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Revenge on the White Bourgeois
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Still from the film “Berlin Alexanderplatz” (Wolfgang Ennenbach Sommerhaus Filmproduktion)
Fiction

Revenge on the White Bourgeois

An Interview with Burhan Qurbani
Jan Pelczar
Reading
time 10 minutes
Jan Pelczar:
A journalist from Radio RAM. Author of the book 'Lecę. Piloci mi to powiedzieli' ('I'm Flying. Pilots Told Me That'). A graduate of the Polish School of Reportage. Associated with 'Przekrój' magazine since forever. In childhood, he flipped through all the editions at his grandparents'. In adulthood, he became addicted to the crossword puzzles of the Kaliber 45 collective and the drawings of Raczkowski.

It’s been 40 years since Rainer Werner Fassbinder adapted Berlin Alexanderplatz for television. It took a lot of time before another film-maker found the courage to tackle this canonical German novel.

Director Burhan Qurbani was born the year that Fassbinder’s series came out. His three-hour-long movie premiered during this year’s Berlin Film Festival. Qurbani’s next project will be an adaptation of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours trilogy, this time using the black, red and yellow of the German flag, which symbolize the themes of unity, justice and freedom. Part one will be a musical.

Jan Pelczar: Your adaptation of Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz is set in the present day. Was it your intention to update it?

Burhan Qurbani: I grew up with this novel. I was 16 or 17 when I first read Berlin Alexanderplatz. I finished high school with it. And I completely failed. I was supposed to become a doctor, but because my high school diploma was not so good, I ended up making movies. That was all because of Berlin Alexanderplatz, really. So I had a certain bitterness towards Döblin’s novel. When I moved to Berlin, I decided to re-read it. At that point, I had already become a writer and I realized how much beauty there is in the novel, how much poetry, how complex the language is. I was able to appreciate it at a much deeper level. The novel stuck with me. But that’s just one of the motivating factors for the adaptation.

The other thing was the place I moved to. I ended up close to Volkspark Hasenheide, which is a very middle-class, bourgeois

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Jan Pelczar:
A journalist from Radio RAM. Author of the book 'Lecę. Piloci mi to powiedzieli' ('I'm Flying. Pilots Told Me That'). A graduate of the Polish School of Reportage. Associated with 'Przekrój' magazine since forever. In childhood, he flipped through all the editions at his grandparents'. In adulthood, he became addicted to the crossword puzzles of the Kaliber 45 collective and the drawings of Raczkowski.
Publish date: 06.11.2020

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