541 - Berlin Alexanderplatz, Part 2, Germany, 1980. Dir. Werner Rainer Fassbinder.
How Is One to Live If One Does Not Want to Die?
Franz Biberkopf sits in the bar with his girlfriend Lina.
He tells her he does not want her to work for him. Not in the way that he used to employ women. He does not think of her that way. He loves her.
She argues with him but concedes. She knows she can make them money, but she comes to understand his aspirations. He wishes to improve his lot in life.
Now Franz has to find a job. A legitimate one.
He sells neckties on the street. He says the most ridiculous things to the passersby. He thinks he is talking them into it, but he is insulting them. Telling them that they do not know how to tie a tie, that tie salesmen are usually swindling them, conning them, but that he will treat them rightly. If they buy from him, he will show them.
A car pulls up with a couple in it. The couple we met in Episode 1. The woman of the couple being Eva, his mysterious ex, played by Hanna Schygulla. With hair of the day. Without curls.
She exits the car. Approaches him. They have a moment. She leaves.
Lina arrives. Who was that woman? She is jealous, of course. He tells her. A girl I used to know. It is over now. There is nothing to worry about.
He explains that he is terrible at selling ties. She tries to help them. They give up.
Maybe they can sell something else.
The man in the underground encourages him to sell "sex education" manuals. He has one for every type of person. With drawings. Franz, for all his past, is naive to this kind of literature. He goes through a series of emotions. Shock, confusion, interest, awe, curiosity, rejection, and then compliance.
When Lina comes home and he shows it to her, telling a story from the literature he is about to start selling on the street, she does not respond the way he expects. He expects her to say, Wow, how curious. Who knew this kind of thing existed? But instead she grows terrified. Insanely jealous. Is that what you are into? Are you that kind of man? She tries to flee. He succeeds in preventing her and convincing her that he is not that kind of man, that the other man persuaded him to sell it, and that he loves her.
She leads the charge in returning the merchandise. With conviction. As he watches from a distance. Around the corner. In the fog.
They go to a club. A large club. A quartet is singing. Songs of a certain kind.
She implores him. This is a happy place. People come here to be happy. He seems not happy.
He finds another job selling. This time newspapers. Newspapers of a certain kind. They make him wear an armband. With a swastika on it.
When does this story take place? It seems early for that. The novel was published in 1929. Does this event occur in the novel? Or did Fassbinder add it in 1980 looking back? Perhaps we should brush up on our history.
Franz seems oblivious to the propaganda this symbol represents. Perhaps because it is early. Perhaps because he is clueless. He encounters a Jewish sausage vendor, who seems to know what the symbol represents. And then a group of communists. Who also know.
There is hostility between them. When he goes to the bar, the one with the sparkling lights, he encounters them again, and the hostility continues. One group of men supporting an ideology that would later be responsible for the genocide of millions arguing with a single man supporting another ideology that would later be responsible for the genocide of millions. The group with conviction, the single man, blindly.
Fassbinder does not make it easy on us.
He presents us with a protagonist who in the first episode was responsible for the death of his girlfriend, who then returns from prison to violate her sister. And who in the second episode goes from selling pornographic literature to Nazi propaganda.
And then, ostensibly, asks us to see the society through that man's eyes. As a kind of Berlin Everyman. Struggling with confusion. Angst. Debility. And discomfort. In the period between the wars.
Are we watching a story published in 1929, before it all began?
Or are we watching a story filmed in 1980, looking back?
Adolf Hitler became Chancellor in 1933. The Nazis on the one side, and the Communists on the other, each advanced their causes in the Election of 1930. The stock market crashed in October of 1929.
This book was published before all of those events took place.
Alfred Doblin himself was Jewish. He clearly senses something. He feels it in the air. And he writes a story with some kind of prescience.
He must know something not good is coming. This way.
That some rough beast slouches towards Berlin.
About to be born.
* * * *
I don't want you earning money from me. I don't want to earn money from someone I love.
How many unemployed people are there in Berlin. I don't know.
A few hundred thousand people maybe.
Why does the Proletarian man not wear a tie? Because he cannot tie one.
Deutsches Tageblatt.
It looks like a squashed bug on the wall, a kippered herring on your chest.
This fine thing is just what you need. Look here! A convenient Christmas present.
Who was that woman?
That was Eva. A girl I used to know. But it's all over now.
Laughing Life.
What's she doing on the stairs with a kitten?
Figaro, Marriage, Ideal Marriage, Love Between Women, Unmarried Couples, Friendship,
Looking at pictures is no good. It ruins a man. It screws him up. It starts with looking at pictures, and later, when you want to, it doesn't come natural anymore.
There's a specialized book for everyone.
"The attempt to regulate a married couple's sex life by contract and to dictate conjugal obligations, as prescribed by law, is the most abominable and humiliating form of slavery one can imagine."
Do things like that really happen?
673,582 people unemployed in Berlin 10 minutes ago.
673,583 people unemployed in Berlin now.
To the new world in Hasenheide.
Mother, the man with the coke is here.
For 20 pfennings you can find out if you're a man.
Volkischer Beobachter!
There must be an order in Paradise.
Potsdamer Platz.
With the sword of justice and the shining shield.
Pickled herring in spiced sauce.
"A swastika is a swastika."
"The struggle against the Jews is also the fight for the sovereignty of Bavaria."
They've really pulled the wool over your eyes.
You don't need to run around like that.
All you do is yap about revolution, but your Republic is nothing but a calamity.
Blood must flow. Blood must flow. Rivers of blood must flow.
I thought the world was at peace, that there was order! But there's something wrong with the world. . . . In Paradise there lived two people, Adam and Eve. And Paradise was the glorious Garden of Eden, where bird and beast played.
The cloud has passed. Thank God, the cloud has passed.
"Let the despicable, renegade scoundrels, encouraged by the bourgeoisie and social chauvinists, disparage the constitution of the Soviets. It simply accelerates and deepens the rift between the revolutionary workers of Europe and the supporters of Scheidemann and so on. The oppressed masses are on our side."
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