Adaptation of one of the most important German novels of the 20th century, often put alongside with James Joyce’s Ulysses. Alfred Döblin created a multidimensional portrayal of the pre-war Berlin depicted from different perspectives, including press extracts, judicial reports, Greek mythology, popular songs, city posters, sound effects and quotes from different works. This is the chaos of a big city of the 20th century where the contemporary nationalism and fascism evolved. This image alarmingly resembles today’s world which rationalizes the extreme right-wing thinking. For us, Berlin is, above all, the state of mind, the space of freedom and avant-garde, endangered by the moralists (those so-called ‘decent’ people) and the fanatics of power. In such Berlin the story of Franz Biberkopf takes place. Biberkopf is a workman, a pimp, a murderer who undergoes an inner transformation through rejection and afterwards integration of the evil found in himself. Reinhold, Biberkopf’s object of fascination, his Shadow, becomes the incarnation of that evil.
