Free Theater of Cruelty by Ian Buruma

transparent, as though one could see through them to their most private desires, often of a violent sexual nature. And in their different ways, Picasso, Braque, and others were doing the same, fragmenting perspective in synthetic cubism.
    Döblin adds his own all-seeing authorial voice to the patchwork of speech, songs, police reports, private thoughts, commercials, and other big-city noises. His voice is as complex as those of his characters. Sometimes it is didactic, like Brecht’s theatrical texts, or dryly analytical like a doctor’s analysis of his patients. Döblin was in fact a doctor, and practiced as a psychiatrist in Berlin, where he heard many crime stories firsthand. Sometimes the voice is ironic, even sarcastic, and often it is given to metaphysical musings, quoting from the Bible, especially the stories of Job and of Abraham’s sacrifice ofIsaac. Sacrifice is one of Döblin’s great themes: death as a necessary condition of rebirth.
    Döblin was the son of a Jewish merchant in Stettin. While in American exile in 1941, he converted to Roman Catholicism, influenced, he said, by his reading of Kierkegaard and, more surprisingly, Spinoza. The questions of fate and personal choice, of man’s place in an impersonal universe of unseen forces, natural as well as technological and political, are a philosophical leitmotif running through the entire story of Biberkopf’s downfall and final redemption.
    How to translate this great literary stew into a film? The first, not inconsiderable attempt was made in 1931 by Phil Jutzi, with a script cowritten by Döblin himself. Biberkopf is played by Heinrich George, one of the most admired actors of the time. Jutzi’s
Berlin-Alexanderplatz
bears some resemblance to Ruttmann’s documentary film, with its wonderful images. But the many layers of Döblin’s expressionist novel cannot be compressed into an eighty-nine-minute feature film. George was a great actor, and the movie is a precious document of what Döblin’s Berlin actually looked like, but the richness of the novel is lost.
    When Fassbinder made his fifteen-hour-long film of
Berlin Alexanderplatz
for television in 1980, Döblin’s city was mostly gone, destroyed by Allied bombs, Soviet artillery, and East German wrecking balls. And what little was left, in the east, was hidden behind the Berlin Wall and thus out of bounds for Fassbinder and his crew. A documentary approach was clearly impossible. And even if it had been possible to reconstruct the Alexanderplatz, Fassbinder felt that
    how it really would look out on the streets [could be seen] better from the kinds of refuges people created for themselves,what kinds of bars they went to, how they lived in their apartments, and so on. 4
    So he recreated the city as a kind of theater set, confined to a few interiors—Biberkopf’s room, his local bar, Reinhold’s apartment, an underground railway station, and a few streets—built in a Munich movie studio. Since panoramic views or even long shots of the city were impossible, Fassbinder chose details, close-ups, window frames, blinking neon signs, bar tables, and stoops, a technique we are familiar with from television soap operas; think of Seinfeld’s Manhattan, constructed on a Hollywood backlot.
    Fassbinder’s film was in fact made very fast and very cheaply, using 16-millimeter film. As Susan Sontag pointed out, the length of the work, consisting of fourteen episodes, lends itself particularly well to the cinematic translation of a novel. The viewer, like the reader of a novel, has the time to immerse himself in the narrative, become thoroughly familiar with the characters, live in the story, as it were. Limiting the number of locations (in the book Biberkopf dwells in various places, not one, and frequents several bars) is another common feature of soap operas; after a while you get to know these places—think of Seinfeld’s coffee shop, or his apartment—as though you have been there many times yourself.