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Cover Page and Table of Contents Copy 100 Years Berlin Alexanderplatz: Disability, Gender and Race in Döblin, Fassbinder and Qurbani By Benjamin C Davis Senior Honors Thesis Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill April 12, 2021 Approved: _________________________ Dr. Richard Langston, Thesis Advisor Dr. Inga Pollmann, Reader Dr. Joseph Rockelmann, Reader Table of Contents Acknowledgements i Introduction 1 Döblin: Doctors and Disability Introduction: Berlin Alexanderplatz in Context 5 Movement I: From Veterans to the Slaughterhouse 8 Movement II: Assault, Accident and Amputation 11 Movement III: Experiencing Disability 17 Movement IV: Therapeutic Madness 22 Conclusion 26 Fassbinder: Queer and Disabled Masculinities Introduction: Fassbinder’s Magnum Opus 28 Wielding Power over Women for Able-Bodied Franz 31 Franz and Homosocial Relationships 40 Franz and Post-Disability Reliance on Women 48 Conclusion 54 Qurbani: Disability and Racialized Bodies Introduction: A Twenty-First-Century Berlin Alexanderplatz 56 Modernizing and Adapting Döblin’s Text 57 Dialoguing with Fassbinder’s Film Series 62 Old Stories with New Characters 68 Conclusion 72 Conclusion 74 Bibliography 77 Acknowledgments I would like to express my sincerest gratitude to my advisor Dr. Richard Langston for his endless patience, persistent aid, and invaluable guidance throughout the process of creating this work. I would like to thank my committee members Dr. Inga Pollmann and Dr. Joseph Rockelmann, in addition to the rest of the teaching faculty of the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill for their support, resources, and for the dedication they show to their students, in academics and personal life. I would also like to thank my wonderful colleagues in the German program and German Club for the many opportunities I had to learn with them and practice speaking together. I would like to thank my roommates and friends, Matthew Ricigliano and Kristina Jones, for their patience, support, and prolific empathy. I would like to thank them, my colleagues from outside the German major, my friends Drew, Parker, MaryBeth, Quince, and my sister Rachael for enduring the many times I spoke German at them. Last, but certainly not least, I would like to thank my mother, June Davis, for her undying commitment to me and my wellbeing and for being a steadfast support to my academic achievement and my identity. i Introduction Berlin Alexanderplatz, first conceived by Alfred Döblin, famously retold in a 15-part TV series by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and most recently, in 2020, adapted by director Burhan Qurbani into a 3 hour film, was originally a story of Berlin and a window into its society, and a reflection of the status of German society as a whole. Its adaptations shift the novel’s focus to address issues reflecting the interests and contemporary problems facing their individual interpreters. Its complex, multithreaded narratives have been rewoven through each retelling and its composition has withstood the test of time as an effective encapsulation of the zeitgeist of 1920s Berlin and offers unique opportunities for reflection and analysis. Although Qurbani’s film warrants sufficient time to establish itself in the critical literature of Berlin Alexanderplatz , there remain other unexplored questions with Döblin and Fassinder’s work which suggest an opening for a common threadline of examination throughout the three by interrogating the role of disability in the narratives of Berlin Alexanderplatz. Although there exist other adaptations, including a radio play and an earlier film version, the three retellings are specifically selected to give different signposts of the story’s meaning at different points in German history, specifically with regards to differences in German attitudes about disability and its functionalization in literature, especially as Qurbani’s film represents a reimagination of the story as taking place in contemporary Germany. In order to discuss the role of disability, we must first establish a common definition for it, and understand its history in German society. In her seminal work, Carol Poore adopts an expansive definition of disability including, “physical, sensory, cognitive, and mental 1 impairments” and the subjects of familiar cultural pejoratives such as “freaks” or “the insane.”1 I will adopt a similar approach and use her research as a lens through which to analyze Berlin Alexanderplatz. However, I will be focusing primarily on visible physical disability and will thus make deliberate distinctions between what I will address as “disability” and “cognitive or mental disability.” The role that disability has played in post-WWI German society is a tumultuous one. Disability was more present in the German consciousness during the Weimar Republic than any time before or since, appearing in artwork, literature and political discourse. The country, having just lost the war, was tasked with reintegrating thousands of wounded war veterans who experienced limb loss, facial disfigurement, shell shock and unemployment. Public outcry over the shame of the lost war often found its way to ridiculing the veterans for their participation. Whether portraying them as cowards for not fighting hard enough, imperialist lackeys responsible for the war, or “monstrous” symbols of the horrors of modern war, civilian perceptions of these veterans were often negative, and only a few avenues existed for their redemption. Many medical professionals sought to restore the functionality of these veterans to return to work, emphasizing the need to fix them so that they could stop relying on charity. 2 However, the medical profession also included such individuals as Alfred Hoche, one of Döblin’s mentors, who advocated for the euthanasia of “lives unworthy of life.” 3 As Poore notes, there was some distinction between the war wounded and Germany’s disabled civilians, in particular those whose disability was congenital, were more frequently the targets of eugenics. The Nazis exploited this difference to gain the support of veterans, creating a “sanitized image” of these soldiers to contrast the critiques of the senseless nature of war and divert the eugenic attention to Germans with congenital disability instead. This attention resulted in calls for sterlization and “euthanasia” that ultimately ended in the deaths of over 1 Poore, “Preface,” in D isability, xvii. 2 Baeyer, Der lebendige Arm, 29. An example of this is found in the work on prosthetics 3 Poore, Disability, 3. 2 70,000 disabled Germans by the end of 1941 as part of “Aktion T4.” 4 After the war, disability became a taboo subject, likely due to its association with both the war and eugenicist Nazi propaganda. 5 Sparse references to disability in literature continued to have varying degrees of success onward into the 70s, where the German abortion debate brought to light existing biases against disabled individuals. 6 Club 68, the Declaration on the Rights of Disabled Persons in 1975 and the UN Year for People with Disabilities in 1981 represent milestones where the disabled community began to be recognized as such and to organize for their rights.7 This perspective that the hardship experienced by individuals with disabilities is most significantly that they are subjected to systemic discrimination continues to drive modern disability advocacy. It has led to an understanding of “ableism” as a structural problem in society. Although Carol Poore’s work contains thorough explanations and criticisms of the function of disability in important German pieces of art, film, and literature, she does not mention Döblin’s work, nor Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, preferring instead to talk about another film of his, Chinesisches Roulette . This absence represents an opportunity to use the understanding of the struggle for disability rights, in parallel with other struggles for liberation, such as from gender and racialization, to interpret new and significant meaning from the works of Döblin and Fassbinder and to understand the perspectives taken by Qurbani. It represents an opportunity to see beyond disability as metaphor, and to examine how disability is portrayed as an integral to understanding intersectional issues. Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz is a seminal work and its continually renewed life through retelling and plot dependence on disability make it an ideal target for analyzing the historical transformations of interpretations of disability throughout almost a century of 4 Poore, Disability, 87. 5 Poore, Disability, 153. 6 Herzog, “Moral Reasoning,” 10. 7 Poore, Disability, 274. 3 German history. In each of the works of Döblin, Fassbinder, and Qurbani, disability is dynamic, having different modalities and intersectionalities, be it class, gender, sexuality or race. This allows us to examine the breadth of intersectionality of disability in German literary canon and study how disability has been defined and redefined on both a systemic and personal level for German writers, filmmakers, and their audiences. 4 Chapter 1 Döblin: Doctors and Disability Introduction: Berlin Alexanderplatz in Context In order to understand the varied roles of disability in the story of Franz Biberkopf through its varied retellings across the century, we must begin at the origin of the story, its conception, and the man who brought it into existence, and his motivations for doing so. Alfred Döblin was a physician at a time when the professional
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