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  • The Paris Review

    Mean Streets: The Life and Afterlife of Berlin Alexanderplatz

    by Dustin Illingworth Mar 06, 2018 5 minutes

    George Grosz, Panorama (detail), 1919.

    The German artist George Grosz emerged from the decadence of Weimar culture as an unlikely moralist. His grotesque paintings of Berlin street life—seething, ugly, claustrophobic, often thick with malice—skewered the city’s lurid postwar demimonde. Though today Grosz is best remembered as a gifted caricaturist, his contemporary Hannah Arendt considered him a documentarian: “[his] cartoons seemed to us not satire so much as realistic reportage,” she wrote. Within the crucible of the metropolis, Arendt suggests, one must be prepared to enlarge one’s conception of the real.

    One of Grosz’s works, , adorns the cover of a new edition of Alfred Döblin’s 1929 Expressionist masterpiece, , published by New York Review Books and translated from the original German by Michael Hofmann. Dense, death-haunted, bleakly erotic,  pairs perfectly with Döblin’s immense and splendidly gritty novel, on whose shoulders rests, as Hofmann has it in his afterword, “the literary name and

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