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.

Marylin had a twenty-five-dollar-a-week job in Chicago.

Every morning she took the same L train to her office from her northwestern neighborhood in the city to the station at the corner of Wabash and Madison.

But what good did it do Philip to take the same train every day, to wait for this very same train six stops before Madison, and to leave it at the same time as Marylin?

The trains going into the Loop are so packed that you have to be happy just to be able to catch one. Then to arrange getting on one particular car, maybe just so you could be standing near a certain person, that’s totally out of the question.

Usually Marylin had a seat, so she must have gotten on several stops back in a neighborhood where the seats weren’t all already taken.

Philip had to be content with getting a spot to stand near the car door so he could hop out and pick her out in the crowd, then follow her along Madison for a couple of blocks.

He knew she took a left onto Dearborn and disappeared a few steps later into the entrance of one of the skyscrapers.

It was his daily game of chance whether, in some way or other—he had no clue exactly how—he might exchange a word or two with this girl.

Someday, he thought, his chance would have to come.

Philip knew Marylin to be wearing two dresses. The one she most often wore was sleeveless. That was the one he first saw her in. Her slender arms that might have been those of a fifteen-year-old had caught his eye. And when he was following after her on the crowded street, almost all he saw were these delicate childlike arms gently swaying back and forth, suspended from her shoulders.

In the surrounding hubbub Marylin strode slowly and confidently to the entrance as if knowing she would arrive on time. Her unforced upright gait increased this impression of calm.

Three weeks into his efforts Philip encountered the girl one afternoon as she was going home, and now he redoubled his efforts in this game of chance. From this point on he waited for her at the end of the workday up at the L station where the trains departed Madison heading northwest.

The Story Marylin was initially serialized in the newspaper the Neue Freie Presse in forty-three installments, starting in September 1928. The text wasn’t published as a novel until 2017, when the Viennese publisher Edition Atelier released a copy of the novel in full. The story begins in Chicago and includes a brief stop in Cleveland before centering most of the action in New York. The focus of the novel is the relationship between Philip and Marylin. Philip is a young architect working in downtown Chicago. Marylin is the beautiful woman who also works downtown and crosses paths with Philip on the train each day, during his commute. His obsession with her beauty leads him to start shadowing her for several weeks, eventually finding out where she lives and where she spends her free time, before he gradually works up the courage to try to communicate with her. As Primus-Heinz Kucher writes, the style of the novel very much reflects the style of Neue Sachlichkeit or “New Objectivity,” a German literary genre from the 1920s and ‘30s “characterised by the use of realistic, sober and matter-of-fact forms which contrast with the exuberant pathos and inclination towards abstraction of expressionism.” Erich Maria Remarque’s classic Im Westen nichts Neues (1929; All Quiet on the Western Front, 1929) stands as the best-known example today. One trademark of Neue Sachlichkeit is its distance when describing the world around the main characters, excluding any mention of psychological motivation or environmental influence, no matter how harsh. Rundt’s approach in the novel to depicting race and revealing Marylin’s secret is closely related to New Objectivity. In that sense, in his fictional narrative Rundt re-creates the role of the observant but distant reporter featured in his book Amerika ist anders (1926; America Is Different).

In addition to this detached writing style, another contemporary theme the novel takes up is the life of white-collar workers in the big city, something that very much interested German audiences at the time: “an existence that’s similar to an assembly line, uninterrupted except for the occasional trip to the movies and a few, fleeting social contacts.”

Introduction:

Revolutionizing German Society and Film

The relationship between the deutsche film- und fernsehakademie berlin (German Film and Television Academy Berlin, dffb) and the West German student movement was a contentious one. That might come as a surprise, considering that the dffb was founded on the heels of the infamous 1962 Oberhausen Manifesto, when twenty-six West German filmmakers rebelliously declared “the old film is dead” and professed the necessity for West German films free of conventions and commercial influence. The institutional effects of the Oberhausen Manifesto were the creation of state funding for film and the creation of three film programs:the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm (School of Design Ulm, hfg), led by Alexander Kluge, Edgar Reitz, and Detten Schleiermacher in 1962, which would close due to financial problems in 1968, as well as the dffb in West Berlin and the Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film München (University of Television and Film Munich, hff), both founded in 1966.

According to Hans-Rüdiger Minow, a member of the dffb’s first cohort, he and his fellow students did not identify with the Oberhausen signatories.Directors such as Kluge and Reitz were nearly twenty years older than Minow, who began his studies at age twenty-two and found that the topics and conventions of Young German Cinema were just not sufficiently political for his cohort. While Fabian Tietke acknowledges the ideological break between the generations on the dffb’s website, he does not focus as much on politics as Minow, who states, “there were points of contact to the political interests we had. But that wasn’t decisive. … Rather, it became evident that the coalition failed at the very moment when political interests were at the forefront of a situation instead of libertarian interests, like in the case of the Vietnam War” (Minow). Thus, Minow’s statement points to a gap between philosophy and praxis, not in terms of filmmaking but of political action. The Oberhausen directors may have strived for social changes that reflected more liberal art and lifestyles, but they were not as committed to effecting concrete political change as Minow and his colleagues.