Games I play while riding the subway: Check out the passengers, decide which are adulterers. Imagine what’s harder for that woman by the door: long periods of solitude or the lack thereof. Guess which of those three guys over there recently awoke into a vacancy so total that for a second (right before the engine of consciousness kicked in), he felt freed at last from time and self and was terrified, awed, elated… (But then the engine sputtered to life, and he forgot this ever happened.)

Or, what percentage of passengers is just now thinking either of money or of sex? Or: what are the odds of this train getting into truly serious trouble?

 

Amusement, anxiety: two poles I veer between. As a matter of course, not merely in the subway. But down there in particular.

Something comic about steel cylinders snaking through tunnels in the dark, disgorging and engorging. But something sinister, too. A subway car is no-man’s land; once the train starts to move, there’s nothing you can do—no exit to aim for, no walls to scale, nowhere to flee.

I take a seat. The only sounds are the train’s; we riders are silent as infants in wombs. As I cross one leg over the other, a stranger’s upper arm presses against my shoulder, supplying warmth without meaning to. Another stranger’s boot grazes mine, our soles hovering in midair. I can hear the boot wearer breathing; I could easily match my breath with hers, inhale and exhale at the same rate. Pretend to be her. Drop my self, that ponderous load, and assume hers, lighter.

Three milieus for life in the city: apartment, streets, subway. 

Streets: Every day the mise-en-scène bustles with actors. They move as if they know precisely what they’re doing—each face masking who knows what… Of course I can’t inquire, can’t seize an elbow and say, Wait, stop, I need to know what lies coiled in your gut! Can know nothing of each body and mind, only that all are in motion.

Apartment: Adequate space and light, but based on an iffy foundation: the subway runs beneath. My apartment trembles whenever a train goes by. I’m used to this; it’s not unpleasant. Yet I cannot rid myself of the notion that one day, worn out by constant shaking, the entire edifice will collapse and I’ll die in the rubble… What’s more, the vibration makes it hard for me to perform certain acts. Eating, having sex, and listening to music are fine; threading a needle is not. Ditto for turning a book’s pages: it’s as if someone or something else is guiding my hand, my mind. I do most of my reading elsewhere.

Subway: Each weekday I board a train and pull a book out from my bag. (Strange though it seems, on trains I can ignore the rattling.) Down the rabbit hole I go, into the space of the book. Meanwhile the subway car hums with activity, not physical but mental—inaudible but ceaseless, potent. Now and then I look up to catch a fellow rider’s gaze: I see you, our eyes say, I’m not staring but I can see…

       

On the R train to downtown Brooklyn late one afternoon, I open the novel I’m reading: Berlin Alexanderplatz.

Alfred Döblin, a psychotherapist by training, published the book in 1929. Though it’s an exemplary modernist work, it rarely arises in regular-folk conversations about “innovative” novels. This is surprising to me, since Berlin Alexanderplatz bristles with playful energy and intelligence. It’s bracingly skeptical about politics, sexuality, justice, love, despair; but its ironies are never cold.

As a novelist, Döblin celebrates the artifice of omniscience. His all-seeing narrator is a marvel of slyness: bleak, silly, oracular, vulgar, outrageous, and childlike, sometimes all at once. The narrator’s account of the life of the hero—a hapless jailbird named Franz Biberkopf—sounds like the playbook for a grade-B gangster flick, though the narrative keeps turning into something else: a drunk’s rant, a feminist morality play, a perverse bildungsroman, a tender love poem, a tongue-in-cheek essay on urban development, a foray into mysticism, medicine, and meteorology… all rendered in a superbly elastic voice. From start to finish, the narrator remains the central player. That’s not to downgrade the story’s memorable main characters—Franz and the two people, Mieze and Reinhold, who matter most to him; indeed, the love/horror scenes involving these three are enthralling. Yet it’s the narrator, as affable as he is enigmatic, who keeps stealing the show.

 

In one essential sense, the narrator of Berlin Alexanderplatz remains steady and reliable: he never lets me forget I’m in Berlin. Here’s what it’s really like, he says, to conduct a life amid perpetual motion. 

I live in the city of Brooklyn, which has roughly half the number of residents today that Berlin had in the 1920s. Like Berlin back then, Brooklyn is always under construction; buildings are torn down and put up all the time, and the transport system is forever being refurbished. As soon as I hit the street each day, I feel the city issuing me orders: no standing, no sitting, no waiting, no idling, keep moving.

Like everyone else, I follow these orders. Getting from A to B entails constant negotiation, not just with practicalities but with myself. The nervous energy of Brooklyn’s physical growth and change, the felt tension of its under- and unemployed, the visibility of its wealthy and privileged, the volumes of noise and trash it produces, the scent of its waterfront, the suburban neatness of some of its precincts and shameful degradation of others, the beauty of its parks, the quantity of its dogs and houses of worship, the multiplicity of its languages, the persistence of its rivalry with Manhattan—to all this and more, my consciousness responds like taffy, extending here and there, sticking to this and that, looping, swirling, crisscrossing… and when I try to retract it into something like a familiar shape, it’s no longer contoured as it was an hour, minute, or even moment ago.

What was I thinking, who was I, before the awning of a new café (signaling an old one’s demise) or the sight of someone pawing through a dumpster caused this reorientation of self? Is my “principle,” like Franz’s, defective in some way? And why this sense that I’m not just experiencing my life in Brooklyn, but simultaneously experiencing the experience of it? Is that the defect?

I’d surely like to understand why this is happening. But I know if he were to hear me say that, the narrator of Berlin Alexanderplatz would laugh at me.

 

As Döblin imagines it, Berlin is chaotic, exhilarating, and violent. We meet a large number of people there (some just for a second or two, à la Mrs. Dalloway), and in every case we see how richly each individual’s experience is woven into that of Berlin itself. The city becomes the physical and metaphysical wheel of the novel’s progress through time, with one particular platz at its hub.

Observing the trams as they cross “the Alex,” the narrator muses on the passengers’ bodies and jobs, their longings and terrors:

 

Who could find out what is happening inside them, a tremendous chapter. And if anyone did write it, to whose advantage would it be? New books? Even the old ones don’t sell, and in the year ’27 book-sales as compared with ’26 have declined so and so much percent. Taken simply as private individuals, the people who paid 20 pfennigs, leaving out those possessing monthly tickets and pupils’ cards—the latter pay only 10 pfennigs—are riding with their weight from a hundred to two hundred pounds, in their clothes, with pockets, parcels, keys, hats, sets of artificial teeth, trusses, riding across Alexanderplatz, holding those mysterious long tickets on which is written: Line 12 Siemensstrasse D[,] A, Gotzkowskistrasse C, B, Oranienburger Tor C, C, Kottbuser Tor A, mysterious tokens, who can solve them, who can guess and who confess them, three words I tell you heavy with thought, and the scraps of paper are punched four times at certain places, and on them there is written in that same German in which the Bible and the Criminal Code are written: Valid till the end of the line, by the shortest route, connection with other lines not guaranteed: They read newspapers of various tendencies, conserve their balance by means of the semicircular canals of their internal ear, inhale oxygen, stare stupidly at each other, have pains, or no pains, think, don’t think, are happy, unhappy, are neither happy nor unhappy.

 

Cities express force through size, of course, and novels set in cities frequently try to capture and exploit this superscaled aspect of urban life. Yet cities are also full of small things that generate an equal though different vitality, which often goes unnoticed—in novels as in actuality.

How many novelists today would allow smoke, for instance, to individualize as clearly as in this scene in Berlin Alexanderplatz, which takes place in Neue Welt (a famous vaudeville and music hall in Neukölln)?

     

The smoke, when it finds it is getting too smoky, tries to escape upwards because of its light weight, and… finds slits, holes, and ventilators ready to push it along. But outside, outside it is dark night and cold. Then the smoke repents of its levity, resists its constitution, but it can’t find the way back, for the ventilators all turn to one side. Too late. It finds itself surrounded by physical laws. The smoke doesn’t know what’s happened, it grasps its brow, and has no brow, it wants to ponder—but in vain. The wind, the cold, the night have seized it…

 

The feckless smoke struggles but fails to figure out what the hell is happening to it—and with this failure, it becomes just like Franz, other Berliners, and us “ordinary readers.” Yet there’s no reason to despair, Döblin’s narrator coos reassuringly. After all, anything goes in Berlin! Anything, that is, but detachment. One can’t opt out. One must grasp one’s brow, even if in vain, and stay in the game.

 

Rush hour: the streets writhe with people, cars, buses.

Having just emerged from down below, I blink like a mole, then trot across Atlantic Avenue. Does that light pertain to me?—hard to tell. At my left looms the carapace of Brooklyn’s new basketball arena; crawling with orange-hatted workers, it looks like an upside-down Frisbee. I sidle along a plywood wall separating pedestrians from the construction pit. A pile driver thumps maniacally. Because of the plywood wall, I can’t see the depths of the pit, only the upper levels, whose steel beams look like pick-up sticks.

 

Where Jürgens stationery store was, they have torn down the house and put up a building fence instead. An old man sits there with a medical scale: Try your weight, 5 pfennigs. Dear sisters and brethren, you who swarm across the Alex, give yourselves this treat, look through the loophole next to the medical scale at this dump-heap where Jürgens once flourished and where Hahn’s department store still stands, emptied, evacuated, and eviscerated, with nothing but red tatters hanging over the show-windows. A dump-heap lies before us. Dust thou art, to dust returnest. We have built a splendid house, nobody comes in or goes out any longer. Thus Rome, Babylon, Nineveh, Hannibal, Caesar, all went to smash, oh, think of it! In the first place, I must remark they are digging those cities up again, as the illustrations in last Sunday’s edition show, and, in the second place, those cities have fulfilled their purpose, and we can now build new cities. Do you cry about your old trousers when they are moldy and seedy? No, you simply buy new ones, thus lives the world.

 

Above me, a huge poster advertising the arena is affixed to a pair of metal braces bolted in turn to the plywood wall. It seems a bit top heavy. Maybe the wall really will collapse.

 

Now he sniffs the air, he noses the streets as if they belonged to him and wanted to take him in. He gapes at the poster columns, as if they were an event in his life. Yes, my boy, you can’t go far now on your two legs, now you’ve got to clutch and cling tight to something firm, now you must set as many teeth and fingers as you have left together and hold on fast, just so as not to be knocked off.

 

Turning onto Fifth Avenue (the pit at my back now), I head toward home.

To and fro the actors go, go… I can guess at their lives, the rise and fall of feeling behind all their ceaseless action—though wouldn’t that be as futile as… as what?

As trying to capture in words my own fugitive self.

In the air there is something idiotic, in the air there is something hypnotic, it’s in the air, it’s in the air, and it won’t get out of the air.

If the person I’ve just passed could be me, then I could be her or him. Or: If I could see inside the unknown people I pass each day, then I could discover my own unknown selves.

Ah, if/then logic!—the province of wishful thinkers. Still, such syllogisms help forestall my opting out. There are, after all, countless individual fates, clear to those to whom they befall only after the befalling; as for my own, I can’t know it, and needn’t. What I owe my city—the same thing I owe myself (selves, rather)—is attention. How to bestow it, though, without first filtering it through some scrim of preconception? What would it be like to look through a truly clear lens?

Too bright. Blinding. I attend as I can, imperfectly.

 

For every citizen in Berlin Alexanderplatz, even the city’s abuses and excesses are proof of its vitality. Preposterously flawed, the city cannot be shamed. Döblin’s Berlin is a Whitmanian song of itself.

The world is made of sugar and dirt.

As I round the corner of Ninth Street and head uphill, my nerves tighten. Amusement, anxiety… How to stay steady, how not to get knocked over, unless you’re the omniscient narrator in somebody’s novel? Words I hear and speak, read and write: aren’t they forever failing to match up with what happens in the world? They have force, though—like that of a fist, a hammer, even a bus. The words come rolling up to us, we must be careful not to get run over; if we don’t watch out for the autobus, it’ll make applesauce out of us. I’ll never again stake my word on anything in the world. Dear Fatherland, be comfort thine, I’ll watch, and use these eyes o’ mine… Keep awake, keep awake, for there is something happening in the world. The world is not made of sugar. If they drop gas-bombs, I’ll have to choke to death; nobody knows why they are dropped, but that’s neither here nor there, we had the time to prepare for it.

Beneath my feet rumbles the train.

 

When I say I’m transported, what does that mean?

Carried from here to there, locus to locus? Or from one feeling to another?

I ride the subway to get from A to B. But that’s not the only reason. I also ride so I can sit still. Take on other riders’ tales, wear them briefly as my own.

This too transports me. As does Berlin Alexanderplatz.