Berlin Alexanderplatz
The German Ulysses. Doblin tells the story of a Weimar-era ex-convict's life in the Berlin underworld using montage techniques borrowed from cinema and radio: streams of consciousness, newspaper headlines, biblical allusions. Joyce praised it. Published in 1929, it captured Berlin's chaos in a form that matched it.
Döblin's montage buries Franz Biberkopf under newspaper clippings, slaughterhouse reports, weather bulletins, and biblical riffs, and the narrator announces each coming blow before delivering it. Berlin dialect defeated English for ninety years; the early translation was notoriously bad, and even the good modern one can only approximate. What survives is the city; Franz himself is a lump.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
