Introduction

When Alfred Döblin wrote Berlin Alexanderplatz in 1929, by creating a protagonist (Franz Biberkopf) who was both a war veteran and a former convict, he intentionally focused on a subject on the margins of society: someone whom society had failed. Furthermore, by making gendered violence such an important part of the narrative, Döblin demonstrated that, due to the misogynist nature of ethnonationalism, even those men on the margins could still justify exploiting others to improve their status in society, rather than fighting for real equality. Rather than transferring this ethnonationalism to his recent adaptation of Döblin’s novel, the German director of Iranian descent, Burhan Qurbani, interrogates the entitlement attached to white, male, German identity by placing Franz B. even further on the margins of society. Qurbani updates the narrative to better situate it in a late-capitalist, neoliberal and multicultural Germany: Franz B. is now Francis, a Black, undocumented refugee from Bissau.

By choosing to make Francis both Black and undocumented, Qurbani continues a trend he has established in his previous films of centering narratives on vulnerable people existing on the margins of white, mainstream German society, such as the queer Muslim protagonists in his film Schahada (Faith, 2010) and the Vietnamese immigrants experiencing the violence of reunification in Rostock in Wir sind jung, wir sind stark (We are Young, We are Strong, 2014). Qurbani, himself the child of Iranian immigrants, was born in 1980 in North-Rhine Westphalia, then in West Germany. Arguably, Qurbani’s films demonstrate his interest in allyship that unites different groups of racialized people in Germany. Berlin Alexanderplatz draws viewers’ attention not only to the problem of anti-Black racism in Germany, but also to the unique experience of Black noncitizens. While Black people in Germany experience differing degrees of anti-Black racism, Black German citizens and Black people with legal residency have certain protections under the law ranging from the right to vote (in the case of citizens) to the right to education, legal employment, and housing. For the undocumented, however, there are no such protections or possibilities to legally participate in society. While Francis’s biography in Qurbani’s adaptation allows the director to make a poignant critique of Germany’s current migration politics, critics were not always convinced by his execution. In fact, some argued that the film itself is guilty of exploiting Black bodies and reducing African men to their physicality and sexuality.