Buy new:
-18% $16.40
FREE delivery Monday, May 13 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35
Ships from: Amazon.com
Sold by: Amazon.com
$16.40 with 18 percent savings
List Price: $19.95

The List Price is the suggested retail price of a new product as provided by a manufacturer, supplier, or seller. Except for books, Amazon will display a List Price if the product was purchased by customers on Amazon or offered by other retailers at or above the List Price in at least the past 90 days. List prices may not necessarily reflect the product's prevailing market price.
Learn more
Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime FREE Returns
FREE delivery Monday, May 13 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35. Order within 4 hrs 24 mins
In Stock
$$16.40 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details
Price
Subtotal
$$16.40
Subtotal
Initial payment breakdown
Shipping cost, delivery date, and order total (including tax) shown at checkout.
Ships from
Amazon.com
Ships from
Amazon.com
Sold by
Amazon.com
Sold by
Amazon.com
Returns
Eligible for Return, Refund or Replacement within 30 days of receipt
Eligible for Return, Refund or Replacement within 30 days of receipt
This item can be returned in its original condition for a full refund or replacement within 30 days of receipt.
Read full return policy
Returns
Eligible for Return, Refund or Replacement within 30 days of receipt
This item can be returned in its original condition for a full refund or replacement within 30 days of receipt.
Read full return policy
Payment
Secure transaction
Your transaction is secure
We work hard to protect your security and privacy. Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Learn more
Payment
Secure transaction
We work hard to protect your security and privacy. Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Learn more
$13.44
Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime FREE Returns
Binding is tight. Pages are crisp and clean with no markings. Cover is in good condition. Ships direct from Amazon! Binding is tight. Pages are crisp and clean with no markings. Cover is in good condition. Ships direct from Amazon! See less
FREE delivery Thursday, May 16 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35
Only 1 left in stock - order soon.
$$16.40 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details
Price
Subtotal
$$16.40
Subtotal
Initial payment breakdown
Shipping cost, delivery date, and order total (including tax) shown at checkout.
Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.
Amazon book clubs early access
Loading your book clubs
There was a problem loading your book clubs. Please try again.
Not in a club? Learn more
Amazon book clubs early access

Join or create book clubs

Choose books together

Track your books
Bring your club to Amazon Book Clubs, start a new book club and invite your friends to join, or find a club that’s right for you for free.
Explore Amazon Book Clubs
Kindle app logo image

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

QR code to download the Kindle App

Follow the author

Alfred Doblin
+ Follow
More books from this author
Something went wrong. Please try your request again later.

Berlin Alexanderplatz (New York Review Books Classics) Paperback – Illustrated, March 6, 2018

by Alfred Doblin (Author), Michael Hofmann (Translator, Introduction)
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 510 ratings
See all formats and editions
{"desktop_buybox_group_1":[{"displayPrice":"$16.40","priceAmount":16.40,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"16","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"40","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"FxJBlUO4FFO9qB3QzEXraAvPnykjQUDBRmpTAlTJeJGbw6rNirS112vg4BHxEhnb2GNRELXAySr77YcchYna3ptpwEfCKTdVJLwR5tKbevtRjNm%2FDcsRlijxsFILq2wXjcMZGMaChK%2BoxcEFdb8Izw%3D%3D","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"NEW","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":0}, {"displayPrice":"$13.44","priceAmount":13.44,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"13","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"44","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"FxJBlUO4FFO9qB3QzEXraAvPnykjQUDBxLVQLiQdA3ju97V1piQMto4VTKGCgwMOuhN8k4xMRQODsxpdYh631XSlOMBo3YP8kOqIhoNJv0sOmPJASdPucA4t88k8pOk3F9rbTXL4JiRlkJ3TQVdOJp36n5koWccZvwADhmVew2khN7kXV5XSS18Q7WwRIzZa","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"USED","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":1}]}

Purchase options and add-ons

The inspiration for Rainer Werner Fassbinder's epic film and that The Guardian named one of the "Top 100 Books of All Time," Berlin Alexanderplatz is considered one of the most important works of the Weimar Republic and twentieth century literature.

Berlin Alexanderplatz, the great novel of Berlin and the doomed Weimar Republic, is one of the great books of the twentieth century, gruesome, farcical, and appalling, word drunk, pitchdark. In Michael Hofmann's extraordinary new translation, Alfred Döblin's masterpiece lives in English for the first time.

As Döblin writes in the opening pages: 

The subject of this book is the life of the former cement worker and haulier Franz Biberkopf in Berlin. As our
story begins, he has just been released from prison, where he did time for some stupid stuff; now he is back
in Berlin, determined to go straight. 

To begin with, he succeeds. But then, though doing all right for himself financially, he gets involved in a
set-to with an unpredictable external agency that looks an awful lot like fate. 

Three times the force attacks him and disrupts his scheme. The first time it comes at him with dishonesty and deception. Our man is able to get to his feet, he is still good to stand. 

Then it strikes him a low blow. He has trouble getting up from that, he is almost counted out. And finally it hits him with monstrous and extreme violence.
Read more Read less
Previous page
  1. Print length
    480 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    NYRB Classics
  4. Publication date
    March 6, 2018
  5. Dimensions
    5.15 x 0.92 x 7.99 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    1681371995
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1681371993
  8. See all details
Next page
The Amazon Book Review
The Amazon Book Review
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now.

Frequently bought together

Berlin Alexanderplatz (New York Review Books Classics)
$16.40
Get it as soon as Monday, May 13
In Stock
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
+
The Artificial Silk Girl: A Novel
$20.99
Get it as soon as Monday, May 13
In Stock
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
+
Berlin Blues
$20.77
Get it as soon as Tuesday, May 14
Only 4 left in stock - order soon.
Sold by TheWorldShopUSA and ships from Amazon Fulfillment.
Total price:
To see our price, add these items to your cart.
Details
Added to Cart
Some of these items ship sooner than the others.
Show details Hide details
Choose items to buy together.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“A raging cataract of a novel, one that threatens to engulf the reader in a tumult of sensation. It has long been considered the behemoth of German literary modernism, the counterpart to Ulysses." —Alex Ross, The New Yorker

"Because of its use of collage, stream of consciousness, and colloquial speech, Berlin Alexanderplatz has frequently been compared to Joyce’s Ulysses and John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer...Beneath the book’s innovative style, the reader can hear the gears of ancient narrative elements grinding: evocations of folk songs, myths and Old Testament stories, and themes of tragedy and fate.” —Amanda DeMarco, The Wall Street Journal

"It was long branded untranslatable…Yet a fluent, pacy new translation by Michael Hofmann gainsays that assumption, opening up the book for English-speakers….Something of the psychology of Weimar, the desire to touch the electric fence just to see what happens, lives on in modern societies and makes them, in their own ways, vulnerable to extremism and demagoguery...One lesson of Berlin Alexanderplatz is that darkness can take many forms." —The Economist

“[A] major writer who grappled with the roots of darkness in our time....” —Ernst Pawel, The New York Times

"In this new translation, the dissonant voices ring out boldly; we can tell when someone is being mimicked and wickedly sent up, enjoy the black Berlin humor...Döblin is never sentimental, or hysterical. He just gets us to listen to the drumbeat of violence throbbing in this city of the mind. Berlin Alexanderplatz is one of the great anti-war novels of our time." —Joachim Redner, Australian Book Review

“His was an extraordinary mind.” —Philip Ardagh, The Guardian
 
“Without the futurist elements of Döblin’s work from Wang Lun to Berlin Alexanderplatz, my prose is inconceivable.... He’ll discomfort you, give you bad dreams. If you’re satisfied with yourself, beware of Döblin.” —Günter Grass
 
“I learned more about the essence of the epic from Döblin than from anyone else. His epic writing and even his theory about the epic strongly influenced my own dramatic art.” —Bertolt Brecht
 
“As we look back over the rich literary output of this great writer, as we look back over the long and fruitful life of this fighter and this friend of man, this perennial spring of spiritual life, we venture to ask: When will the gentlemen [sic] of the Nobel Prize jury discover him?” —Ludwig Marcuse, Books Abroad

About the Author

Alfred Döblin (1878–1957) was born in German Stettin (now the Polish city of Szczecin) to Jewish parents. When he was ten his father, a master tailor, eloped with a seamstress, abandoning the family. Subsequently his mother relocated the rest of the family to Berlin. Döblin studied medicine at Friedrich Wilhelm University, specializing in neurology and psychiatry. While working at a psychiatric clinic in Berlin, he became romantically entangled with two women: Friede Kunke, with whom he had a son, Bodo, in 1911, and Erna Reiss, to whom he had become engaged before learning of Kunke’s pregnancy. He married Erna the next year, and they remained together for the rest of his life. His novel The Three Leaps of Wang Lun was published in 1915 while Döblin was serving as a military doctor; it went on to win the Fontane Prize. In 1920 he published Wallenstein, a novel set during the Thirty Years’ War, which was an oblique comment on the First World War. He became president of the Association of German Writers in 1924, and published his best-known novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz, in 1929, achieving modest mainstream fame while solidifying his position at the center of an intellectual group that included Bertolt Brecht, Robert Musil, and Joseph Roth, among others. He fled Germany with his family soon after Hitler’s rise, moving first to Zurich, then to Paris, and, after the Nazi invasion of France, to Los Angeles, where he converted to Catholicism and briefly worked as a screenwriter for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. After the war he returned to Germany and worked as an editor with the aim of rehabilitating literature that had been banned under Hitler, but he found himself at odds with conservative postwar cultural trends. He suffered from Parkinson’s disease in later years and died in Emmendingen in 1957. Erna committed suicide two months after his death and was interred along with him.

Michael Hofmann is a German-born, British-educated poet and translator. Among his translations are works by Franz Kafka; Peter Stamm; his father, Gert Hofmann; Herta Müller; and fourteen books by Joseph Roth. A recipient of both the PEN Translation Prize and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize, Hofmann’s Selected Poems were published in 2009 and Where Have You Been?: Selected Essays in 2014. In addition to Berlin Alexanderplatz, New York Review Books publishes his selection from the work of Malcolm Lowry, The Voyage That Never Ends, and his translations of Jakob Wassermann’s My Marriage and Gert Ledig’s Stalin Front. He teaches in the English department at the University of Florida.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ NYRB Classics; Translation edition (March 6, 2018)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 480 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1681371995
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1681371993
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.15 x 0.92 x 7.99 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 510 ratings

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.
Alfred Doblin

Alfred Doblin

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
4.4 out of 5
510 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Tom Quinn
5.0 out of 5 stars Extraordinary Berlin Alexanderplatz will rattle you to your bones
Reviewed in the United States on February 19, 2019
Verified Purchase
I suppose translations are a necessary evil. I can read novels in French Spanish and Italian but realised finally my very basic German would not allow me to read this classic novel in its own language. You are always left wondering... I found the languagse of the translation unlike anything I have read in English, and more readily associated it with exaggerated British sit-coms or carry-on films... Words like "geezer" "bint" "eejit" occur and reoccur as the style becomes increasingly odd, jangly (some would say jazzy), cartoonish, and oblique. You have to trust the Translator, but I found the "translation" the most difficult obstacle to overcome reading Berlin Alexanderplatz, certainly to begin with.

Translation aside this is truly an extraordinary novel which will leave no one indifferent. Döblin is compared to Joyce, but I think this is only fair in as much as Ulysses is Dublin, and Berlin Alexanderplatz is Berlin... Joyce is benevolent whereas Doblin's vision is of a gritty seedy lowlife criminal underbelly, where existence itself is captured in all its pitiless savage reality. Perhaps because of the biblical intrusions I was reminded more of Don Passos' Manhattan Transfer, but this novel is uniquely Döblin's, a great torrent of language, ideas, events and accidents, a teeming ferment on every level, which ulrimately indelibly defines the troubled city of the late 1920s. Berlin is perhaps the greatest character here.

It is a breathtaking tumult which will grip you and not let you go. The characters are gripping, the portraits of relationships between men and women, between prostitutes and pimps, between thieves and thieves ... It can be tender brutal lyrical and violent in the spur of a moment. The style is a whirlwind, the description of streets and buildings, of shops and tram journeys, there are newspaper reports and advertisements, there are poems and songs, and the stunning biblical interventions... There is a long poignant description of animals led to slaughter. There is an unusual passage where Newtonian formulae are used to show how Ida"s sternum was crushed by Franz. I could go on. The list is endless. The book seems infinite in its resources. It simoly never ceases to absorb and to amaze. It is simply one of a kind.

I truly hope to read it someday free of translation.
21 people found this helpful
Helpful
 Report
tim tomasi md
5.0 out of 5 stars Lively translation of a difficult and great 20th century novel
Reviewed in the United States on January 6, 2021
Verified Purchase
A first rate novel in the modern fractured style of the early 20th century. A modestly hard read in terms of broken narratives, streaming consciousness and scene to scene whiplash. However if you read through the more difficult parts without flinching or conjuring up a desire to understand every word and sentence you will find that this breathtaking novel will rise to greet you, little by little as you open to receive it. The protagonist Franz Bieberkopf is unforgettable. And kudos to the translator Michael Hofmann for he has given us a lively read as well as a visceral picture of the 1928 Berlin underworld.
One person found this helpful
Helpful
 Report
Regis
4.0 out of 5 stars So Much Energy
Reviewed in the United States on May 9, 2022
Verified Purchase
This is a very interesting book: for its time and beyond, innovative, cacophonous, controversial, violent and cruel, sometimes lyrical and erudite, sometimes rough and vulgar--really difficult to believe it was written in 1929. The fluid and convolluted stream of consciousness blended with a myriad of other sources (mass propaganda, weather forecasts, local news items and scandalous newspapers, popular songs, and a lot of street noise) seem to make it a pair to Joyce's Ulysses, but soon BA moves underground to the life of street gangs in Berlin, with their 'jobs' and crude violence, especially against women (something that to me was rather shocking) and an ocean sets the two novels apart.
So while many compare BA with Joyce's U and there are good stylistic reasons for that, thematically U seems extremely naive compared with BA, one novel written by a theoretical scholar (conscious about but insulated from the troubles of the real world) and another by a street artist (who has to fight everyday to buy her next meal). Almost ten years set apart the publication of U (1920) and BA (1929), one in Paris (having been written for the most part in peaceful Zurich, Trieste), the other in pre-nazi Germany, and that also helps to set different tones. Joyce had his own personal financial challenges, but Doblin was a clinical doctor at the Buch insane asylum learning for any years about the harsh lives of people just like the characters of his book. To me, it was really meaningful that Joyce in U takes Leopold Bloom to the Dlugacz's butchershop for him to buy and enjoy his piece of pork kidney, while Doblin in BA takes us to the slaughterhouse to witness the painful death of each kind of animal (cattle, calves, sheep and pigs), how they are put down and sliced up, with a richness of details that only those who have already been to a slaughterhouse can really appreciate.
BA's collage takes some of the cinematographic influence of the early 20th-century literature to a new level (one could think of Mahler's "sampling" which started more or less at the same time), some passages where the language becomes extremely fluid, coloquial and edited/cut in fragments are just like a modern graphic novel/comic book. In certain passages, it is as expressionist as Kafka or Canetti, in others it sounds like Tom Waits' "Underground"; one passage is like listening to Friedrich Hollander's 'Munchhausen', but then it turns into David Mamet's Heist, Al Pacino paying a visit to Charlize Theron in Devil's Advocate and then some. It is true that the exuberant use of collage makes the pace of the story very much erratic, sometimes extremely slow, sometimes in a total frenzy, a kind of unbalanced rythmn. The last quarter of the novel moves really fast like the conclusion of a play by Shakespeare where all pieces quickly move to be put together (and small characters like the plumber Karl Matter aka Otto Fischer out of blue gains important roles), but then the action vanishes and suddenly stops, and then slowly crawls to a somewhat pale conclusion (the opposite of modern, action movies--and maybe it is interesting to check what Burhan Qurbani did in his new movie version of the story!)
All the violence at the last quarter of the novel made me think of David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, speaking about the survival of the fittest (the way some crops survive the cold by converting starch into sugar) but insisting on how the human being can be good and virtuous in a world of filth and injustice (where the story of the biblical Job certainly plays an important part). An article signed by Amanda deMarco for the WSJ highlights that "for as jarring as Doblin's tactics may be, Franz is as complex as any chacter in a traditional novel," which is something I agree and certainly sets U and BA apart. There is no way to compare Franz Biberkopf with Stephen Dedalus or Leopold Bloom, or Mitzi with Molly Bloom, and this lack of character complexity makes BA fall a little short imho. BA is a sensational book for all the energy it contains, but much of it just dissipates in the thin air after its reverberant explosion. For a book written just a few years before the rise of nazism in Germany, I also fet that the political tension is described very subtly if not altogether played-down, especially considering that Doblin was a Jew and actually left Germany the day after the Reichstag Fire only 4 years after the publication of BA. But as translator Michael Hoffman says in his Afterword, "a masterpiece is always a mixed blessing." Indeed, praise for Hoffmann's work with his "the opaque is my enemy" strategy, much helpful compared, for instance, with Irene Aron's difficult (and imho sometimes misled) translation to Portuguese.
11 people found this helpful
Helpful
 Report
David B. Karpf
5.0 out of 5 stars One of the great books of all time
Reviewed in the United States on June 2, 2018
Verified Purchase
Read this for the Stanford Book Club. Not the easiest read in the world, but well worth it, as this novel from 1929 is probably one of the top 100 novels of all time, with Doblin being considered the German version of James Joyce, and Berlin Alexanderplatz being Doblin's "Ulysses". In actual fact, while both important novels are (to me) equally challenging on the reader, they are dissimilar in that Joyce makes use of the inner voice, whereas Doblin includes local (in time and place) news stories, bus and train lines, and other devices to firmly root the reader in Weimar Germany between WW! and WW2, in the early days of the rise of Fascism. Although the story focuses primarily on a single flawed individual, the petty thief and manslaughterer (of his girlfriend) but ultimately decent Franz Biberkopf. To me, at least, Doblin's horrendous depiction of the workings of the abbatoir/slaughterhouse foreshadows the Holocaust, although Doblin could not have known of that in 1929.
24 people found this helpful
Helpful
 Report

Top reviews from other countries

Translate all reviews to English
AKHIL PRINCE
1.0 out of 5 stars Bad print
Reviewed in India on December 11, 2023
Verified Purchase
Bad paper quality. Poor print
Report
Tomo of Qaf
5.0 out of 5 stars A work of the most staggering genius
Reviewed in Canada on December 25, 2020
Verified Purchase
As Joyce's Ulysses is the great novel of Dublin, this, assuredly, is the great novel of Berlin. Michael Hoffmann as translater is fully equal to the task .. I read it and then I read it again. It continues to startle.
One person found this helpful
 Report
Felipe Bedoya
5.0 out of 5 stars Buen producto
Reviewed in Mexico on May 20, 2020
Verified Purchase
Excelente libro
Report
M. Morrison
5.0 out of 5 stars A "must read" Berlin novel.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 2, 2021
Verified Purchase
I read this on Kindle and was well pleased with how it appeared there. I chose to read it because of my interest in Berlin as a city and its history. It is set in the Mitte district, the area I general stay in when visiting; the street names mentioned still exist which gives the novel an air of authenticity for me. The novel is straightforward to read and moves along with pace. I probably read it too quickly as I wanted to engage with the story and for many readers that will suffice - but there are multiple layers and it requires to be re-read. At the end of the book the translator has placed an "afterword" - I came upon it when I finished the novel - I think it would be helpful to read it before embarking on the story - but others may think differently. And so, if like me you have an interest in Berlin, the Weimar Republic, Brecht, Weill, or even the television production "Babylon Berlin", this novel is probably a "must read" for you.
8 people found this helpful
 Report
Luigi7
2.0 out of 5 stars Not what it's supposed to be
Reviewed in Italy on May 11, 2018
Verified Purchase
Read a good book review in 'The Economist" about it. It's just aligned with the journal's point of view without giving me satisfaction from a literary or historical content point of view.
Report