Alfred Döblin

On the Alexanderplatz they are tearing up the road-bed for the underground. People walk on planks. The tram-cars pass over the square up Alexanderstrasse through Münzstrasse to the Rosenthaler Tor. To the right and left are streets. House follows house along the streets. They are full of men and women from cellar to garret. On the ground floor are shops.

Liquor shops, restaurants, fruit and vegetable stores, groceries and delicatessen, moving business, painting and decorating, manufacture of ladies' wear, flour and mill materials, automobile garage, extinguisher company: The superiority of the small motor fire extinguisher lies in its simple construction, easy service, small weight, small size.  - German fellow-citizens, never has a people been deceived more ignominiously, never has a nation been betrayed more ignominiously and more unjustly than the German people. Do you remember how Scheidemann promised us peace, liberty, and bread from the window of the Reichstag on November 9, 1918? And how has that promise been kept? - Drainage equipment, window-cleaning company, sleep is medicine, Steiner's Paradise Bed. - Book-shop, the library of the modern man, our collected works of leading poets and thinkers compose the library of the modern man. They are the great representatives of the intellectual life of Europe. - The Tenants' Protection Law is a scrap of paper. Rents increase steadily. The professional middle-class is being put on the street and strangled, the sheriff has a rich harvest. We demand public credits up to 15,000 marks for the small tradesman, immediate prohibition of all public auctions in the case of small tradesmen. - To face her hour of travail well prepared is the desire and duty of every woman. Every thought and feeling of the expectant mother revolves around the unborn. Therefore the selection of the right drink for the mother-to-be is of especial importance. Genuine Engelhardt Stout and Ale possess, above all other drinks, the qualities of palatability, nutritiousness, digestibility, tonic vigour. - Provide for your child and your family by contracting a life insurance with a Swiss life insurance company, Life Annuities Office, Zürich. - Your heart is light! Your heart is light with joy, if you possess a home equipped with the famous Hoffner furniture. Everything you have dreamed of with regard to pleasant comfort is surpassed by an undreamed-of reality. Although the years may pass, it will always look well and its durability and practical wear will make you enjoy it continuously.

The Private Protective Agencies watch everything, they walk around buildings and through buildings, they look into buildings, control clocks, Automatic Alarms, Watch and Safeguard Service for Greater Berlin and environs, Germania Protective Agency, Greater Berlin Protective Agency, and former Watch and Ward Division of the Café Proprietors' Association of the Society of Berlin House-Owners and Landlords, Associated Management, West Side Central Watchmen's Service, Watch and Protection Company, Sherlock Company, collected works on Sherlock Holmes by Conan Doyle, Watch and Protection Company for Berlin and adjacent towns, catch it in time, Watch on the Rhine, wash on the line, washing eliminated, Apollo Linen Renting Agency, Adler's Wet-Wash Service, handles all household and body linen, speciality of fine gents' and ladies' washing.

Above and in behind the shops, however, there are dwellings, behind which there are courtyards, side-wings, cross-buildings, out-houses, garden-houses. Linienstrasse, there is the house where Franz Biberkopf sneaked off after the trouble with Lüders.