Berlin Alexanderplatz, the great novel of Berlin and the doomed Weimar Republic, is one of the great books of the twentieth century, gruesome, farcical, and appalling, word drunk, pitchdark. In Michael Hofmann's extraordinary new translation, Alfred D?blin's masterpiece lives in English for the first time. As D?blin writes: The subject of this book is the life of the former cement worker and haulier Franz Biberkopf in Berlin. As our story...