Rainer Werner Fassbinder's fourteen-part Berlin Alexanderplatz, broadcast on German television in 1980, is a pivotal work in the artist's oeuvre. The 1929 novel by Alfred D blin, a subproletarian apocalypse set in the Weimar Republic, provided Fassbinder with material to historicize the avant-garde of the 1920s and redetermine the relationship between utopianism and popular address. While D blin created his protagonist to be a hysteric,...