Alfred Doblin’s Anthropocene

On 9 July 2021 the LA Review of Books published the first (first we’ve noticed, at least) review of my translation of Döblin’s Mountains Oceans Giants. A prestigious venue, and a ferociously intelligent reviewer!

In the three months or so since Galileo published two of my Döblin translations (Mountains Oceans Giants and Manas), not a single UK based publication has so far seen fit to notice the books.

Now an American historian, Alex Langstaff, has published a powerful and very positive review, in the book review of the leading West Coast newspaper the LA Times. Here are a few excerpts:

MOUNTAINS OCEANS GIANTS is perhaps the most forgotten modernist epic of the Anthropocene. … It evokes a tumultuous world, of melting icecaps, new geological strata, and the unfettered hubris of humans. Rediscovering this strange book means rediscovering how, over a century ago, one of Germany’s greatest writers thought and wrote about climate science. Originally published in 1924 as Berge Meere und Giganten, it has now been translated into English by Chris Godwin.

Alfred Döblin (1878–1957) is best known for the novel Berlin Alexanderplatz, which the critic Michael Hofmann has described as “that tombstone overlaying, nay, burying, crushing, obliterating the possibility of any interest in his other work.” With his translation of Mountains Oceans Giants, Godwin demolishes this one-novel mausoleum by showcasing Döblin’s breadth.

A book of two halves, the first reads like a demented edition of The Economist magazine. Döblin transposes a catalog of 1920s anxieties — Malthus, Suffragettes, miscegenation, decolonization — onto the 27th century. … All of this was meant to be positively apocalyptic to Döblin’s 1924 readership.

Perhaps the most intriguing idea is the rise of synthetic food as a weapon of political control. Döblin is channelling the widespread trauma that starvation, thanks to five years of total blockade on Central Europe, had wrought … In Mountains, this doesn’t so much mean autarchic policies of sourcing domestic production but rather reengineering the needs and desires of the human species altogether. As one of Döblin’s Hegelian scientists puts it, “the only way left for humanity is to become either a solitary animal, or a vegetable mass. The solitary animal is impossible. That leaves the vegetable mass. Result: the end of history.”

The Urals War is inconclusive and gives way to the book’s second, more lyrical half, and its raison d’être: a daring plan to melt Greenland’s vast icecaps. As fleets of ships descend on Greenland to transmute it into a new continent for colonization, they disgorge droves of nameless engineers who scuttle across their destructive machines like expendable ants. When Greenland is finally ready for “melting,” Döblin imagines a scene that eerily foreshadows J. Robert Oppenheimer standing in the New Mexico desert at the Trinity test site 20 years later …

As with the Urals War, Döblin stresses the pointlessness of his characters’ terrible endeavors. They, however, persist in forging ahead, citing the inscrutable Aesopian rationale that “the horse must not be allowed to gallop unharnessed out of the wilderness.” All they really want, they confess, is to know “how to harness unleashed forces.” The consequences matter little.

Langstaff then usefully references an Austrian magazine called Der Orchideen-Garten (‘The Orchid Garden’), published in the early 1920s, where “translations of old Edgar Allan Poe tales rubbed shoulders with new creations from the Czech Čapek brothers.” He has done some research! I shall look out for this, should affordable reprints be available.

Langstaff concludes:

Mountains Oceans Giants represents a pioneering attempt to combine literary fiction with climate science long before there was a market. But the book is also a deeply personal exorcism of his generation’s war traumas… World War I introduced a new vocabulary for describing geography. Döblin’s novel is full of it: barriers, zones, frontlines, sulfuric fogs, blockades, “desolation belts,” and caverns of underground bunkers. This way of seeing space has also shaped how we describe environmental destruction in fiction and film today. The Zone is especially prominent: think of Andrei Tarkovsky and the Strugatsky brothers’ Stalker; W. G. Sebald’s description of Orford Ness in The Rings of Saturn; or Jeff VanderMeer’s brilliant Southern Reach trilogy…

With Mountains Oceans Giants, Döblin should also be added to a forgotten literary canon of writers who have sought to collapse human and natural histories into a new genre worthy of our changing environment. In peeling back the familiar stratum of the planet to reveal something unfamiliar and unsettling, their futuristic dystopias were really histories of the present.

I wonder what reviewer, and what publication, will be confident enough to comment on Manas?