In this excursive analysis of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s pivotal work, the 14-part Berlin Alexanderplatz miniseries broadcast on German television in 1980, German historian and theoretician Manfred Hermes explores the potential of narration in the paradoxes of cinematic representation. In the miniseries, Fassbinder took as his subject the 1929 novel by Alfred Döblin, a sub-proletarian apocalypse set in the Weimar Republic. In the process Hermes argues that Fassbinder historicized the avant-garde of the 1920s and redetermined the relationship between utopianism and popular culture. While Döblin created his protagonist to be an hysteric, Fassbinder chose to hystericize the viewer. In this work, along with others from the same period, Fassbinder established a Jewish-German mirror rotating on the axis of the Holocaust.