Page 108 - Darko Štrajn, From Walter Benjamin to the End of Cinema: Identities, Illusion and Signification. Ljubljana: Educational Research Institute, 2017. Digital Library, Dissertationes, 29.
P. 108
from walter benjamin to the end of cinema
tage as the “principle” that affected the narration style of the novel thus en-
visaged a change in Döblin’s position on film. Accordingly, it can conclu-
sively be said that Döblin indirectly acknowledged the filmic effect in his
writing retrospectively; at the same time, this retrospective acceptance was
helped by the emergence of sound film because Döblin, reportedly in his
early comments on cinema, perceived the absence of the spoken word in
films as an impediment to film as a full-blown art.
Reading Berlin Alexanderplatz
Walter Benjamin presented Döblin‘s principal novel Berlin Alexanderplatz
in his essay Krisis des Romans in a very condensed manner. The discourse
of the review of the novel moves through interdisciplinary fields (as one
could say nowadays) such as comparative literature and cultural analysis.
There are statements and opinions in the review that should be read togeth-
er with Benjamin’s Arcades Project. Howard Caygill rightly connects the
project to Benjamin’s reflection on the “epic,”: “/. . ./ whether the epic thea-
tre of Brecht and the epic novels of Victor Hugo and Döblin, or the anti-ep-
ics of Kafka and Baudelaire. The various themes are brought together in the
genealogy of modern urban experience as the destruction of tradition un-
dertaken in the Arcades Project” (Caygill, 1998: 64). Benjamin’s inspiration
for simultaneous poetic and theoretical descriptions of the complexities of
urban experience in the Arcades Project must have been Döblin’s novel.
Hence, Benjamin’s city reading3 – which obviously mingles with Döblin’s
travels through the various urban and social layers of Berlin of the 1920s
as sensed through Franz Biberkopf, the antihero of the novel – reveals the
economic and political realities of the structure of Berlin’s urban environ-
ment. Bourdieu developed the concept of social (and symbolic) space dec-
ades later through his reflexive sociological and philosophical conceptual
apprehensions of complexities of modern society. Bourdieu’s notion of so-
cial space incorporates basic aspects of meaning that I have tried to present
above: “This space is defined by a more or less narrow correspondence be-
tween a certain order of coexistence (or of distribution) of agents and a cer-
tain coexistence (or distribution) of properties. Consequently, there is no-
body that is not characterized by place where he is situated more or less in
a permanent manner” (Bourdieu, 1997: p. 162). The aspect of urbanity has a
structuring role because it is inscribed in the constituting movements of in-
dividuals as represented by the characters of the novel. “Döblin’s epic unites
3 This term was proposed and developed by David Henkin (1998).
106
tage as the “principle” that affected the narration style of the novel thus en-
visaged a change in Döblin’s position on film. Accordingly, it can conclu-
sively be said that Döblin indirectly acknowledged the filmic effect in his
writing retrospectively; at the same time, this retrospective acceptance was
helped by the emergence of sound film because Döblin, reportedly in his
early comments on cinema, perceived the absence of the spoken word in
films as an impediment to film as a full-blown art.
Reading Berlin Alexanderplatz
Walter Benjamin presented Döblin‘s principal novel Berlin Alexanderplatz
in his essay Krisis des Romans in a very condensed manner. The discourse
of the review of the novel moves through interdisciplinary fields (as one
could say nowadays) such as comparative literature and cultural analysis.
There are statements and opinions in the review that should be read togeth-
er with Benjamin’s Arcades Project. Howard Caygill rightly connects the
project to Benjamin’s reflection on the “epic,”: “/. . ./ whether the epic thea-
tre of Brecht and the epic novels of Victor Hugo and Döblin, or the anti-ep-
ics of Kafka and Baudelaire. The various themes are brought together in the
genealogy of modern urban experience as the destruction of tradition un-
dertaken in the Arcades Project” (Caygill, 1998: 64). Benjamin’s inspiration
for simultaneous poetic and theoretical descriptions of the complexities of
urban experience in the Arcades Project must have been Döblin’s novel.
Hence, Benjamin’s city reading3 – which obviously mingles with Döblin’s
travels through the various urban and social layers of Berlin of the 1920s
as sensed through Franz Biberkopf, the antihero of the novel – reveals the
economic and political realities of the structure of Berlin’s urban environ-
ment. Bourdieu developed the concept of social (and symbolic) space dec-
ades later through his reflexive sociological and philosophical conceptual
apprehensions of complexities of modern society. Bourdieu’s notion of so-
cial space incorporates basic aspects of meaning that I have tried to present
above: “This space is defined by a more or less narrow correspondence be-
tween a certain order of coexistence (or of distribution) of agents and a cer-
tain coexistence (or distribution) of properties. Consequently, there is no-
body that is not characterized by place where he is situated more or less in
a permanent manner” (Bourdieu, 1997: p. 162). The aspect of urbanity has a
structuring role because it is inscribed in the constituting movements of in-
dividuals as represented by the characters of the novel. “Döblin’s epic unites
3 This term was proposed and developed by David Henkin (1998).
106
