I

“In the throes of an almost murderous puberty," around the age of fourteen or fifteen, Rainer Werner Fassbinder discovered Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz.

Initially, the novel struck him as “boring”: the first third depicted the directionless chaos of Weimar without putting a claw in his mind, or making him want to continue reading. Fassbinder nearly gave up on Döblin several times, as admitted in a March 1980 essay titled “The Cities of Humanity and the Human Soul”.

But decades later, the adult could still recall the instant when that changed for the teen. It was “p.155 of the 410 page paperback edition” — the meeting of the two “heroes", Biberkopf and Reinhold, mesmerized him. There was no going back after that.

“Devouring, gobbling, gulping down”: these are the words Fassbinder used to describe the state of reading that stopped feeling like reading and began to waver towards something like experiencing “life, suffering, despair, and fear.”

Fassbinder read Berlin Alexanderplatz three times (at least) during his life.

This ‘take-three’ — this reading trinity — intrigues me. Obviously, it speaks to the value of multiple readings, or to the attenuation of interpretations. When he first read the novel, for example, Fassbinder was quite young and bound to his family. He later said that this first reading presented him with a principle that would animate his work, namely, an interpenetration, a mutually-informing dynamic between returning to “one’s own reality” and thinking “morally about being realistic.” The novel “helps you accept the reading as the real thing, as sacred" without climbing on a pedestal to moralize. The crown, itself, is both ordinary and sacred. Ordinariness was interesting and dangerous.

"Life-support," Fassbinder called the novel. Life-affirming to readabout how men ruin themselves because they lack courage to “recognize” their need for one another. In Weimar, the impracticality of the heroes’ feelings made fear the only livable response. This first reading helped Fassbinder admit his own “paralyzing” fear of “homosexual longings”; it prevented him from “becoming completely and utterly sick, dishonest, desperate.” In his own words, Berlin Alexanderplatz saved him.

Five years later, when Fassbinder read the book again, he discovered something different in it: a way of thinking about “what I really means”, a way to resist the temptations of “living life secondhand”. The second reading offered the shock of recognition in the realization that many things had had considered part of himself “were nothing more than the things described by Döblin.” The reader had subconsciously turned the novelist’s imaginings into the script of his own life.

II

I want to pause here and note the difference between the two readings: if the First provided a glimpse of a larger reality that implicates the writer and reader, and allows the reader to use as a tool for deciphering life, then the Second reading revealed the extent to which the books we read socialize our imaginations and exert influence on our actions by expanding our views of possibility. Fassbinder’s self-recognition is what comes with the Second reading, but the nature of this re-cognition is to cognize the First readings’ influence on a life.

III

After viewing Piel Jutzi’s film version of Alexanderplatz, Fassbinder felt dissatisfied. He vowed to use cinema to “document” his own “involvement with this very special piece of literature.”

It took a decade, a different epiphany, a way of seeing. Reviewing his own films, Fassbinder discovered that there were more “quotations from Döblin’s novel” in his films than he’d realized — and many of these quotations were unconscious, or unintended. This prompted Fassbinder to undertake a third reading.

The third reading had a purpose: to get a clear picture of “what was going on between me and Alfred Döblin’s novel.” With this third reading, Fassbinder recognized that “this novel, a work of art, had helped determine the course of my life.” The course, here, designates more than how life could be (which he found in the first reading), or the way in which he saw himself in relation to the heroes (which he gleaned from the second reading), but in the art that he had produced. The reading transformed the novel into something like a formative relationship, an intellectual and emotional entanglement that touched everything in his life.

IV

Am I reading too much into the significance of the number 3 here? Perhaps. Poets are prone to such things. Still, the pure reasoners (and their reasonings) might appreciate a quotation from the opening pages of Berlin Alexanderplatz, as written by Alfred Döblin and translated by Michael Hofmann:

V

Berlin Alexanderplatz ends with Franz being committed to an asylum after being arrested for the murder Reinhold committed. The asylum puts Franz through “a reverse process of catharsis,” a socialization that transforms Franz into a normal or well-functioning citizen of Weimar.

The well-functioning citizen is the one who considers it a duty (or even an “honor”) to become a functionary. Like Franz after his reverse catharsis, the well-functioning is tamed; he has accepted the system that exists and defines success in relation to how high he climbs in it. “He will probably become a nationalist,” Fassbinder said of Franz in the interview. There was no way to survive his encounter with Reinhold in the world that the “heroes” had been given.

VI

”Cinema finds its language in the close-up,” filmmaker and former-Surrealist Luis Buñuel said on April 1, 1927. For Buñuel, a close-up is “anything that results from the projection of a series of images that comment or explain an aspect of the total view, whether it be a landscape or a person.”

The art of cinema is established by the relationship between shots. A film is a series of shots. A shot is a series of images. In the usual novel, the story follows a narrative arc. Learning this arc is a staple of writing workshops, as well as conventional rubric for analyzing plot and tabulating the “success” of a novel. The film studio formula, like the narrative arc, focus on satisfying an audience. The happy ending is in the resolution. But independent films, indie publishers, and minor writers tend to focus on experimenting at the level of the line, or how we see, and reimagining how existence is narrated visually.

Fassbinder did not make films that would satisfy the studio formula. Sometimes he even purposefully flattened narrative arcs. He stretched silence just past the point of bearability. His films make me squirm, makes it impossible to avoid reckoning with the gaps in dialogues, or recognizing myself in the rupture between characters who are asking for something as simple and human as comfort. We are never quite the persons we imagine. We are often the insecure freaks we play in ordinary life.

Oddly, the word vicinity comes to mind: to be ‘in the vicinity’ of something is different from merely observing it. Being in the vicinity encourages us to implicate our own eyes in how we see, and what we see, and why. Vicinity-driven thinking acknowledges the traces of the books that we have read on our lived experience. “And even if my reason tried to talk me out of it, I knew that my imagination was right,” wrote Peter Handke in one of my notebooks.