

BIBERKOPF IN BERLIN Biberkopf is emblematic of Dahlin's view of humanity's condition in the modern metropolis, a state in which individual psyches are subject to dispersal and recombination through a multitude of external forces. It is a process replete with danger. The irony, and ultimately tragedy, ofBiberkopf's situation is that he firmly believes he can maintain control of his life, and yet his great gullibility allows him to be swayed easily by others. His ideology of self-reliance is itself a discourse to which he has succumbed, one vocalized in a variety of cliches that he spouts at every conceivable occasion: "Franz knows who he is" (Franr weift, wer er ist); "No one can touch me!" (Mir kann keener!); "keep to yourself" (for sich bleiben); "I'm a selfsupplier!" (Jck bin Selbstversorger/). 85 These platitudes are countered by a number of voices that warn him to recognize and accept his dependence on others. He hears this first in the Scheunenviertel from N achum, who takes him in after his release from jail: "You shouldn't make such a big deal about yourself. You should listen to others. Who told you to make such a fuss over yourself? God lets no one fall from his hand, but there are other people around as well." A little later Nachum tells

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Franz, "The main things about a person are his eyes and his feet. You have to see the world and go to it." 86 He repeatedly hears similar admonitions from his best friends, Herbert and Meek. But it is not until the very end that the lesson sinks in, when it is related by Death. Against his ideology of maintaining his autonomy and integrity (sich bewahren ), Franz is told to drop his self-reliance and allow himself to be approached (herankommen lassen).g 7 Of course, it could be said that Franz constantly allows himself to be approached: indeed, that is his downfall, since his sociability and garrulousness, combined with his gullibility, get him into trouble. But his problem is his lack of balance, his inability to mediate his self-reliance with his dependence on others. In other words, he needs simultaneously to have sufficient sense of self to ward off nefarious and destructive siren calls and sufficient sense of community to seek aid from those who genuinely desire his well-being. By continually succumbing to the former and warding off the latter, he faces an increasingly violent series of "blows." 88 These issues are presented from the very first page of Berlin Alexanderplat'{_. After being sequestered in jail for four years, Biberkopf experiences his reemergence into a commercial and mediatized society as a frightening and threatening assault: "He stood in front of the gate of Tegel prison and was free." Far from being elated, Franz remains rooted to the spot; it is for him a "terrible moment," since it is now that "the punishment begins." After finally boarding a streetcar, he is disoriented by his sudden confrontation with masses of houses, streets, peopleand his first encounter with media, in the form of a vendor's voice crying out the names of several papers, including Berlin's most popular photo journal and its weekly radio magazine ( "Zwiilf Uhr Mittags'{_eitung, B.Z., Die neueste Illustrirte, Die Funkstunde neu"). He gets off near the Rosenthaler Platz, and his confusion is

exacerbated by the plethora of shops, commodities, and services: "shoe stores, hat shops, light bulbs, pubs." His predominant feeling is fear, and his instinctive reaction is violence-violence toward people ("you'll get to sniff my fist") and toward display windows ("you can just smash them"). But he chooses flight over fight, as he turns into the narrow Sophienstrasse and ducks into a doorway: "Where it's darker, it's better. "89 Biberkopf gradually overcomes his fear as he succumbs to the seductive-and often explicitly eroticized-images of the media. Soon he is lured into a cinema by "a giant bright red poster with a man on a staircase, a swell young girl clung to his legs, she lay on the steps, and the guy above her made a cocky face. Beneath it the words: Without parents, the fate of an orphan child in six reels." Once inside the theater, Biberkopf is enchanted by the ambience, which seems to him the opposite

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of Tegel: "Franz found it wonderful, as people around him started to giggle. Lots of people, free people, amusing themselves, no one tells them what to do, wonderfully nice, and I'm right in the middle of it!" 90 The cinema is not only a place to be "free"; it is also a place to hide, to escape observation. Franz had been looking for such a space when he ducked into the doorway of the Sophienstrasse; now he finally found one in the darkness of the theater. In fact, purveyors of film were well aware that lower-class audiences enjoyed "the lovely darkness," as one observer noted in

1913. 91 A year earlier, one enterprising manager in Mannheim had stood in front of his nickelodeon and proclaimed, "Come right in, we have the darkest cinema in the entire town." 92 Conversely, this obscurity was one of the things that moralistic opponents of film found most troubling about the medium: it hindered observation of an audience that consisted of the very groups most in need of control, according to bourgeois attitudes of the day-youths, workers, and women. Michel Foucault has suggested that in the nineteenth century many "panoptic" institutions were established to bring the anonymous masses into the light, so that they could be better observed, recorded, and controlled. Indeed, Doblin twice refers to goingson "in the panoptic building" (im panoptischem Bau) of the jail at the Police Presidium on the Alexanderplatz. 93 Cinema is its polar opposite: it is an antipanopticon that allows the populace to plunge happily back into obscurity, and it gives them a sense of being "free." But are they really? The novel immediately raises doubts about how "free" these people are, and questions whether "no one tells them what to do," as we see the power of images to awake desire. As Franz watches the film, the sight of amorous couples, and women's legs in particular, arouses sexual impulses that he has been forced to contain for four years. He has a mental flashback to the times in prison when he and the other inmates would stare out the prison windows at women strolling by. 94 Significantly, Franz's reverie indirectly equates a viewer sitting in a cinema, staring at a screen, with a prisoner locked in jail, gaping through a barred window. Is the cinema a disciplinary institution after all? If so, then it is even more insidious than jail: whereas imprisonment subjects external behavior to observation and control, film awakens internal longings. Since Franz is now "free" to act on his desires, he leaves the cinema and heads straightaway to a prostitute, only to discover that he is impotent. Film can arouse his desire but not fulfill it. The rest of the novel provides numerous examples of Franz's susceptibility to external prompting, despite his ideology of autonomy-a tension that leads to repeated frustration, which escalates into anger. Sometimes the frustration takes the form of self-pity, as Biberkopf curses "fate" (in direct contradiction to his claim

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to be in control of his life). But his anger can climax in outbursts of violence, often against women. Biberkopf overcomes his initial impotence by raping Minna, the sister of Ida, whom he had beaten to death four years earlier in a fit of rage. Later in the novel, Mieze almost suffers the same fate. 95 Along the way, Franz too is a victim of violence, as his right arm is crushed after Reinhold pushes him out of a getaway car; the amputation of the limb mirrors the fissures in his psyche. Biberkopf's gullibility is doubly tragic because he actually does possess the tool that would allow him to ward off the siren calls: the local Berlin argot. In his essay praising the language of advertising, Doblin contended that the "everyday language" spoken by one's neighbors also could provide a basis for the new literature, since it could be used "for tragedy, comedy, burlesque, irony, naiVete, gallows humor, and humor sans gallows. And it grants an immense advantage: whoever speaks or writes using everyday language is protected from swindling, blarney, art, and educated nonsense." 96 Berlin Alexanderplatr_ suggests that most Berliners cope with media saturation by employing heavy does of irony and skepticism-wellknown attributes of the proverbial "Berlin wit" (Berliner Witr_). One example of this strategy is provided in the narrator's extended riff on a poster that calls on Berliners to see Coeur-Bube (Jack of Hearts), touted by its promoter as a "delightful comedy that combines charming humor with a deeper meaning." The narrator lists a number of reasons why many people will not even see the poster, such as being bedridden ("that's a heap of people in a city of four million"), and then proceeds to explain why most of those who do read it will not respond positively (for example, some people think that "charming humor should be wiped out the way the Romans wiped out Carthage"). The narrator concludes that "in a big city like Berlin, many people doubt, criticize, carp at a lot of things, including every word of the poster that the theater manager put up with his hard-earned money." 97 Biberkopf's own command of the Berlin dialect, as well as the slogans of the day, is exemplified by his monologue touting the virtues of the necktie holders that he tries to sell on the Rosenthaler Platz. InN ovember

1929,

at the time of the novel's

publication, Walter Benjamin read that passage over the radio in a program entitled "Berlin Dialect," where he praised it as a prime example of the local braggadocio ("Berliner Schnaur_e"). 98 In a tour de force of free association, Franz fires out a barrage of quips about everything ranging from the general human condition to specific recent events, like the case of a "hunger artist" who had devised a means of feeding himself undetected. But though his pitch is aimed at working-class customers, a large component of his vocabulary is drawn from the discourse of rightwing politics. "Why doesn't the prole [der Prolet] wear cravats? Because he can't

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tie them. So he has to buy a necktie fastener. And when he's bought it it's bad and he can't put his tie on with it. That's fraud, that embitters people, that pushes Germany even deeper into misery than it already is." That statement might be considered more humorous than political, but after singing the praises of his necktie holder, he notes that one can buy cravats "at Tietz or Wertheim or, if you don't like to buy from Jews, somewhere else. I'm an Aryan man" -at which point he lifts his hat to display his blond hair. Later on he makes another joke with overtones of nationalist resentment against Germany's postwar reparations bill: "If the Dawes Plan has left you anything at all, it's the head under your lid, and that has to tell you that this is something for you." He concludes his spiel with the statement, "The German man buys only solid goods, and that's what you see here." 99 The recurrence of right-wing verbiage in an otherwise apolitical, highly humorous monologue underscores one of Franz's major problems: not just his gullibility in general but his political naivete in particular. In his mental makeup, the Berlin vernacular, replete with healthy skepticism, is trumped by his susceptibility to the conning calls of strangers, including hucksters of radical ideologies. While discourses drawn from the spheres of advertising and entertainment generally predominate in Berlin Alexanderplat{, political rhetoric is a recurring theme, and it becomes the central focus of the novel's concluding passages. Dahlin's own attitude to the political language of the era was even more fraught than his opinions on advertising, since the stakes were so much higher. He began to take note of the proliferation of handbills and posters during the politically volatile period following the collapse of the monarchy. In January

1920

he reported, "Massive numbers

of leaflets are distributed, in which the craziest things are promised. Posters are glued to pillars and houses." 100 And in September 1923, at the height of the hyperinflation, Dahlin noted that "the plastering of houses with posters is a barometer for political agitation." 101 In the early years of the Republic, Dahlin was most concerned with political leaflets and posters that used simplistic catchwords to con gullible and confused citizens: "Airplanes and autos are loaded with inflammatory leaflets that are dumped on people. To excite and stun them, the most important things are slogans, full of affect, imprecise, sparkling words and concepts, which act alluringly on brains unused to thinking and seduce people who are not familiar with the issues." 102 The depth of Dahlin's distrust of political sloganeering was a product of his dismay at the upheavals during the spring of 1919. In the weeks after the fall of the monarchy, he too had been caught up in the revolutionary excitement: on 23

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he wrote that his "color" was "blood red to ultraviolet!" 103 But

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three months later, during the "March days" of 1919, he was fed up with calls for revolution that led nowhere. In response to a mass strike called by the parties of the far left, Germany's Social Democratic rulers had allowed right-wing paramilitary troops to reassert order in Berlin. They did so with great brutality, using heavy artillery in working-class neighborhoods and leaving some thousand citizens dead, most of them summarily executed after capture. During the fighting, Doblin's sister Meta was killed by shrapnel as she left her house to buy milk for her children. In his lengthy autobiographical essay of 1928, Doblin described the horrors perpetrated by the counterrevolutionary troops, but then recounted his even greater disgust at the strikers. He vented his rage at the parties that yelled "revolution" but were incapable of carrying one out: "Back then I saw how necessary it was to push back that so-called revolution. I'm against incompetence. I hate incompetence." Doblin even applauded the paramilitary forces (whose grenades had killed his sister): "As much as I considered the reactionary troops alien and hostile, I stepped back and said firmly: this is good, it's better than those over there. A just judgment is being laid down here. Either they know what a revolution is, and they make a revolution, or they deserve to be flogged, since they're just playing games." 104 Few passages reveal more clearly Doblin's extremely contrary nature. It also indicates that Doblin himself might have sensed, intuitively, the very dangerous pull of "law-and-order" ideologues, to which Biberkopf succumbs. To be sure, Doblin's political sentiments, however volatile, were usually to the left of Social Democracy. He was a founding member of the "Gruppe 192;" (1925 Group), a contentious alliance of leftist and communist writers; evidently, Doblin himself contributed greatly to the instability of the league. 105 His play Die Ehe (Matrimony, 1930) was barely distinguishable from communist agitprop in the eyes of many critics. But Dahlin regarded the Communist Party of Germany with contempt, and the feeling was mutual. Indeed, the publication of Berlin Alexanderplat'{ led to an ugly exchange with the Linkskurve, a Communist literary magazine. In a review of the novel, Klaus N eukrantz accused Doh lin of having written a "reactionary and counterrevolutionary attack on the thesis of organized class struggle," inasmuch as its hero was the lumpen proletarian Biberkopf rather than, say, a Communist worker. Doblin hit back with a withering assessment of the literary qualities of the Linkskurve. Honing in on Neukrantz's assertion that he did not know how workers spoke-a clearly stupid claim, since his command of the Berlin dialect, often learned from his working-class patients, was one of his fortes-Doblin made merciless fun of the bombastic prose and ecstatic expressionist poetry of Linkskurve authors like Johannes R. Becher, his erstwhile colleague in the 1925 Group. 106

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While that exchange had more to do with the increasingly narrow tunnel vision of Communist authors in the late 192os, Doblin was well aware of his own labile politics, as he said of himself in 1928: "Sometimes it seems that he stands decidedly to the left, even far left, sort of left to the second power, but then he comes out with sentences that are spoken without thinking, which is completely unacceptable in a man of his age, or he acts as if he stood above all parties, smiling with poetic arrogance." 107 Those lines were written while Doblin was composing Berlin Alexanderplat'{_, a work whose political thrust is often difficult to decipher. That novel too is replete with examples of what disgusted him a decade earlier: the reduction of political thought to simplistic sloganeering that cons gullible citizens. We first witness Biberkopf's political naivete when his chance encounter with a Nazi induces him to sell National Socialist newspapers. This eventually causes a split with many of his friends, all of whom have leftist sympathies; indeed, even Franz had routinely taken part in the annual marches commemorating the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. 108 The regulars at Henschke's pub challenge him to defend his views, and a rhetorical escalation ensues, as Franz's spouting of nationalistic, law-and-order slogans is countered by the others' praising of Lenin and the Soviet Union. At Franz's next appearance at Henschke 's, they demand that he sing a song. After he belts out "The Watch on the Rhine," a fight ensues and he is ejected from the pub, which had been his substitute home. Though it costs him his friendships, Franz persists in selling Nazi papers for a number of reasons: his susceptibility to simplistic rhetoric, his stubbornness, but also his genuine fear of chaos and commotion, as seen in his panicked reactions at the outset of the novel. "Order" was one of the major things promised by the Nazis, who lambasted the "disorder" of the Weimar era. Franz fails to see that his desire for stability at all costs not only flies in the face of his other values, such as independence and autonomy, but also threatens people who have helped him. His vending of Nazi papers is introduced with the words "Franz now sells racistnationalist [viilkisch] papers. He has nothing against Jews, but he's for order." 109 His gratitude toward the Jews who had aided him eventually vanishes, so that when he finds himself again in the Scheunenviertel, he contemplates visiting them with a perverse intention: "Maybe I'll sell them a Viilkischer Beohachter. Why not, I don't care if they don't like it, as long as they buy it. He grinned at the thought." 110 Franz's loss of his arm puts an end to his sale of Nazi papers, and after that he prefers to be apolitical: "Franz quietly reads the Mottenpost and then the Griine Post, which he likes best of all, because there's nothing political in it." 111 For a

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while Franz hangs out with Willi, a youngster whose motto is "do only what's fun; everything else is rubbish" (precepts that he had learned from someone who supposedly espoused the ideas of Stirner and Nietzsche). 112 Franz is attracted to Willi's audacity, his game of going to anarchist or socialist meetings and provoking the workers in attendance with his radically selfish precepts. But Franz soon tires of that sport, and after breaking all contact with Willi, he avoids political discussions altogether: "Then it's over, completely, with politics." 113 But the novel suggests that lack of political interest is not a proper response to the plethora of conflicting political discourses. Even Herbert, Franz's best friend who continually chides him for his gullibility, tells him, "Politics, I have nothing against that, you can do that." 114

Berlin Alexanderplatr_ suggests that opting out of politics is not a solution. But what form should political engagement take? How should one negotiate the contradictory, often high-stakes political discourses of the Weimar era? If the novel offers answers to such questions, then they must be deduced from the precept printed on the cover of the book's first edition (fig. 6): "You don't start your life with good words and intentions, you start it with perception and understanding and the right companion." Through most of the story, this moral is elucidated via Franz's ill-fated endeavor to remain autonomous; but by the end of the novel, it has evolved into a political maxim as well. After Franz recovers from his mental breakdown and his confrontation with Death by being "reborn" as an entirely new man, he realizes that he is dependent on others in a multitude of ways. "A lot of misfortune comes from going alone. It's different when there are more people. You have to get used to listening to others, since I'm affected by what others say. Then I realize who I am and what I can do.... One is stronger than I. When we are two, it's already harder to be stronger than I. When we are ten, even harder. And when we are a thousand and a million, then it's really hard." But simultaneously with this new commitment to collective movements comes a suspicion of mass slogans-the political counterpart of "good words and intentions": "Now I'll know better what is true and false. Once already I got snagged by a word, I had to pay dearly for it, that won't happen to Biberkopf again. Words roll up against you, you have to take care that you aren't run over, if you don't watch out for the bus, it will turn you to mush." That being the case, Franz eyes suspiciously any columns of marching demonstrators that pass by his window. With his experiences in the Great War in the back of his mind, he thinks, "If I march, I will have to pay with my head for what others have thought up. So I'll first calculate everything, and when it comes that far and it seems right to me, I will act accordingly." 115

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The novel ends with two proclamations: one calling for destruction of the old world and a new dawn of freedom, the other invoking masses marching off to war. There is, however, a profound ambiguity in the finale: are these proclamations opposites, or are they equivalents? Inasmuch as both are printed in thick-spaced letters, with only a paragraph break between them, they can be read in opposition, as contrasting propositions offering different options. But they also can be read in apposition, to suggest that the call to revolt is no different than the call to war. The massive ambiguity of the novel's conclusion can be understood, at best, as an appeal for political self-reliance among Doblin's readers: rather than proffer a party line, the work implores them to think critically and come to their own conclusions.ll 6 That "solution" would have conformed to his repeated cautions against propaganda in any form. It is also possible that Doblin planned to delay clarification or resolution of the issue until the novel's sequel, which was to describe the new, reborn, and (we must assume) politically more astute Biberkopf. But in keeping with his "apposition" mode of composition, the story took on a dynamic of its own: "Against my will, simply from the logic of the plot and the plan, the book ended as it did; it was not salvageable, it escaped my control [mir schwammen meine Pelle davon]." 117

That sequel was never written. Instead, Doblin rescripted the tale for radio and film; but in these versions, the political, sexual, and commercial themes that pervaded the novel were absent. To understand that disparity, we must examine the political forces that molded the media of the Weimar era, particularly during the crisis years of 1930 and 1931.

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3)

TWO

Politics and Censorship at the Berlin Radio Hour

Germany's public broadcasting system was established as a state monopoly, largely due to fears of political misuse of the airwaves by radical groups. It also was explicitly conceived as a countermodel to the freewheeling American system, where commercial companies and political, civic, and religious associations sponsored a multitude of private stations, which directly or indirectly touted their wares and their views. Although German radio claimed to be nonpolitical, it was intensely contested by competing groups. At radio's inception, the central Reich government and the federated states argued over the extent of their respective control. As broadcasting became established, there were heated disputes about its political content, which was controlled by political oversight committees manned by appointees of the Reich and the states. Some critics claimed that the official "nonpartisan" guidelines favored traditional values and conservative policies; as a result, not just socialists but even supporters of the Republic often had to fight for airtime. Increasingly, republican politicians, as well as writers like Doblin, demanded that stations host debates among people representing a variety of persuasions, as a means of educating the listening public to the virtues of pluralism. By the end of the 1920s, as the Weimar Republic seemed to have achieved stability and legitimacy in the eyes of its citizens, and as Social Democrats governed both the Reich and the state of Prussia, stations like the Berlin Radio Hour celebrated democracy by bringing competing voices to the airwaves.

THE ORIGINS OF PUBLIC BROADCASTING IN GERMANY From its inception, radio was shaped and constrained by Germany's political culture. The technological basis for radio dated back to the 188os, when Heinrich Hertz discovered the electromagnetic waves that would make broadcasting possible. In the following decade, Guglielmo Marconi devised a system to transmit telegraph signals over long distances (wireless telegraphy). By 1906 inventors on both sides of the Atlantic had developed vacuum tubes that permitted transmission of speech and music (wireless telephony), though the technology was not perfected for widespread use until the early 1920s. Prior to World War I, Germans used the airwaves to maintain communication with three major groups: the army and the navy; the African colonies; and merchant and passenger ships. The Imperial era also saw the passage of legislation that was crucial to maintaining the state's monopoly of broadcasting: a law of 1908 stipulated that Funkhoheit (the right to transmit and receive radio signals) resided exclusively with the Reich, and the authority to regulate nonmilitary wireless communication was vested in the Postal Ministry. 1 War being the proverbial mother of all things, the Great War gave a great boost to radio. In 1927 an article in Der deutsche Rundfunk, a weekly radio journal, claimed that "it was exclusively due to the war that we have made such tremendous strides in radio technology in the few years since the invention of cathode tubes." 2 The airwaves were used primarily to transmit information of military importance through the medium of wireless telegraphy (which could be coded, unlike speech). But the war years also saw the first uses of wireless telephony for entertainment and news: in 1917 Hans Bredow began to broadcast music, literary readings, and news reports to soldiers on the western front. Bredow was to become arguably the most important figure in the history of German radio. Before the war, he had been an engineer and eventually a manager at Telefunken, a joint venture devoted to wireless technology that had been founded in 1903 by the two German electronics giants, Siemens and AEG. In 1919 he joined the Postal Ministry and became the key figure in promoting and organizing public broadcasting during the Weimar Republic. 3 When the war ended, some two hundred thousand men with wireless training returned from the field, many of them taking their equipment with them. Some of them put their skills to use during the uprisings of November 1918: after seizing a number of stations and transmitters, the workers' and soldiers' councils (or "soviets"),

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which sought to operate as a parallel government to the executive branches of the Reich and the states, created a Central Radio Committee (Zentralfunkleitung) that attempted to control wireless communications within Germany. Those actions were considered a threat not only by the bureaucrats in the Postal Ministry but also by the Social Democrats in the central government. The new republican authorities moved quickly to reestablish control over all radio communications, and by April I9I9 wireless transmission was back in the hands of the Postal Ministry. Nevertheless, the events of the winter of I9I8-I9I9, often referred to as the "radio nightmare" (Funkerspuk), continued to haunt the authorities. After all, there still was enough filched army equipment-not to mention dexterous radio fans who built their own transmitters and receivers-to prevent total governmental control of the airwaves. Moreover, the political turmoil of the first years of the Republicthe leftist strikes and uprisings in Berlin and Bavaria in I9I9, the right-wing Kapp putsch of I 920, the crushing ofleftist militias in the Ruhr and Thuringia in October I923, followed by Hitler's "beer-hall putsch" the following month-made the government skittish about internal security. In March I924 the Reich interior minister wrote, "The number of secret radio transmitters is rising constantly. The existence of such transmitters seriously threatens the security of the state and public order, since it provides the opportunity for subversive circles to create a comprehensive secret communications network, which in times of crisis seriously could endanger the actions of the constitutional regime." 4 That same month, President Friedrich Ebert, using the emergency powers granted him under Article 48 of the Weimar constitution, issued a decree stipulating that civilians could operate transmitters and receivers only with the permission of the Postal Ministry; failure to comply with the order was punishable with imprisonment. 5 At the same time that the government passed laws that reaffirmed its monopoly of the airwaves, it sought to meet the persistent and increasing demand for civilian use of radio. Various groups were clamoring for the introduction of a public broadcasting system. Electronics firms were particularly vocal, since they realized that the construction of transmitters and the sale of receivers promised lucrative profits.6 Initially, nonmilitary broadcasting was limited to business purposes. In the early I920s the Postal Ministry set up a wireless service to transmit stock reports and other economic information to some four thousand businesses and another one to broadcast news reports to press agencies. But by then German citizens were learning about developments in the United States, where laissez-faire attitudes allowed the public to send and receive radio signals freely. A plethora of local transmitters in America-privately financed by businesses, newspapers, churches,

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and political parties-competed for the attention of shoppers, worshippers, and voters. 7 Excited by reports of these developments, German radio amateurs as well as newspapers (which wanted to become involved directly in the new medium) called for the elimination of the state monopoly of the airwaves, so that a freewheeling "American system" could develop. Unregulated private broadcasting was, however, precisely what the bureaucrats in the Postal Ministry and other agencies wanted to avoid; they shrank from it as from a nightmare of pure chaos. Erich Scholz, a politically ultraconservative undersecretary in the Reich Interior Ministry who was to play an important role in the regulation of public broadcasting during the Weimar era, wrote, "The developments in the United States cannot be a model for Germany, because there everyone is permitted to operate transmitters and receivers, to send or receive news. In a short period many hundreds of private stations were founded by factories, department stores, newspapers, and religious sects, which broadcast all sorts of programs, especially ones touting their own interests. At the same time numerous receivers were built, which picked up everything broadcast without there being any obligation to pay fees. The industrial development of this new field was so great that up to now, the attempts of the government to gain some influence and bring some order into the ensuing chaos have not succeeded. To be sure, the economic and technical development of the broadcasting industry in the United States has made very great strides, but the task of creating an orderly radio system that serves the interests of the community as a whole, and that will be made permanently viable by requiring listeners to pay fees, has remained unsolved due to lack of a legal basis." 8 Scholz's comments are highly revealing of the mentality that gave birth to and shaped the German broadcasting system. Lack of regulation was simply inconceivable to the bureaucrats. On the one hand, they contended, it would lead to a plurality of stations that ultimately served narrow commercial, religious, or political interests, as in the United States. On the other hand, it would lack long-term financial stability, since how could a system be viable where the consumers-the radio listeners-received something for nothing? Instead, Scholz and his colleagues believed that radio ought to serve the interests of the whole community, rather than particular interest groups; and in true Hegelian fashion, they contended that the only entity representing the interests of the nation was the State. As for the financing of German broadcasting, it was based on the premise that there should be no free lunches. Radio listeners would have to pay to receive broadcasts-and only such broadcasts as the State deemed in the general interest.

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Not only conservative bureaucrats supported the state's radio monopoly; it also was applauded by the Social Democrats, albeit for very different reasons. Their residual Marxism predisposed them to support nationalization of industries, including the media. But more specifically, they wanted to avoid the tendencies that they perceived in newspapers and film, where the free market allowed wealthy capitalists to wield disproportionate control over the ideological content of the printed page and the silver screen. Social Democrats continually pointed to Alfred Hugenberg, the right-wing media mogul who had bought up the conservative Scher! publishing group as well as local papers throughout Germany. These acquisitions permitted him to exert political influence on newspaper readers on a daily basis, as he touted the beliefs of the antirepublican Nationalist Party. The film industry likewise witnessed a process of ever-increasing consolidation. Even when films were not overtly ideological, the Social Democrats contended that they betrayed their bourgeois spirit by avoiding social criticism and offering mindless entertainment and nationalistic themes. Indeed, the Marxist fears of the right-wing control of the media seemed to be confirmed in 1927, when Hugenberg purchased Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft (Ufa), Germany's largest film production company. In 1929 Ernst Heilmann, the Social Democratic majority whip in the Prussian parliament during the Weimar era, contended that "radio would have gone the same way as film had it not been pressed into the mould of a state monopoly. Radio would have fallen into the hands of some large capitalistic corporation."9 Social Democrats believed that they, as well as the populace at large, had a better chance to influence the airwaves through the ballot box than through the workings of the free market; hence they supported the state's broadcasting monopoly. They differed from the conservative Reich bureaucrats on issues like the political tone of broadcasts and the cost of radio licenses; Social Democrats contended that there should be a sliding scale, with richer people paying substantially more and poorer people paying nothing. Hans Bredow, who left Telefunken for the Postal Ministry in 1919, coordinated the efforts for creating a public broadcasting system. The first proposals called for a single national channel, but that idea was buried when it became clear that the federated states (Lander) would block it. Both historical precedent and the constitution of the Weimar Republic granted authority in cultural matters to the states, which now demanded a say in any public broadcasting system. At the same time, the Reich Interior Ministry, concerned with domestic security, indicated that it too would become involved. Thus from 1923 to 1926 the Reich Postal Ministry, the Reich Interior Ministry, and the governments of the states haggled over division of

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authority in the emerging radio network. What is particularly striking about these developments is the fact that all policies were instituted by bureaucratic fiat. Parliamentary bodies were not involved; the Reichstag was merely informed of the new system once it was in place, in December 1926. The exigencies of technology also encouraged the decentralization of the system. Relatively few people in the mid-192os-and certainly in 1923, at the height of the inflation-could have afforded the vacuum-tube receivers that were needed to pick up long-distance signals. Most of the early sets were crystal detectors, which could be built easily and cheaply by hobbyists. But crystal detectors could pick up ground waves only within fifteen kilometers of the broadcasting towers. For this reason, stations were located in big cities throughout Germany, and during the 1920s radio listeners were largely urbanites. Berlin, Leipzig, Frankfurt, Munich, Hamburg, Stuttgart, Breslau, Konigsberg, and Munster were the nine cities with independent stations that began transmitting between October 1923 and October 1924; the Munster station was moved to Cologne in 1926, after British troops evacuated that Rhineland city (fig. 7). Each had a broadcasting range of 150 to 300 kilometers for listeners equipped with vacuum-tube radios. By the end of the decade these stations were linked via telephone lines to subsidiary transmitters in Nurnberg, Bremen, Hannover, Kassel, Dresden, Dortmund, Elberfeld, Gleiwitz, Stettin, Kiel, Freiburg, Augsburg, Aachen, Kaiserslautern, and Danzig. In addition, there was the "Deutsche Welle," a national station that transmitted via long wave throughout Germany; 90 percent of its programs, which were highly didactic, were relayed from the studios of the Berlin station. All of the transmitting facilities were owned and operated by the Postal Ministry. Programming was the purview of the stations, but initially it was unclear how they should be organized and financed. The authorities wanted to have their cake and eat it too: they wanted private capital to start up the stations, as in the United States, but they also demanded extensive regulatory powers to avoid the chaotic excesses of"das amerikanische System." Although annual profits of the broadcasting compa-

nies were capped at 10 percent-everything above that had to be reinvested in the broadcasting system--enough private capital was accumulated to get the stations off the ground. The first one was financed by the Vox phonograph company, which hoped to give airtime to its own recordings and thus increase its gramophone sales (a strategy employed by RCA and similar companies in the United States). The very first public broadcast in Germany was a one-hour musical program transmitted from the "Voxhaus" in downtown Berlin on 29 October 1923. But the Postal Ministry moved swiftly to curb the type of commercialism that dominated

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