Not a problem. I bought postcards and headed for the post office, which was not only open but rather busy. Post offices in Germany are more civilized than their U.S. counterparts. German post offices also function as banks for a lot of people. Anyway, I sat down at a desk and wrote my postcards. (U.S. post offices don't have chairs.) By the time I handed my postcards to the lady it was nearly 10. I didn't see a place to get a snack in the area; so, I went straight to the bookstores.
One of the things I like to do when I travel in non-English-speaking countries is buy their books on learning English. I use them in reverse, and I happened to find three good ones this morning. The resources for Germans learning English are far greater than our resources for learning German. (And the French have greater resources for learning English than we have for learning French.) So, once you have a foundation in grammar and vocabulary, if you want to learn German, get those books that Germans use.
At Knesebeck Elf I bought Englisch ganz leicht. Wortschatz, which was only €5, and Große Lerngrammatik, Englisch, by the same publisher. My favorite, though, is Englisch fürs Gespräch, which is not only a wealth of things we say all the time in English, it is also a convenient pocket size. When I go on to Amzon.de, I see these books' siblings, which I did not see in the stores I went to. I suppose I'll buy them online at some point. I did not buy any audio books today. At Marga Schoeller I bought a few other books, German translations of books I know in English (which means I can use the English version as a crutch as I try to improve my reading). I was surprised that I did not see any of the dual-language books published by Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag. I have bought several of those on eBay, and I suppose that's where I will continue to find them. If you want to learn to read German, buy these books (and other dual-language books by other German publishers). To repeat: The German resources totally blow away our resources.
I dropped my sack of books off at my hotel and headed out to another neighborhood to check out its used bookstores. I changed trains at Alexanderplatz. Since you asked, the answer to your question is yes, you can buy a copy of Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz in the bookstore in the Alexanderplatz station--however, that is a very long book that is waaaay over my head. Instead, I bought a Leberkäse im Brötchen.
Leberkäse is pink meat that is the approximate size and shape of loaves of bread and it sits under the glass in hot steel pans waiting to get sliced up and served between two halves of a roll. The man at the Leberkäse stand in the big train station, in his tattoos and leather, with a lean, hard face, looked like he would rather beat me up than sell me a sandwich. But when I asked him (in German), he was very polite. He took out a big knife and sliced a slab of meat for me. When I didn't understand his question about the mustard, he switched to English--my semi-useless American phrasebook had not prepared me to be asked whether I want sweet or hot mustard. I also ordered a Heineken. A Leberkäse im Brötchen is about the size of a hamburger.
The meal was delicious! Leberkäse is similar to what we think of as hot dog meat, although it is lighter and less salty than a hot dog, and it has a mild taste that I enjoyed. By the way, you can buy beer in Berlin the way we can buy, say, Coca-Cola, and you're allowed to drink it in the street without that beloved American charade of hiding it in a small brown paper bag. When I finished off my brunch, I handed the empty Heineken bottle back to the leader of the pack behind the counter, and he politely thanked me. With a light lunchtime beer buzz I headed through the tunnels of Alexanderplatz to find the U-Bahn that would take me to a neighborhood that had a used-book store.
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