“Berlin Alexanderplatz. The Story of Franz Biberkopf (1929) is the most famous work of the German prose writer and essayist Alfred Döblin (1878-1957), one of the key novels of the 20th century. For the first time, the reader is offered the full text of the work (for this edition, numerous, both ideological and random, cuts have been translated, the graphic appearance of the original has been restored, to which the author himself attached special artistic significance). The writer managed not only to recreate an extremely accurate portrait of his era, but to combine innovative technique of writing with the eternal problems of existence. The story of a former loader, who served four years in prison for the murder of his girlfriend, is interspersed with pictures of life in Berlin in the 20s of the last century, authentic advertising and newspaper articles of that time. Such an unusual editing technique of writing allows you to immerse yourself in the atmosphere of a big city, over which the shadow of fascism is already hovering. The book became a real sensation, immediately causing loud debate among German intellectuals about the meaning and fate of prose genres in the literature of the 20th century. This controversy is reflected in the Addendum to the main text (previously not published in Russian), which contains a review by Döblin’s contemporary, the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, The Crisis of the Novel, and Döblin's response; here is a selection about Berlin in the life of the writer, his essays on poetics and aesthetics, autobiographical writings. Experimental, genre-bold for its time, but still relevant today and initially cinematic in form, the novel formed the basis for the cult film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1980 ).