Franz Biberkopf has sworn to be decent, and you have seen how he is decent for weeks, but that was, in a way, only a grace period. Life finds this too delicate in the long run and cunningly trips him up.

The story of the transport worker Franz Biberkopf, who, released from Berlin-Tegel prison, wants to find his way back into life as an honest man, is the first German metropolitan novel of literary rank. The Berlin of the twenties is the setting for the events. In the process, the metropolis itself becomes the antagonist of the good-natured and quick-tempered Franz Biberkopf, who tries to defy this enticing but also relentless world.

With Berlin Alexanderplatz, Döblin made a radical departure from the bourgeois psychological novel. No individual fate was analyzed here. The collective events, the generality of a human situation, experienced a valid poetic design here. The novel is one of the great epics of our time.