RaveThe Times (UK)\"...a brutal and prophetic novel, with great literary merit and historical fascination too ... Dialogue is the most difficult thing to get right in translation and Hofmann has opted to render the speech of working-class Berliners in cockney dialect. It reads fluently, even at the risk of being possibly obscure to a non-British audience ... Berlin Alexanderplatz is a turning point in the history of the German novel, departing from a more traditional narrative structure. When the Nazis came to power, Döblin fled to Paris and thence to the US. He suffered ill health and obscurity thereafter — one more victim of a regime unparalleled in philistinism as well as barbarism.\
