“It’s only because of their stupidity that they are able to be so sure of themselves.”
--Franz Kafka (to Max Brod)
Not so long ago I was discussing the compelling and distressing works of four Japanese novelists in terms of a special category I rashly called the scariest narratives ever written. And while it’s true that Kenzaburo Oe, Osamu Dazai, Kobo Abe and Yukio Mishima are right up there in terms of writing seemingly elegant and restrained tales while secretly scraping off the thin psychological veneer of civilization to reveal the throbbing savagery beneath, now I might have to retract my assessment in light of recent re-readings of two novelists who are even more pertinent and sadly applicable to these harrowing times we’re all hopefully living through. They were written historically close to each other, one by a German author, Alfred Döblin in 1929, when his country was witnessing the demise of the wistful Weimar Republic and the rise of National Socialism, while the other was an American novelist in 1935, Sinclair Lewis, who was witnessing a threat to his own country’s democratic principles under the paranoid banner of white nationalism.
History, as they say, may not repeat itself, but it often rhymes. And both books focus our attention on what happens when rare periods of liberal progress are replaced intermittently by atavistic and tribal bouts of xenophobic fever writ large. Hence my new declaration for the two scariest novels ever written: Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz because it reflects a time of fervent madness that we naively imagined was behind us, and Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, because it reminds us that not only can the past actually catch up with and outdistance the present; it can also threaten the very existence of a viable future in any form at all. Döblin’s macabre masterpiece was translated into English in 1931, at which point all of the western world, or at least those who were conscious, could plainly see the racist mobster takeover then fully underway in Germany. His sordid saga concerns a murderer who is released from prison, only to discover that the wider world outside is just a bigger prison populated by even worse criminals, the kind that never seem to get caught or punished. Döblin’s Franz Biberkopf must contend with diminishing opportunities to go straight, escalating crime waves and the rise of Nazism. His hapless struggle for survival of the foulest has often been compared to Joyce’s Ulysses, released seven years earlier, though Walter Benjamin (who, as usual, is totally right) draws clear distinctions between Joyce’s free-association interior monologue technique and Döblin’s use of a cinematic montage style.
Döblin is stylistically closer to Kafka, via a blending of first person and third person narration told from multiple points of view, one which utilizes sound effects, news articles, songs, speeches and even other books in order to move the dark story forward at a breakneck pace. Coincidentally, Berlin Alexanderplatz was translated into English by a friend of Kafka’s named Eugene Jolas, and it is an almost abstract masterpiece of literary modernism. The basic raw material for the narrative can be found almost entirely in Kafka’s epigram about how so often the people with the most confidence and certainty (generally the ones in control of both the levers of government as well as the corporate sector in a power merger, which was, after all, Mussolini’s definition of fascism) are usually the dumbest humans around. This is not a matter of their intellectual acumen, of course, but merely their sheer bloated self-interest that results in doomed decisions in the long run historically.
Döblin’s characters are, like Kafka’s, permanent victims of circumstances beyond their control who live a life exclusively devoid of certainty. In fact, doubt and ambiguity are their personae projected on a grand scale on a daily basis, lived out with frightening Sisyphean regularity. The unsavory and solipsistic Bieberkopf is a genuine anti-hero who makes us feel guilty for being so fascinated with his plight, most likely because we realize that he is a kind of archetypal cipher for the entire country of Germany as it was slipping into the maniacal grip of a lunatic they actually voted for in 1933. Only a few years after his rise to literary celebrity with this bleak but prescient novel, Döblin would be forced into exile by Hitler, eventually fleeing to Los Angeles and rubbing shoulders with other involuntary émigrés such as Thomas Mann.
 |
| Döblin in 1930 looking temporarily pleased with himself. (Photo: WikiCommons.) |
Döblin’s harrowing tale of life spinning out of control also lent itself admirably to film adaptation, perhaps because it already felt cinematic. First directed in 1931 by Piel Jutzi, with Döblin himself assisting in the adaptation, it was followed 49 years later by the more famous and somewhat notorious 14-part miniseries (one of the first), directed by the renegade German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder for German television. (It has also been released theatrically in an extended fifteen-hour version.) Personally I can’t think of any film director more suited to undertaking the adaptation for the screen than Fassbinder, who invaded our homes and fed us a magnificently sordid metaphor for both individual and collective decline. Though his ambitious project has its technical and aesthetic flaws deriving from a ragged and feverish approach matching its maker’s temperament, no one but he would have had the audacity to let the cinematic version be just as rough edged and chaotic as the novel’s own narrative. The finesse of a Wim Wenders or the mania of a Werner Herzog would have produced perhaps a more accessible work of art (especially if Klaus Kinski or Bruno Ganz had portrayed Bieberkopf rather than Günter Lamprecht) but either of those routes would have missed the essential discontinuity and dissonance of the source material.
 |
| (The Criterion Collection.) |
Fassbinder was the ideal candidate for this project, partly because of the impact the book had on him when he first read it as a teenager, and partly for the devotion to radical storytelling he had already demonstrated as a well-known cinema rebel. He also happened to concur with his countryman Walter Benjamin’s insight that Döblin wasn’t utilizing Joycean stream of consciousness technique but rather Kafka’s imagistic montage method, building up a sequence of optical impacts that constructed meaning in the unconscious of the reader/viewer. As per his own shared input on the story’s effects on his existential outlook hyperactive nervous system: “I found myself reading Berlin Alexanderplatz in a way that you could hardly call reading . . . more like devouring, gobbling, gulping down. And these expressions still don’t do justice to that way of reading, which dangerously often wasn’t reading at all, but more like life, suffering, despair and fear.”
 |
| Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1980. (Photo: Wiki Commons.) |
And because Fassbinder found a way of embodying Döblin’s story in nervous images, he was also very successful not exactly in making a fabulously successful limited series (it left viewers baffled back in 1980) but rather in manifesting the perfect vehicle for what Benjamin had accurately identified as “the most extreme, dizzying, last and most advanced embodiment of the old bourgeois Bildungsroman” (a novel dealing with one’s formative years or spiritual education. One of the reasons audiences were not overly enthusiastic in their response to Fassbinder’s opus was precisely the fact that it so distinctly captured the collapse of both an individual under bombardment from perpetual sensation overload at the same time as a society (the brief flowering of freedom of expression during the Weimar Republic) under the assaults of a collective spiral into totalitarian madness (a swamping emotional tidal sensation which no one has ever reported was particularly either uplifting or edifying). In other words, Fassbinder creatively interpreted the Döblin novel so effectively in cinematic terms that few people could bear to watch it. Which suited the irascible Fassbinder just fine, since, after all, he wasn’t exactly filming The Thorn Birds.
Xaver Schwarzenberger, Fassbinder’s cinematographer, has stipulated that the hectic, on-the-fly style of shooting, usually restricting themselves to one take, rarely two, was a reflection of both their style and their youth: “Invention in the moment. Rainer gave us situations, challenges that we had to solve. Shooting in a dark underpass with only two feet to move around. It’s very complicated. It was my challenge back then to solve these things. It was certainly exciting. But yes, it might have been better if we had planned more precisely beforehand, true. But it wasn’t possible. Still, the problems were solved.” Personally I think that the problems were solved by leaving them alone and letting the scenario organically follow the formlessness of Bieberkopf’s own lamentable pathology. He was living through conditions that seemed spookily to mirror his own inner turmoil.
In this regard I tend to concur with researcher Jesse Pasternack, who describes it as “part of a vivid body of work unlike any other in film history. If you want to watch something as sprawling, strange and downright compelling as [Fassbinder’s] own actual career, you have to make time for Berlin Alexanderplatz.” And as usual I recommended reading the novel on which it is based prior to watching the film series, and then if possible reading the novel again to gauge its raw authenticity and fidelity to the text. This might require the reader/viewer to consume the book with nearly the same compulsive ardor as Fassbinder did, but after all that is the only valid way to consume certain stories, without pausing to think – only to drink, perhaps – and read as if your life depended on it. Because if you do approach it that way, “devouring, gobbling, gulping down,” your life suddenly will in fact feel as it if it depended on it. And as Pasternack puts it, “If you can watch a 13-hour Netflix season of Russian Doll in a weekend, then you can certainly also watch Berlin Alexanderplatz.”
At the other end of the angst-drenched scary-novel spectrum, exploding almost silently onto the American literary scene three years after Döblin’s fever dream appeared for English readers, a prescient Yank novelist awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Literature chose to decline the distinction because he claimed the prize was designed to celebrate those who extolled the virtues of American culture, and his novel was not written for that purpose. Sinclair Lewis wrote It Can’t Happen Here as a cautionary tale warning that America had its own homegrown fascist hate-fest which was in danger of overtaking the Constitution and the very Republic it codified. Sound familiar? Witness the massive Nazi rally held in Madison Square Garden in New York (only four years after the novel’s English publication) replete with all the fancy psychotic decorations. It amazes me that after 90 years, not only has no major film director adapted his narrative though its frightening message has started to become a palpable reality. Perhaps now that a reality television show version of the presidency is playing out on our small screens every nerve-racking day, a film is no longer tenable?
The basic premise of the Lewis novel is so staggering that only a simple summary is needed. It follows a right-wing American politician, Berzelius Windrip, a demagogue who foments fear and drastic economic change while promoting a return to patriotism and traditional values. He rapidly assumes power as America’s first dictator when he takes total control of the government via self-coup and imposes totalitarian rule with the help of a ruthless paramilitary force. The novel focuses on a journalist’s opposition to the regime and the struggle for a liberal rebellion, and a new civil war breaks out as the resistance tries to consolidate its efforts. Amazingly, though the novel has been turned into a play twice, by Lewis Moffit in 1936 and Tony Taccone in 2016 (appropriately), a film has been much more difficult to produce. MGM Studios purchased the rights in late 1935 and a version was planned starring Lionel Barrymore. However, studio head Louis B. Mayer postponed it indefinitely, much to the publicly expressed satisfaction of Nazi Germany and the Production Code office.
Weirdly enough, Joseph Breen, head of that office, thought the script was “too anti-fascist and too filled with dangerous material.” But in 1938, Charlie Chaplin, bravely challenging Hollywood’s timidity, announced that his next film, The Great Dictator, would satirize Hitler. This prompted the MGM producer Lucien Hubbard to put Lewis’s novel back on the schedule with a dramatic climax “showing a dictatorship in Washington and how it was kicked out by disgruntled Americans as soon as they realized what had happened.” However, by July 1939, with war looming on the horizon, MGM reneged once again.
Well, folks, I suppose to some degree we might be watching it play out after all, but in real time on the evening news today. Jules Stewart of The Guardian has noted the obvious similarities between Trump’s Amerika and the book, and Malcolm Harris in Salon commented, “Like Trump, Windrip uses a lack of tact as a way of distinguishing himself, and the social forces that Windrip and Trump invoke aren’t funny, they’re murderous.” Reading It Can’t Happen Here in 1935 was as terrifying as reading Berlin Alexanderplatz in 1929, when the same thing was happening to the short-lived Weimar Republic. And watching the evening news every day in 2021 has become just as scary as reading both of them. Yet it’s not like we weren’t adequately warned. My favourite portrait of Sinclair Lewis, created by Ukrainian-American painter Boris Artzybasheff in 1945, is shown below, and it seems to be shouting to us, “For the love of heaven, why didn’t you pay more attention?”
At the other end of the angst-drenched scary-novel spectrum, exploding almost silently onto the American literary scene three years after Döblin’s fever dream appeared for English readers, a prescient Yank novelist awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Literature chose to decline the distinction because he claimed the prize was designed to celebrate those who extolled the virtues of American culture, and his novel was not written for that purpose. Sinclair Lewis wrote It Can’t Happen Here as a cautionary tale warning that America had its own homegrown fascist hate-fest which was in danger of overtaking the Constitution and the very Republic it codified. Sound familiar? Witness the massive Nazi rally held in Madison Square Garden in New York (only four years after the novel’s English publication) replete with all the fancy psychotic decorations. It amazes me that after 90 years, not only has no major film director adapted his narrative though its frightening message has started to become a palpable reality. Perhaps now that a reality television show version of the presidency is playing out on our small screens every nerve-racking day, a film is no longer tenable?
The basic premise of the Lewis novel is so staggering that only a simple summary is needed. It follows a right-wing American politician, Berzelius Windrip, a demagogue who foments fear and drastic economic change while promoting a return to patriotism and traditional values. He rapidly assumes power as America’s first dictator when he takes total control of the government via self-coup and imposes totalitarian rule with the help of a ruthless paramilitary force. The novel focuses on a journalist’s opposition to the regime and the struggle for a liberal rebellion, and a new civil war breaks out as the resistance tries to consolidate its efforts. Amazingly, though the novel has been turned into a play twice, by Lewis Moffit in 1936 and Tony Taccone in 2016 (appropriately), a film has been much more difficult to produce. MGM Studios purchased the rights in late 1935 and a version was planned starring Lionel Barrymore. However, studio head Louis B. Mayer postponed it indefinitely, much to the publicly expressed satisfaction of Nazi Germany and the Production Code office.
Weirdly enough, Joseph Breen, head of that office, thought the script was “too anti-fascist and too filled with dangerous material.” But in 1938, Charlie Chaplin, bravely challenging Hollywood’s timidity, announced that his next film, The Great Dictator, would satirize Hitler. This prompted the MGM producer Lucien Hubbard to put Lewis’s novel back on the schedule with a dramatic climax “showing a dictatorship in Washington and how it was kicked out by disgruntled Americans as soon as they realized what had happened.” However, by July 1939, with war looming on the horizon, MGM reneged once again.
Well, folks, I suppose to some degree we might be watching it play out after all, but in real time on the evening news today. Jules Stewart of The Guardian has noted the obvious similarities between Trump’s Amerika and the book, and Malcolm Harris in Salon commented, “Like Trump, Windrip uses a lack of tact as a way of distinguishing himself, and the social forces that Windrip and Trump invoke aren’t funny, they’re murderous.” Reading It Can’t Happen Here in 1935 was as terrifying as reading Berlin Alexanderplatz in 1929, when the same thing was happening to the short-lived Weimar Republic. And watching the evening news every day in 2021 has become just as scary as reading both of them. Yet it’s not like we weren’t adequately warned. My favourite portrait of Sinclair Lewis, created by Ukrainian-American painter Boris Artzybasheff in 1945, is shown below, and it seems to be shouting to us, “For the love of heaven, why didn’t you pay more attention?”
– Donald Brackett is a Vancouver-based popular culture journalist and curator who writes about music, art and films. He has been the Executive Director of both the Professional Art Dealers Association of Canada and The Ontario Association of Art Galleries. He is the author of the recent book Back to Black: Amy Winehouse’s Only Masterpiece (Backbeat Books, 2016). In addition to numerous essays, articles and radio broadcasts, he is also the author of two books on creative collaboration in pop music: Fleetwood Mac: 40 Years of Creative Chaos, 2007, and Dark Mirror: The Pathology of the Singer-Songwriter, 2008, as well as the biographies Long Slow Train: The Soul Music of Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings, 2018, and Tumult!: The Incredible Life and Music of Tina Turner, 2020, and a book on the life and art of the enigmatic Yoko Ono, Yoko Ono: An Artful Life, released in April 2022. His latest work is a book on family relative Charles Brackett's films made with his partner Billy Wilder, Double Solitaire: The Films of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, published in January 2024.
No comments:
Post a Comment