Berlin Alexanderplatz
  • Published: 4 June 2019
  • ISBN: 9780141191621
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 480
  • RRP: $22.99

Berlin Alexanderplatz

Formats & editions
Paperback
4 Jun 2019
EBook
1 Feb 2018
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The great novel of 1920s Berlin life, in a superb translation by Michael Hofmann

The subject of this book is the life of the former cement-worker and haulier Franz Biberkopf in Berlin. As our story begins, he has just been released from prison, where he did time for some stupid stuff, and now he is back in Berlin, determined to go straight.

To begin with, he succeeds. But then he gets involved in a set-to with an unpredictable external agency that looks an awful lot like fate.

To see and hear this will be worthwhile for many readers who, like Franz Biberkopf, fill out a human skin, but, again like Franz Biberkopf, happen to want more from life than a piece of bread . . .
  • Published: 4 June 2019
  • ISBN: 9780141191621
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 480
  • RRP: $22.99
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Praise for Berlin Alexanderplatz

Franz Biberkopf is one of the modern world's richest literary characters, as memorable as Woyzeck, Oblomov or Madame Bovary

New York Review of Books

Berlin Alexanderplatz is Europe's Moby-Dick ... both seriously significant and a great deal of fun

John Self

Reading it was the most wonderful experience

Deborah Moggach, Saturday Review

This new English translation by Michael Hofmann - the first in more than 75 years - expertly captures the fecundity, originality and musicality of Döblin's masterpiece ... A bold and dazzling collage of a novel

The National

Brutal and prophetic ... a turning point in the history of the German novel

The Times

A flashing kaleidoscope of a novel ... Michael Hofmann's translation has a vivid immediacy

Country & Town House

The classic Weimar novel ... Long branded untranslatable, a fluent, pacy new translation by Michael Hofmann gainsays that assumption, opening up the book for English-speakers

Economist

Ace translator Michael Hofmann has delivered an exhilarating new version of Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz: that street-smart, slang-filled, richly allusive tale of crime, punishment and social crisis in the capital of Weimar Germany just before Hitler's rise to power. Hofmann's firecracker prose fizzes through this revolutionary trip into the lower depths of big-city life

Boyd Tonkin

Berlin Alexanderplatz, which celebrates its 90th anniversary this year, still fascinates as a cautionary tale by shining light on the most obscure parts of the human soul.

Tobias Grey, Wall Street Journal