ABSTRACT
Any attempt to sketch a topography of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's expansive and complex Berlin Alexanderplatz has a vast territory to cover. First of all, one must take into account the film's textual basis, Alfred Döblin's many-voiced urban epic of 1929, as well as Phil Jutzi's 1930 rendering of the novel starring Heinrich George, “an underworld drama with many documentary shots.” 1 Second, Fassbinder's reception of the novel demands consideration. The filmmaker's life-long obsession with Döblin's book proved to be a dynamic relationship, one which Fassbinder depicted in a lengthy essay. 2 In the passionate article, the director openly admitted just how crucial Berlin Alexanderplatz had been for his own development, how the novel had left decisive marks on his impressionable young mind, and how these traces are to be found throughout his entire oeuvre. Finally, the most sizeable challenge remains Fassbinder's mammoth adaptation of the novel, a work of 15 hours 21 minutes. Accounting for the terms of this personal rendering of a work privileged by the auteur remains a strikingly imposing task, in 1984, two years after the filmmaker's death, four years since the film's controversy-ridden première on West German television, 3 a year following its resoundingly successful commercial release in American arthouses, at a time when the film is being aired on American cable outlets, marketed as a video cassette, and rescreened in Germany. 4 Berlin Alexanderplatz was in 1980 German television's most exorbitant undertaking ever, a 13 million DM investment supported by Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) and the Italian Television Network (RAI), a film of thirteen episodes and an epilogue, a production with a cast of 100 lead and supporting actors besides 3000 extras, a work shot over 154 days between June 1979 and April 1980 on location in Berlin and in the Munich Bavaria Studio. 5
