Douglas Messerli | Everyman Is a Murderer: Two Berlin Alexanderplatzes [essay]

everyman is a murderer: two berlin alexanderplatzes

by Douglas Messerli

 

Given the genius of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and a budget that was able to support a 15-and-a half hour production of the important Alfred Döblin fiction, it is truly unfair to make comparisons with Phil Jutzi’s 90-minute 1931 work of cinema. In its truly panoramic presentation of the Weimar Republic Berlin and its stellar ability to bring that world alive through the acting talents of Günter Lamprecht, Brigitte Mira, Hanna Schygulla, Annemarie Düringer, Gottfried John, and particularly Barbara Sukowa, the 1980 version of Döblin’s work is arguably better than even his own written text.

     Fassbinder is able to show us how the post-World War I world into which the simpleton Franz Biberkopf was suddenly dropped had no longer any place for the ordinary hard-working everyday heterosexual man, but had become a city of mad business entrepreneurs, cutthroat robbers, and sexual deviants of all sorts who ultimately sold their souls to the devil of the Holy Whore of Babylon: Hitler and the horrors of his nightmarish dreams. Biberkopf might delude himself that he stood “on guard” against just such a world, but without his even knowing it he and his own violent inclinations had helped to create it and would trample him in its rush to reality. 

   By focusing primarily on that everyman, director Phil Jutzi in the original version could not hope to demonstrate how the streetside vendor had found his way into the corner from which there was no escape. Yet the movie succeeded fairly well in showing us how his own subconscious sexual desires pulled into the arms of a dancing Satan who would destroy half of his body and nearly everything he loved other than the woman he himself had already murdered. As both directors realized, the relationship between the womanizing Franz Biberkopf and the closeted and later active homosexual Reinhold Hoffman may have been inevitable but was not the result of an openly sexual attraction as much as it was a dark homoerotic pull toward their spiritual opposites: the outwardly good man with a uncontrollable inner rage attracting the outwardly cruel and violent being with an inward desire for redemption and love, the thin queer and the fat heterosexual man feeding off each other’s fantasies and strategies for survival in a world that was made for just such a marriage. Both wound up in prison, but their kind existed everywhere outside the prison walls that temporarily contained them, creating a world that was doomed to failure with a desire that could never be fed.

       Jutzi’s work, interestingly enough, becomes a kind of legend or guide book for the other greater work. In it we can see clearly the true center of the vaster picture of the Weimar Hell without being so fully distracted as we are in Fassbinder’s wonderland of contradictions. And it is in connection with the later film rather than its own period that more clearly defines its own significance. Hence, I have included with the 1980 work rather than isolating it in the years of its original making, where alongside such works as William A. Wellman The Public Enemy, Leontine Sagan’s Girls in Uniform, René Clair’s Freedom For Us, and F. W. Murnau’s Tabu, and Mervyn LeRoy’s Little Ceasar, it would make far less sense.

 

Los Angeles, June 1, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2022).