Berlin Alexanderplatz - translated novel

Aug 25, 2026

Berlin Alexanderplatz traces the life and disorientation of Franz Biberkopf through a segmented view of Berlin’s streets, institutions, and social pressures. The provided text outlines Alfred Döblin’s background and the novel’s publication history, then introduces Michael Hofmann as translator and essay author. It also lists early chapters and their central episodes, framed by themes of psychological tension, urban movement, and moral struggle amid political and criminal currents.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryStory & Novel

FormatPDF

Pages411

Reading Time10 h 33 min

AccessFree to download

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

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 ofthe 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 onto 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. BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ ALFRED DÖBLIN Translated from the German and with an afterword by MICHAEL HOFMANN NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS New York THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014 [www.nyrb.com](www.nyrb.com) Text copyright © 2008 by S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main Translation and afterword copyright © 2018 by Michael Hofmann All rights reserved. First published as Berlin Alexanderplatz by S. Fischer Verlag in 1929. The English-language translation is published here by arrangement with Penguin Books, Ltd, London. Cover image: George Grosz, Panorama (Down with Liebknecht) , 1919; © Estate of George Grosz; licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Cover design: Katy Homans The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the GoetheInstitut. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Döblin, Alfred, 1878-1957, author. | Hofmann, Michael, 1957 August 25-translator. Title: Berlin Alexanderplatz / Alfred Doblin ; translated by Michael Hofmann ; afterword by Michael Hofmann. Description: New York : New York Review Books,[2018] | Series: NYRB Classics Identifiers: LCCN 2017046077 (print) | LCCN 2017047715 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681372006 (epub) | ISBN 9781681371993 (paperback) Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Psychological. | FICTION / Crime. | FICTION / Political.

FAQs

Who translated Berlin Alexanderplatz and added the afterword?

Michael Hofmann translated the German text and also provided an afterword.

When was Berlin Alexanderplatz first published?

Berlin Alexanderplatz was first published in 1929 by S. Fischer Verlag.

What does the table of contents cover in the early chapters?

The contents summarize key events for Chapters One through Four, including Biberkopf’s arrival and movements in Berlin, his encounters with others, and escalating conflict and decline.

Aug 25, 2026

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