In 1978, Günter Grass toured Asia and Africa, taking with him Döblin’s “extravagant book, whose theme is the heaven-storming extravagance of humanity.” His long essay reflecting on what he saw and how it matched up (or didn’t) to Döblin’s visions was published in a leading West German newspaper. Grass’ insights provide provocative waymarkers into Döblin’s dystopian text.
“The Future is already Here – it’s just not evenly distributed” – William Gibson
In 1967, a decade after Döblin’s death, Günter Grass famously called attention to an important but neglected writer with his lecture “On my teacher Döblin”, in which he depicted Döblin (in contrast to Thomas Mann and even Bert Brecht, who “consciously worked within the literary schema of Classicism”) as an “anti-classical writer” who “never had a community, not even of his enemies”:
Only Alfred Döblin motivates no congresses, seldom attracts the diligence of our Germanists, seduces few readers. … Let me leave Mann, Brecht and Kafka respectfully aside and as a pupil express thanks to my teacher: for I owe much to Alfred Döblin, more even: without the futuristic components of his work from Wang Lun and Wallenstein and Mountains Oceans Giants all the way to Alexanderplatz, my prose is inconceivable.
A decade later, in 1978, Grass undertook a tour of Asia and Africa, taking along Mountains Oceans Giants so he could refer to it in “places where everything is present everywhere: Utopias – the bygone and the regressed, the only just erected, the overtaken, and other Utopias not yet in the programme.” His insights – on elites vs. the masses, on the arrogance of those with the “big heads”, on the underlying convergence of supposedly hostile ideologies that all have the same goal: maintaining their own power and wealth, and on the threat posed to that goal by anyone (e.g. a writer, or a slum teacher) who can present an alternative reality – offer some waymarkers through a dense text bursting with visionary fireworks.
I’ve translated the essay Grass published on his return in the leading West German newspaper Die Zeit: you can read it here.
