The great novel of 1920s Berlin life, in a new translation by Michael Hofmann, translator of Alone in Berlin\nFranz Biberkopf is back on the streets of Berlin. Determined to go straight after a stint in prison, he finds himself thwarted by an unpredictable external agency that looks an awful lot like fate. Cheated, humiliated, thrown from a moving car; embroiled in an underworld of pimps, thugs, drunks and prostitutes, Franz picks himself up over and over again - until one day he is struck a monstrous blow which might just prove his final downfall. 
A dazzling collage of newspaper reports, Biblical stories, drinking songs and urban slang, Berlin Alexanderplatz is the great novel of Berlin life: inventing, styling and recreating the city as reality and dream; mimicking its movements and rhythms; immortalizing its pubs, abattoirs, apartments and chaotic streets. From the gutter to the stars, this is the whole picture of the city. 
Berlin Alexanderplatz brought fame in 1929 to its author Alfred Döblin, until then an impecunious writer and doctor in a working-class neighbourhood in the east of Berlin. Success at home was short-lived, however; Doblin, a Jew, left Germany the day after the Reichstag Fire in 1933, and did not return until 1945. This landmark translation by Michael Hofmann is the first to do justice to Berlin Alexanderplatz in English, brilliantly capturing the energy, prodigality and inventiveness of Döblin's masterpiece.

Berlin Alexanderplatz (Penguin Classics)

Literature & Fiction

Döblin, Alfred

Literary

Penguin Classics

Alexanderplatz: The Story of Franz Biberkopf

Jolas, Eugene

Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd.

Berlin in the 1920s. Franz Biberkopf has just been released from prison after serving four years for violence that resulted in the death of a girlfriend. He returns to his old neighbourhood, Alexanderplatz, vowing to live a decent life. What he finds are unemployment lines, gangsters, prostitutes, petty thieves, and neophyte Nazis. In this sordid world there are new women: devoted Eva, vulnerable young Mieze and the dangerous, near psychotic Reinhold, who befriends him. As Franz struggles to survive, fate teases him with a little luck, a little pleasure, then cruelly turns on him. "Berlin Alexanderplatz" is one of the masterpieces of European literature. The first German novel to adopt the technique of James Joyce, it excited and overwhelmed critics and readers everywhere as it was translated into other languages. One of its greatest admirers was a brilliant young German director. Rainer Fassbinder saw in the novel "a huge part of myself, decisive into determining the course of my life." One of Fassbinder's last projects was an impressive fifteen-hour film version of Berlin Alexanderplatz. Some of the stills from that epic adaptation - remarkably faithful to the Doblin novel - are included here.

Berlin Alexanderplatz : The Story of Franz Biberkopf

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

Continuum Intl Pub Group (Sd)

A People Betrayed (November 1918)

Genre Fiction

Angel Books

Trying to recover from the physical and emotional wounds of World War II, Edward Allison returns to live with his family, which is dominated by his father, a cynical writer

Tales of a Long Night (English and German Edition)

Fromm Intl

Tales of a Long Night: A Novel (English and German Edition)

Wadzeks Kampf Mit Der Dampfturbine: Roman (German Edition)

Contemporary

Nabu Press

Berlin Alexanderplatz

Thompson, Anne

Translator

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

Reissued as a paperback by Plunkett Lake Press, Destiny's Journey is a memoir reconstructed partly from notebooks that Döblin kept from the time he worked in the French Ministry of Information in the spring of 1940 and partly written without notes in Los Angeles where he took refuge during the Second World War. It tells the personal and generational story of the flight of Jewish and anti-Nazi intellectuals from Europe to America, their fear and frustration, isolation, and inability to work. Döblin’s story differs from that of other Jewish intellectuals and artists in that his family converts to Catholicism in Los Angeles. Unlike most of them, he returns to Europe as an officer with the French forces and works on denazifying German literature. The conversion narrative bridges the departure from and return to Europe. “The first part of ‘Destiny's Journey’ [about] Döblin's departure from Paris [in] 1940... is magisterial: acidly observed, saturated in telling detail, grimly comic and harrowing... with an exemplary introduction by Peter Demetz... an important, nourishing book” — John Simon, The New York Times

Destiny's Journey

History

Destiny's journey

Paragon House Publishers

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Books by Döblin, Alfred