Cinema: Germany Without Tears

BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ Directed and Written by R. W. Fassbinder

Franz Biberkopf presses his hands to the sides of his head, as if he were about to pulverize a rancid cantaloupe, and screams. He staggers wildly about the apartment-house courtyard, its high walls allowing the merest tantalizing glimpse of sky. This is Germany, 1927. As the nation spun from the humiliation of Versailles to economic and social anarchy, and then into the toxic delirium of the Third Reich, so Franz spins. A laborer and part-time pimp who has just been released from prison after serving four years for beating a girlfriend to death, Franz has few resources of intelligence or nobility upon which to build a decent new life. He is dull and heavy, a Zolaesque human beast, but less a villain than a big lug. His attention span is so short he cannot even hold a grudge. He feels no remorse for the wrong he has done, no vengeance toward those who have wronged him. His life is determined by forces—of personality, of society, of fate—he has neither the will nor the power to control. He is the simple, dogged, malleable soul of Germany between the wars, when there was little sunlight and a person had every right to scream.

In his novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), Alfred Döblin dissected and described his characters' passions with the meticulous disinterest of a big-city coroner ("Then she sank to the part of his body she thought was his heart but was in fact his sternum and the upper lobe of his left lung"). A physician like his spiritual contemporary Céline, Döblin saw Germany as a huge human slaughterhouse and Franz as "a big, good-natured sheep.' Mixing statistics of death and disease with the story of some petty, brutal people living in East Berlin, Döblin created a 600-page epic that was part newsreel, part nightmare—a documentary melodrama written in blood and neon. Through his art he exercised the control that Franz and his friends could never exert on their lives.

So it was with Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Germany's pre-eminent stage and film director died last year at 36, a fat, wasted mess, bloated with drink and drugs like so many of his movies' protagonists. Yet his films, such as Ali and The Marriage of Maria Braun, were models of brisk precision (they had to be: he made 40 or so in only 13 years), and his camera was a most fastidious voyeur, observing every ruction of sexual violence with sympathy at a distance. Döblin and Fassbinder were a perfect book-and-movie match, and the young director knew it. He read Berlin Alexanderplatz as a boy of 15, reread it at 20, and realized that "an enormous part of myself, my attitudes, my reactions, so many of the things I had considered all my own, were none other than those described by Döblin. I had . . . unconsciously made Döblin's fantasy my own life." In 1980 he got the chance to turn his life into a movie, when Bavaria Studios gave him $6 million for a 14-episode film of Berlin Alexanderplatz. The relentless, triumphant result—15 hours, 21 minutes of degradation redeemed by art—opens this week in a Manhattan moviehouse. (It will be shown in five weekly segments, each about three hours long.)