The free-verse epic Manas remains, almost a century after it appeared, the most neglected item in Döblin’s oeuvre. Has any other notable work of European (or world) literature been so studiously avoided by a cultural industry that delights in picking away at even the most obscure writings?
Manas: Waymarkers into Unknown Territory
The free-verse epic Manas remains, almost a century after it appeared, the most neglected item in Döblin’s oeuvre. Has any other notable work of European (or world) literature been so studiously avoided by a cultural industry that delights in picking away at even the most obscure writings?
Critical Reception of Manas
On first publication in 1927 Manas attracted a scant seven reviews. The 1961 post-war edition stimulated a 1967 dissertation by Heinz Graber which remains the only critical work devoted solely to Manas; it has never been reprinted, never translated. The most comprehensive overview of Döblin’s pre-1933 works omits any discussion of Manas, on the grounds that Graber has done a good job, and discussion of nuances would take up too much space. (As if Ben Jonson was the last word in Shakespeare criticism!)
Some of the 1927 reviews were uncomprehending and dismissive; others sought to clarify what Döblin was attempting, and to highlight his extraordinary feat of linguistic creation. The most thoughtful and detailed assessment was by Döblin’s great Austrian contemporary Robert Musil, who wrote:
“…It is the boldest move, and one requiring the most radical commitment, to go back to earlier verse narratives in order to make that ancient holy turtle move at today’s pace. You can’t say he gets away with it lightly – pious preservers and aficionados of the strict heavenly forms will cover their heads in horror – but it happens with a marvellous relentlessness that has great pulling power in even the smallest details.
“…What Döblin writes is a kind of primal verse, raw and passionate …. This achievement is as bold as it is successful, as extraordinary as it is surprising.
“…The realism with which humans, super- and sub-humans, gods, the dead, demons, real and unreal events are described is as exact as an observation and as cruel as the fact that all flesh carries within it the ribs of death. Against and over one another these pitiless descriptions, the lyrical beauty of which is Döblin’s surprise, pile up to a wildly decorated tower.
“… I shall point to just one example to illustrate this: the descriptions of the god Shiva. It is hard to depict a god, especially one with a big belly, plump cheeks, fat-smeared face, snakes in the hair, three eyes, four arms and so on, so that our missionaries call him a disgusting idol. Nevertheless he – the Blue-throated, the Flower-footed – is the World-shaker through love; around him wafts warmth, mountains bulge under him like soft pelts, snowfields melt when he steps on them, and Döblin succeeds in turning this paradoxically mixed god-being into an actual god, one of whom his entourage speak with sweetness, of ‘him for whose sake one lives’ …
Musil hoped, in vain alas, that “this work should have the greatest influence”. Instead, for nearly a century: nothing (apart from Graber’s one book). With the publication of my translation of Manas in autumn 2020 (Galileo, forthcoming), the English reader is therefore confronted with a completely unknown work in an uncommon format, without benefit of even the vaguest waymarkers.
This presents the Anglophone lit. crit. world with a golden opportunity to pioneer a wide appreciation of Döblin’s achievement in Manas, and in so doing shame their counterparts in the German-speaking world, who, confronted with a phenomenon some way outside their usual frame of reference, for almost a century have so resolutely ignored (not challenged, not condemned, but ignored) this magnificent text, rather as Australian natives are said to have ignored the incomprehensible vision of Captain Cook’s fleet.
That Musil’s endorsement fell on deaf ears is dismaying. That Graber’s work lies forgotten and out of print is also sad, albeit understandable in the light of the continuing neglect by Germanist critics and literary journalists and book editors, whose silence ensures that the public have never even heard of Döblin’s powerful poetic epic, Manas, let alone been given hints on how to approach it.
Here now are excerpts from Graber’s book, taken from the Introduction and the Conclusion. (Three dots … indicate excisions from Graber’s text.)
Alfred Döblins Epos Manas, Francke Verlag Bern 1967.
Klaus Müller-Salget: Alfred Döblin: Werk und Entwicklung (AD works and development), 2nd revised and enlarged ed. 1988, p.3.
Berliner Tageblatt, 10 June 1927.
You can download a PDF of this post here.
Excerpts from “Alfred Döblin’s Epic Manas” by Heinz Graber (1967)
Translation © C. D. Godwin 2020
.1. Introduction
… Among Döblin’s works Manas occupies a special place: it is his sole purely epical text in the original sense of a lengthy narrative in verse. Following a blueprint which is remarkably clear compared to earlier works, it is divided into three almost self-standing parts, each of which consists of three more or less self-contained sections. The first part is preceded by a Prelude. The divisions are signalled in each case by a large majuscule initial. The sections comprise an irregular number of scenes, ranging in length from a dozen lines to more than a dozen pages.
Only the three Parts are given titles, whose sequence already indicates what the main figure will undergo: ‘The Field of the Dead’, ‘Savitri’, ‘The Return of Manas’. The fable, which can already be read off from these, was expressed tersely by the author himself in three paragraphs detailing the discovery of the material and the motif that sent the hero on his journey. In his 1948 ‘Epilog’ Döblin writes:
I found once in Berlin (in the City Library at the Marstall) a travelogue from India with lots of pictures and various tales. The milieu was foreign to me and adventurous, tropically lush. I was entranced by the reports of Hinduism, of the god Shiva, of a Realm of the Dead. I saw a human penetrate there, someone from our world, who wants to let himself be torn apart by the sorrow he finds in this Realm of the Dead. He wants all earthly anguish to storm in upon him, wants to bind himself to every sorrow, because he knows (having come from a war) that we are all one and the same, brothers, the murderer and the murdered, the executioner and his victim.
He dares to make the terrible journey, and breaks down. But Savitri, his wife (a goddess, divine love) restores him; he returns as a new man, a demigod.
This is Manas, an epic poem written in free rhythms.
The breakdown at the end of the terrible journey is the death of a human; restoration as the work of a goddess is his rebirth; the resulting return is the life of a demigod. How this human becomes that one is the entire course of events. How a new human comes out of the old, an Expressionist theme, is at the same time the theme of all the works that follow Manas. “From this point on come the books that revolve around the human and the manner of his existence.” The earlier works do not revolve around the human, but around Nature as a hostile inhuman power. The realm in which humans exist and in which the manner of their existence can become a problem must first of all be wrested from Nature. This is what happens in Manas.
… In 1928 Döblin asserted that “the epic work reports on a hyper-reality” This is characterised by
the exemplary nature of the action and characters depicted and communicated in report-mode. Here we have stark fundamental situations, elemental situations of human existence to be worked through; it is elemental human situations that appear in this sphere and, because they are real in a thousandfold fragmented ways, may be reported as such. Yes, these characters who are no Platonic ideals, this Odysseus, Don Quixote, Dante the wayfarer, and these primal human situations in their primal originality, truth and potency stand above everyday fragmented reality. And so a whole range of characters, no great number, rise above reality; of them, new yarns may ever and again be spun.
One recalls the paragraphs with which Gottfried Keller introduced his story of Romeo and Juliet. He can invoke an actual case, but this serves only “as evidence of how deeply rooted in humanity are those fables on which the great old works are built. Such fables are limited in number; but they continually step out in new attire…” Döblin too, as early as 1917 in his ‘Remarks on the Novel’, invokes the great old works, even though just a few years before he had asserted that, much as one may still enjoy Homer, anyone trying to follow Cervantes is liable to be eaten by moths …
Döblin makes no attempt to place his story in the dependable environs of the Modern. He absolutely declines in Manas to bring hyper-reality and reality into spectacular confrontation as he would do in Berlin Alexanderplatz, or artfully interweave them as in his last novel Tales of a Long Night …. He makes just as little attempt to reconstruct quaint ancient surroundings, avoids wherever possible any depiction of historical-cultural conditions, since these could all too easily claim attention for themselves; and thus he avoids the danger of painting a picture of the past. Instead, all the more powerfully, something steps forth which has no trace of humanity: the landscape is the main space within which those situations that concern the author unfold. And these are charmed forth so starkly that they appear as such, almost naked. Everything is left purely in the sphere of the exemplary, in a fabulous world the truth of which requires neither historical probability nor realistic depiction.
In addition, as if satisfying some rule of classical poetry, Döblin restricts himself to a very few figures whom he places centre stage, and is extremely frugal even in his choice of minor characters. This is astonishing, given that all his works before Manas adhere to the principle he stated in 1924: “The epic has no use for individuals and their so-called fate,” and also embody his 1913 critique of the conventional novel:
Carried away by this psychological mania they have placed individual humans far too obtrusively at the centre of novels and stories. Thousands of peculiar characters have been invented just so the author can bask in their complexity. Behind this ruinous rationality, the whole world with its multiplicity of dimensions is totally obscured.
Precisely this multiplicity is the object of the epicist. He does not allow the particular to take precedence at the expense of the “living totality”. To him everything seems of equal worth; he confronts the phenomena of life making no value judgements. He shares this characteristic with scientists, of whom Döblin himself is one. That Döblin’s works are unthinkable without the modern natural sciences needs little further discussion. But a desire to fabulate creeps up on modern knowledge, and Döblin seems in this respect to belong with the older type of epicist.
Döblin presents a world “outside the humanistic bubble”. Nature is not shown from a human viewpoint, rather humans are regarded from the standpoint of nature. Not merely is Döblin’s perspective not humanistic or anthropocentric, it is not even anthropomorphic. This is a world without reference to humans. The human is not the measure of all things; things are the measure of the human …
Döblin’s Manas has nothing in common with the principle that the individual is unsuited to the epical, other than an implacable hostility to the psychological novel. Manas is an individual human being, and yet not one in the sense of the subjective and the private … Nowhere does the reader find out what Manas looks like – enough that he is the most handsome, the strongest, the best, the superlatives summarising as types rather than individual features what is called the aristocracy of the heroes …
Attaining this hyper-real sphere does not mean fleeing from the actual, but presupposes the possibility of “grappling” with it and “penetrating through it”. The new concept of the epic that underlies Manas forms in the Twenties out of Döblin’s nature-philosophy. Hyper-reality is already there in his concept of nature, e.g. “The physical world is incomplete and hence not real … The world sustains itself and becomes real through a hyper-reality.” In order to become realistic and thus complete, a representation of the world and its various dimensions – both in science and in literature – must incorporate the hyper-real. In both field this sets Döblin against Positivism … Realism for him was never about depicting facts … Kafka said of Döblin: “it seems to me he conceives the world as incomplete, so that he must complement it creatively with his word.” Döblin himself said: “I experienced nature as a secret. Physics as the surface, in need of interpretation.” …
Science never takes the world as a whole as its object. Not so the epicist, for whom the world is undivided … But the Whole is a concept that the scientist and the epicist have in common: where one proceeds beyond facticity thanks to his imagination, fabulating, the other enquires about the meaning of a fact uncovered by physics. In both cases we have a transition from an observation of a phenomenon to insight into its essence. This transition, this stepping into the exemplary sphere, is exemplified in the very first lines of Manas. The opening scene comprises two parts. The first half presents an event in the heavens:
THERE was no more rain.
Storms shredded the black clouds hither and down
From the eastern iceheads of Himalaya …
In the course of this movement the landscapes of the Earth, scoured by the storm, come into view, and when the following twelve lines have filled out the meaning of “hither and down” the movement swings back on itself:
Storms shredded the black clouds away,
Howled.
The second half is linked to the first in the way it takes over and picks up its voice:
And ravines meadows rockwalls awoke to the drumming of waters,
Began howling like seas.
The Earth echoes back to the heavens by lending voice to the rain, like a drum, and in “the drumming of waters” allows the ear to hear a sea; the acoustic impression is strong enough to press this concept home visually:
And ships rode on the sea.
What sort of ships were they that rode the sea,
Boats bobbing, darting under sail, capsizing, coming aright?
And now the answer: “Souls, pale misty souls.” Only at this point does the first scene reveal the grandiose representation of nature as a depiction of the Field of the Dead. The second half of the scene is to be read as context and mythological interpretation of the first half. For just as what at first are likened to driven vessels turn out to be “souls”, so the wind, which is introduced in the first half, is more closely specified in the second half as
…breath from the mouth of Shiva,
Three-eyed God on crystal Kailash.
This betrays to us that the driver which sets all in motion stems from the god and that the whole is a cruel divine game. By naming the god’s abode the scene return at the end to the heights of the beginning. But in the meantime everything has changed. What was a moment ago geographically fixed now belongs to a different order. Crystal Kailash is something other than the eastern iceheads of the Himalaya: it is the centre of a mythical landscape. Likewise the storm is no mere meteorological phenomenon: as the god’s mighty breath it traverses the whole world.
.2. Conclusion
We now speak of the meaning which, according to Döblin, attaches to the physical phenomenon of resonance. “The phenomenon of resonance is not limited to physics”; for Döblin there is nothing that “is only physically and materially there. Everything is beset with metaphysics.” He describes resonance as a “universal force of Nature”- “Resonance has something about it of putty, it causes like to find like. And at the same time it is a kind of magic wand, for it unveils likenesses and even more: it strengthens likenesses.” Numerous motifs in Manas acquire significance from this… For resonance is the force that determines the work in every respect. It reveals itself at the same time as a principal element in magical thinking. Cassirer calls the relations fixed by myth, like Döblin with his resonance, as “a kind of putty that enables the most unlike things to somehow stick together.”
According to Döblin, “There is something magnetic in entities. Meaning seeks out meaning. Things stick together so. In human life one has experiences: one invokes actions, people, summons them onto the projection surface when one really, inwardly needs them.” So, in his dire need, Manas summons Savitri onto the scene. She hears him, and responds by going to find him … The very circumstance that only Savitri can hear him calling bears witness to her accordance with him. Both stand in a relation of “resonance” with one another, they belong together. Of sympathy as a phenomenon of resonance Döblin reiterates: “In the hands of some people it is the dowsing-rod that points to the source.” Savitri seems to possess such a dowsing-rod. Occult forces steer her journey; she is drawn by Manas, “surging to him as waters to the moon”. Being drawn is the typical way her progress is depicted. Invisible connections and tensions run between her and Manas. “The lines of force of magnetised iron bars make visible the currents and commitments of such tensions.” Savitri moves in a magnetised field of force, and arrives, without really knowing how, at her goal. “Dreaming”, as we are several times told, she comes to the tree beneath which Manas died. The secret of his death, which clings magically to this place, attaches itself to her. Along her way Savitri finds herself in wild country and becomes the lover of a Bushman. She seems to have forgotten Manas. One night his voice seeks her out, and again she hears his call, while the man at her side does not. But then:
And only when she clutched at him,
And trembling, dark distant trembling streamed through her body,
Did the cries stream through her body into him.
This is clearly a case of “resonance phenomena in electricity”. Savitri is a pure medium. At one point Shiva speaks to the sleeping woman until she “resonates”. At certain points as well, along the road that Manas took before her and along which she pursues him, his words resound again. Such words once spoken do not fade once and for all but have a latent, almost physical existence independent of the speaker. They stay in the air. Preserved at certain points, they seem to insist on themselves. They belong in a stream of consciousness that is much broader than the consciousness of the character who picks them up and to whose unconscious they speak. This current breaks through the bounds of an individuation which to Döblin is never something completed, and creates a direct connection across space and time. The individual has a part in this. The relationship that occurs here is analogous to that between language and the one who speaks it.
The relationship between Savitri and Manas is a model. Thus are all things in the world of this work linked to each other. “It means that there exists no entity that does not have a connection to certain other entities and influence them. All entities in the world are attuned in this way to each other, keep in with each other, belong together.” This conception of the world, described in a work of natural philosophy, finds in Manas its fulfilment in pure style. What was developed theoretically emerges here embedded in poetry.
The human being, as organism an “open system”, is constructed of several layers of forms fixed in nature, and contains animal, plant, mineral and inorganic matter. The important role of resonance in nature consists in its mediating of influences among the form levels. “One understands that we are dealing here with an elementary process for our existence. We would not be made of substances of this world and alive, if we were not accessible to these deep and subtle influences.”
Döblin’s concept of the connections between humans and the whole of nature has nothing to do with science, rather has the character of magical thinking. In such thinking, according to Cassirer, alikeness or resemblance “is never merely a concept of relationship or reflection, but a real force … because it has real effects.” Since, according to a fundamental principle of this thinking, only like can affect like, an effect is always conversely an indicator of likeness. “That a club, the iron or the wood, can kill me shows me nothing more than – my commonality with it. How could it affect me if I were not if its kind?” says Döblin; hence in his conception “Nature is pulsating with many strong and weak forces of the most varied kinds, and these are palpabilities that radiate out and encounter their likeness to either aid it or harm it.”
In Manas, resonance … becomes language itself. In the naïve art of the epic, the biological relationship of the human with every layer of nature is represented nowhere more obviously than in the fact that humans, animals and plants have the fabulous gift of being able to talk to one another. This emerges as the poetic consequence of Döblin’s resonance theory. Intimately linked to this is his theory of art. He distinguishes between a “constrained, an incomplete and an unconstrained resonance … Resonance that does not boom out fully allows us to perceive, observe, describe. On the other hand we have generative resonance, which belongs in the realm of art.” And this “rests on the revived memory and lively engagement with the non-human constituent forces of the human.” As he creates, the artist stands
in relation to things about which not he, but his substance knows, deep down to the inorganic. This relationship becomes unveiled and works its effect during the process of production … Heredity preserves many things, and the living substance of the creative person is pliable and multifarious enough that even things distant in space or time can vibrate, resonate and resound in him.
Döblin describes the mood in which he produces … as a meteorological situation that corresponds to a certain mental high pressure. But these are not simply metaphors. The process of creation for him has the character of a natural process which, once initiated, proceeds according to its own laws. It is “something impersonal, as nature worked away within me and was pleased to shape itself into the spiritual, phantastical, a meteor, a stone statue chiselled from my substance.” Döblin’s concept of art was, as only to be expected, a part of his concept of nature; his poetics, like all the rest, to be understood only in the light of his physics. “The same force unfolds in the forms of nature, and works away in our artefacts.”
… Creative resonance, unconstrained by anything, is represented in Manas as the relationship between creator and his creation. It becomes visible as the generative force, which works by “begetting beauty”:
As the radiance of his horde vanished towards the north,
Fernshoots rising from the stony soil
Looked towards him, fed on his disappearing light.
They pushed up high, the earth pushed them,
To worship Shiva with green red and brown.
As the great Dancer beneath whom the Earth shakes “like the soft pelt of a beast”, Shiva exercises the greatest influence over the world. It is indicative of the world of Manas that its god is a magician “whose noises filled the air”. Döblin remarks that “There is magnificent music for us to hear in the world”, and in Manas this is meant literally. Shiva makes the world ring out, to becomes the god’s resonance-space and sounding strings when he travels with his entourage through the air:
Invisible against the blue of sky they swept along,
A warm draft above the icecold of the Himalaya,
Only now and then appearing greenish in a flash of sun,
Like the lustre on the wings of butterflies.
Jagged glaciers, massed peaks down below.
…Above them was a humming, whirring,
A whirring that faded and then swelled again,
As if ten thousand birds of passage were flying overhead,
Returning from the south.
The black icebound mountains could not sing,
They were heavy massive mountains,
Age-old beings, deeply bedded,
But their flanks thrummed like strings that cooed bass notes,
They felt that they were happy, Trisul, Yamunotri:‘We are fixed and heavy,
And something has come over us to turn us into sounding strings.’They purred cooed,
Amplified the tenthousandfold welling wafting that swept over them.
Across the blue, shimmering greenly,
Moved the World-shaker, Dancer, Penitent.
With him the curlyheaded lovely youths, Rudras with their crescent horns,
…
Shimmering greenly in the blue, the horde with Shiva.
And over a hundred pages later:
The black icebound mountains lay there,
Ponderous mighty mountains,
Ancient embedded beings.
In the blue above them, shimmering green, flew the World-shaker, Penitent,
With him the curly-headed youths, the Rudras with their moon-horns.
The mountains hummed and cooed,
The tenthousandfold floating hovering above them gave them strength.
The World-shaker flew over snowfields,
Cho Mavam came, the lake where he had burned,
Nanda Devi, Trisul,
The endless soaring peaks flown over in the blue.
Then the mountains sank, plummeted away,
Became forests swampland level plains.
People lived down there, tended fields.
Flown over in the blue the cities Meerut and great Delhi,
And people and animals were caught by a sweetness,
As he flew over, though they could not see him.
For just a moment they were free of cares,
Everything around them simple, unfixed, within hand’s reach.
The people seemed to hear a ringing in their ears.
Who was thinking of them at that moment?
But it was the humming of the ground, which hummed
As it felt the Three-eyed One in company of the Rudras,
And now it wanted to stammer
No more distinctly
Than when one says ‘ah.’
The many little rivers flung out their waters,
Surged into one another. The lowest tried to climb higher.
Stands of bamboo rang with a hundred voices.
These two widely separated passages reveal not merely the magical conception of the world over which Shiva holds sway, but by their correspondence reveal how resonance works formally in the text. While in individual lines the words cohere through alliteration and assonance and different lines remain linked via parallelisms, the reader proceeding through the text again and again encounters already familiar sections of text. Nowhere are preceding lines left in the past, but can at any moment be “quoted”, made present. Such often widely separated passages, with the same or similar sounding wording that thereby points one to the other, connect substantial parts of the work and create an inner unity. …
From an abundance of examples let us select the nearest at hand: the opening Prelude. Its meaning emerges only after repetition, and at first stands in isolation. The second scene makes no reference to it. But several pages later the first recurs almost complete and word for word, separated from the preceding text by just a dash. Only now is its significance revealed. It denotes the boundary of the Field of the Dead; and every time this boundary is reached, the Prelude at once again recurs, in Part Two as just a few of the familiar lines, for no more are needed to identify the location. Part Three begins with a partial reprise of the Prelude, as Manas is borne away from the Field of the Dead. Aiming at completion, the work reverts again to the beginning. Various scenes employ the same principle of composition; for example the last one third of Part Two, where the first scene reads “Resplendent, Mount Kailash”, the next, “Mount Kailash, resplendent”, and thirty pages later: “And Kailash resplendent, full of rejoicing”. More than a hundred pages later comes a final iteration: “Resplendent, Kailash in icy Himavat”.
In this way repeated situations are captured in quite definite formulae. They occur almost as if by compulsion at the required place. Such places are waymarkers, topoi, firm points of reference in the mythical landscape of the text; the formulaic lines bear comparison with the ancient epic. As recurrent rhymes they reveal their connective power within a single scene. …
As with the figures, the author himself seems to move in a magnetic field of force in which he is steered by language. His “inclination to repeat the same thing, the urge to repetition” can be understood as a “resonance drive”. Insofar as resonance strengthens likenesses, a sentence formulated in regard to nature applies also to style: “Repetition, the ability to repeat, is an index of power.” Repetition is emphasised, because it must be held in memory. The reader is encouraged to internalise it. The final lines, for example, speak to this task of repetition, testifying to what will persist:
He is not extinguished. Not extinguished.
Manas is not extinguished.
… Such repeated wording both reveals likeness and sustains it.
Resonance, which in Manas shows itself in content and form in the indicated “system of linkages”, is an index of identity. The field of action of resonance is a “field of identity”. And such a field, in which everything holds together with everything else, is the world which in Manas is represented, nay, is revealed by the text. It gives a voice to identity. The inherent concept is “Ego”, the general Ego that by the end of his journey the individual, namely Manas, has come to know. Moreover, “Knowing rests objectively on the discernment of likenesses and identities between the known and the one who knows. And so knowing belongs with the phenomena of resonance.” …
With the identity of Ego and world, resonance at the same time reveals its own precondition. “Individualised in a myriad ways is the Ego, but with the organs and in the individual entity it brings itself magnetically together … What we call world, visible nature, is a scaffolding, is this net which carries the heavens and every being. But what makes contact and interpenetrates, seemingly fragmented into individual entities, is the one great primal Ego, the Ego that signifies life, and gives meaning. And the mutually attractive motion, the adhering, is merely a sign of its unity with itself.” All resonance rests in the end on this primal identity, and points to it. The metaphysical identity of the primal Ego appears as resonance, “which has split like the colours in a prism.”
We see that the concept of magnetism serves the author in many ways. For describing the manner in which he makes the material his own and shapes the “fragments of reality” into the totality of the work of art. For describing the world, how things in the world of appearances as represented in this text relate to one another. Already in describing the abstract laws of form which “actually generate the content as it stands concretely there”, Döblin says: “I would like to speak of a web of tension, of a dynamic web that extends gradually over the whole work, becomes cemented in specific conceptions, and actions and persons are embedded in this web.” He illuminates the structure of the world and of the text using the same images. The structure of the work resembles the world it represents. The unity of the world corresponds to the unity of the work.
… Referring to Kant’s theory of transcendental aesthetics, Schopenhauer says:
This theory, that all multiplicity is merely apparent, that in all individuals of this world, endlessly many as they represent themselves behind and next to one another, there yet is manifest only one and the same truly existing being, present and identical in all of them, this theory long predates Kant, indeed one might say has always been there. For first and foremost it is the principal and fundamental thought of the world’s oldest book, the holy Vedas, the dogmatic part of which, or rather the esoteric doctrine, lies before us in the Upanishads.”
Schopenhauer’s overview of the history of philosophy brings in, among others who attest to this theory, Giordano Bruno and Spinoza. Döblin was well-versed in both.
The only reality, which constitutes the being of humans and nature, is known in Schopenhauer’s philosophy as the Will. What Döblin calls “Ego” has the same broad conceptual scope. The unity of the primal Ego with itself would thus correspond to the metaphysical identity of the Will in Schopenhauer. That this connection is at least not completely inadmissible is shown where Schopenhauer says:
Upon the metaphysical identity of the Will, as the thing-in-itself in the innumerable multiplicities of its appearances, rest three phenomena above all, which can be subsumed under the concept of Sympathy.
These three are compassion, sexual love, and magic, powers which in Manas play a major role. … Not hard to recognise here what Döblin means by “resonance”, in which he also includes the narrower sense of empathy.
Beneath the forms of phenomena we are to understand Space and Time, beneath the connections mediated by these and subordinated to the theory of sufficient reason we are to understand causality. The magical is exempted from this. The fundamental character of magic consists in an effect that is not tied to causality, time and place. In Manas there are many instances of magical motifs in this sense: they belong in the primitive world of myths. But such motifs are also found in other works by Döblin. We mention one briefly: the figure of the Sorceror. In Manas he appears in the form of Shiva the god, and his priests. In Berlin Alexanderplatz he is Death, “his grey cloak flaps open, images and landscapes become visible, the swim about him, wind around him from foot to chest”. He reveals revolutions and wars, world history as a dance of the dead. In Babylonian Exile the sorcerer is George, riding with Conrad through the clouds like Puto with Manas, and presenting to him the past, in order to show “what it means to act in the world”. Violence and horror. Conrad calls him the Evil One; the sorcerer has the features of Satan. In November 1918 he is presented as the tempter of humankind. All these figures point to one and the same entity: the author. In the story Der Oberst und der Dichter (The Colonel and the Poet) the author himself steps out as a mage and, like Death in Berlin Alexanderplatz, opens out the bleak images on his cloak. He is called the Juggler, but juggles nothing, says that he “only calls and summons up what is.” This time it’s Greek myths, opening with Orpheus and Eurydice. Here the writer magically summons up his primal image.
Magic comes into consideration not just as a substantive motif. Rather it emerges as a decisive ground tone in Döblin’s writings. And this ground tone develops nowhere more fully than in Manas. In this work are found significant markers of magical writing: the identity of Ego and world, and the motif of a journey to the Beyond. Walter Muschg calls it “shaman poetry, perhaps the greatest example in recent literature.” The way Döblin makes use of his material, his capricious use of facts, the unfettered fabulation – all are indicators of magical creation. In his 1928 lecture ‘The Construction of the Epic Work’, Döblin says:
Here one is in competition with stony firm solid reality, and performs magic with it and blows soap bubbles made of the same material that the creator of the world used to make the whole heavy Earth, the heavens and all the animals and their fates … Now everything is possible that can be thought, gravity is swept aside, all physical laws are swept aside – but at the same moment there is the knowledge: gravity and all the laws exist, but we, we can do anything, we use the report-mode to tell of a quite other world.
Döblin understood this freedom from physics as an “adaptation of art to a materialist-scientific age”. He experienced this all the more intensely in that he grew up in a materialist atmosphere and was educated in the natural sciences. For him who even in literature had long applied only the scientific stance of the “so-called objectivity of the narrator”, the sovereignty of the imagination was attained only at that moment when he discovered the Ego and its position over nature. “Ego over Nature”: the title rings now as a formula for what people usually call the magic of imagination.
There is evidence that Döblin saw magic as possible even beyond such figures of speech. He says for example in Unser Dasein:
In the work of art, in human simulacra of art, there is complete freedom over Time. But it’s more than just a sovereign and phantastical control over segments of time and a crazy fabulation. For we have a single life-substance, it’s the one and only world, the one and only life in all its configurations, and under certain circumstances many and distant segments of time, past, present and future, can oscillate within us, after-resonance and pre-resonance … If we think it through, even the possibility of prediction, of premonition, in any case the overleaping and decoupling of straight-line present time can be assumed.
The consequence of such thinking is what is generally called superstition. Döblin was not free of this. All through his life he was occupied with the question of how the mind, the invisible, relates visibly to the physical, “the ontological symbiosis of mind and material reality.” In his view, metaphysics can only apply in the guise of the practical, empirical – with magic included in that definition. In his Polish Journey, Döblin quotes a summoning spell and adds:
It’s easy to dismiss this as superstition, yet it lives on illegitimately. Lives on like a cult of the dead. It is concentrated Cabbalism. Grows out of the ancient belief in the connected-ness, indeed the identity, of word and reality, is an emanation of an ancient mystical feeling. A grand old way of thinking. How distant, or secretly near, does Hegel’s concept beckon: “what is, is reasonable.” People today content themselves with the study of the historical plane: words and signs arising from visible animal life. Here the word is primary.
In a world where everything has a soul, everything can for good or evil be a token of something occult. Such a world easily assumes demonic features, seems bewitched. Thus in Destiny’s Journey, where Döblin points to phenomena as manifestations of “a primal power asserting its will” and expresses his conviction that
Out of the invisible worlds stream hints and coincidences, signs, into this visible world. It’s a curious softening of reality. Reality becomes transparent. But it was always so. It’s just that there are not always eyes there to perceive it … We receive signs, it seems to me, in packets of waves, of forces. Now we are good receivers, now poor. In us the signs encounter, or fail to encounter, understanding, or are misinterpreted. If I look deeper, I cannot remain with the physical image of resonance, for we are ourselves active participants in the emergence of these signs.
Such signs point the way to Döblin’s conversion. “One must not oppose the occult forces that guide our destiny.” And he adds: “I have had this word in me for a long time, now in this form, now in that. It actually elicits an ancient fundamental feeling in me. When I speak it out, I have formulated my entire faith.”
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Part One actually has four sections.
‘Construction of the epic work’: a major lecture delivered by Döblin in December 1928.
‘A village Romeo and Juliet’, in Keller’s Seldwyla Tales.
‘Remarks on Mountains Oceans Giants’.
‘To Novelists and their Critics’
‘The Spirit of a Naturalistic Age’.
‘Remarks on Mountains Oceans Giants’.
Unless otherwise noted, all quotations are from Döblin’s two works of nature-philosophy: Das Ich über der Natur (Ego over Nature) 1928, Unser Dasein (Our Existence) 1933, or from essays included in Aufsätze zur Literatur (Essays on Literature). More detailed references would clutter the post.
Ernst Cassirer: Philosophy of symbolic forms vol II: Mythical thinking, 1925 (in English 1955), p.82.
Döblin’s next epic novel, published 1929; its main figure, Franz Biberkopf, was said by Döblin to be “Manas with a Berlin accent”.
Berlin Alexanderplatz, p.428 in the 2018 translation.
Written in 1933 during Döblin’s first year of exile, and published in Amsterdam in 1934.
A quartet of novels detailing the failed German revolution of November 1918 – March 1919, written in exile between 1938 and 1943.
Muschg initiated the post-war republication of several Döblin works.
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