The relationship of the national and gender codes in Alfred Doblin's novel Berlin Alexanderplatz

The research is aimed at studying the relation between the national and gender codes in Alfred Doblin's novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929). This subject is new and has never been viewed in the abundant corpus of research about Doblin's novel. The primary method used is the narratological analysis, with gender-conscious and postcolonial approaches being employed. As a result, the author has detected close links of the national and gender-specific constructs in the novel. The constructs are evident in both the characters' speech and the included intexts (advertisement), as well as in the narrative text strategies and in the text structure. The paper explores the connection (made by Mieze, Franz Biberkopf, Reinhold and others) between the ethnicity (for example Turkish or Russian) of the persons and the sexual behavior that the characters consider deviant (polygamy, exchanging females and so on). By contrast, the German people are endued both by characters and by advertising slogans with positive connotations: they display common sense, reliability, sense of dignity and beauty. These aspects have gender connotations: common sense, reliability, sense of dignity are attributed to German men, beauty to German women. The attitudes of the main character, Biberkopf, to Jews, women and homosexuals are remarkably similar: all the three groups provoke his laugh and are not to be taken seriously as from his viewpoint they are subordinate elements to the patriarchal and nationalist community. The narrator position expresses itself in the text strategies repeatedly linking passages depicting Biberkopfs attitude to Jews and women: after his crisis, the character both goes to the Jewish people, whom he treats disdainfully, and visits and rapes Minna, whose sister he has killed. Taking into account such passages correlation and semantic parallelism one may talk about the narrator critical position to the gender and nationalist discrimination. The nationalist and gender constructs are viewed here in terms of Judith Butler's gender perfor-mativity concept (Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 1990) and Benedict Anderson's nation theory (Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 1991). The study also elaborates on the results of Hans Mayer's research (Outsider, 1981) stating the three main outsider groups in the European culture, namely Jews, women and homosexuals. The paper highlights the common mechanism of the nationalist and gender code production. The codes appear as a construct that the dominating group (heterosexual men of the prevailing ethnicity) uses as a tool to oppress and marginalize other groups and thus to ensure its power in the society.

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