Unpublished during his lifetime, or cut from the text for which they were originally intended, or almost totally neglected by the lit. crit. industry: these eight Döblin pieces deserve attention for their merits and for the light they throw on aspects of his life.
The Cutting Room Floor
Eight outcast and orphaned pieces from the prolific pen of Alfred Döblin
“He found production in no way difficult; on the contrary, he was incapable of fully turning off the spigot of production.” – Günther Anders, on Döblin in 1930s exile.
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Over five decades of an almost unbelievably productive life, several of Alfred Döblin’s writings fell by the wayside. The manner of their non-appearance varied: unpublished in his lifetime, but retrieved posthumously from archived papers; excised from a manuscript before the original German publication; cut from an English translation; published but immediately banned and burned by the German dictatorship. Even today, some of Döblin’s writings are resolutely ignored by polite Döblin scholarship.
This collection brings together eight remarkably varied pieces: a movie script; an anguished attempt at autobiography; an early reflection on Jewishness; a short story; some letters; an excised scene from the first epic novel; a novella cut from the English translation of a late epic novel; and Döblin’s only explicitly Christian fiction.
Döblin was for too long known to English readers for only one of his many works: the big city novel Berlin Alexanderplatz. All nine epic fictions are at last all available in English: seven as published books (of which two titles only on the second-hand market), and two others only on this website. There’s also a slim volume of Döblin’s short stories (Bright Magic).
Still almost totally unknown in the English-speaking world is the vast corpus of Döblin’s non-fiction writings: journalism, theatre and book reviews, polemics about politics, the writer’s life, culture, literary theory, history, natural philosophy, religion, travel writing. His fascinating criminological study (Two Women and a Poisoning) recently appeared – self-published. The first extensive selection in English of Döblin’s non-fiction, German Masquerade, writings on politics, life, and literature in a chaotic age, is at present available only on my website.
The website was launched in 2018 to introduce Döblin to a wider public. It attracted interest from the independent publisher Galileo, who have so far brought out four of the epic novels in English, as well as The Epic Worlds of Alfred Döblin: an Adventurous Reader’s Guide. In 2023 the podcast “The Epic Worlds of Alfred Döblin” was launched. Season One took the story from Alfred’s birth to exile in 1933. Season Two will follow events up to and after Döblin’s death in 1957.
Each of the pieces in this collection is introduced to set it in the context of Döblin’s life and works.
CONTENTS
- Dunkirk Flotilla (1941). Döblin’s contribution to the script of MGM’s 1942 blockbuster Mrs Miniver never made it to the final cut, so he missed out on the Oscar for Best Screenplay.
- Doctor Döblin (1917). This first anguished attempt at autobiography remained unpublished during the author’s lifetime. Only ten years later was Döblin able finally to face down the traumas of his childhood.
- German Conditions, Jewish Response (1924). This response to a questionnaire from an editor was first published in 1986 from an MS found in the archive. It was written during Döblin’s lengthy travels around Poland in late 1924.
- Summer Love (1933). This tale of a stunted Ego was included in Unser Dasein (‘Our Existence’), published in 1933 and promptly banned and burned by the Nazis.
- Lost Letters: the muse who must not be named (1940s). The role of Yolla Niclas in Döblin’s life and work from 1922 until his death is still a taboo topic in the scholarly world.
- Stauffer and the Women (1942-44). This storyline, written in Los Angeles exile, was cut entirely from the 1980s English translation of November 1918: a German Revolution. It resonates with several themes in Döblin’s own life.
- Conversation in the Palace of Ch’ien-lung (1912). One of many offcuts from the manuscript of The Three Leaps of Wang Lun, this piece is notable for the density of the evoked atmosphere, and the synaesthesia at the close.
- The Pilgrim Aetheria (1947-49). hhis explicitly Christian tale was not published in Döblin’s lifetime. It has largely been ignored by the German literary establishment, and the reading public, since it first appeared in 1978.
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