Franz Biberkopf und das Wissen des Wissens zum Schluss von Alfred Döblins Berlin Alexanderplatz unter der Perspektive Einer Theorie der Beobachtung der Beobachtung

Abstract

The ending of Alfred Doblin's novel Berlin Alexanderplatz has been controversial in literary criticism from its first publication until today. Critics have either rejected the ending as being merely a philosophical, utopian, construction or tried to solve the supposed contradiction of an active and a passive attitude of the hero Franz Biberkopf by favouring one attitude or the other or, thirdly, have accepted the paradoxical coexistence of both attitudes without making rationally transparent the structure of that paradoxical coexistence itself. This article describes the hero's transition from first order to second order observation against the background of a concept of second order cybernetics as developed by G. Spencer Brown, G. Gunther and N. Luhmann. In this way it becomes possible to see the ending of the novel as logical and consistent both from a narratological and from an epistemological point of view.