Abstract
This article takes up the concept of montage that has defined scholarship on Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz: Die Geschichte von Franz Biberkopf (1929) since its publication. Against interpretations that understand the novel’s technique of montage as related to film and the avant-garde, I show that the novel is more strongly tied to paper objects and practices, above all the nineteenth-century serial novel and its medial environment in the newspaper. Approaching the novel from this perspective directs attention – in opposition to the scholarship that has emphasized the experience of disruption produced by montage – to the significance of the plot and its highly gendered violence.
Highlights
Zusammenfassung Seit seiner Erstveröffentlichung wird Alfred Döblins Berlin Alexanderplatz: Die Geschichte von Franz Biberkopf (1929) durchweg unter dem Begriff der Montage verhandelt
This article takes up the concept of montage that has defined scholarship on Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz: Die Geschichte von Franz Biberkopf (1929) since its publication
The review thereby foreshadows such Benjaminian themes as the modern demise of storytelling diagnosed in his essay »Der Erzähler« (1936) and the aesthetic possibilities of film discussed in »Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit« (1935–1939)
Summary
Abstract This article takes up the concept of montage that has defined scholarship on Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz: Die Geschichte von Franz Biberkopf (1929) since its publication. Zusammenfassung Seit seiner Erstveröffentlichung wird Alfred Döblins Berlin Alexanderplatz: Die Geschichte von Franz Biberkopf (1929) durchweg unter dem Begriff der Montage verhandelt.
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