Over six decades of a writing life, Alfred Döblin (1878-1957) produced such quantities of output covering such varied genres and themes that even now, after half a century of vigorous scholarly work, no comprehensive overview has yet emerged and indeed may never prove feasible. Readers who become hooked by Döblin find, as they explore, constant surprises that invite ongoing revaluations. But those who do not comfortably read German have only a tiny sample of his works to go on.
German Masquerade
Writings on Politics, Life and Literature in Chaotic Times
INTRODUCTION
NOTE: An earlier version of this selection was posted in March 2020. The updated version contains some additional items; the translations have been carefully proof-read, and the front matter has been expanded.]
Over six decades of a writing life, Alfred Döblin (1878-1957) produced such quantities of output covering such varied genres and themes that even now, after half a century of vigorous scholarly work, no comprehensive overview has yet emerged and indeed may never prove feasible. Readers who become hooked by Döblin find, as they explore, constant surprises that invite ongoing revaluations. But those who do not comfortably read German have only a tiny sample of his works to go on.
This selection from Döblin’s wide-ranging non-fiction aims to introduce Anglophone readers to a voice that represents both an acute individual sensibility, and a kind of filter into which flowed many of the currents of 20th century European culture, with all their confusions and contradictions. The selection focuses on three broad areas: politics, life, and literature. (Döblin’s philosophy of nature and his views on religion are also touched on.)
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Part 1 : Pre-War and Aftermath
While still at school, Döblin read avidly in the philosophical and cultural undercurrents of the day (Kleist, Hölderlin, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Dostoevsky) – a habit which endeared him not at all to the Prussian functionaries who staffed and inspected the school (see “A first look back”) – but as a young adult his principal interest was Medicine. Qualifying as a neurologist in 1905, he published frequently in professional journals while “withdrawing from the struggle for so-called existence” into junior positions at mental asylums and hospital emergency rooms. But he also wrote novels, stories and an avant-garde play, cultivated contacts with leading avant-garde writers and artists such as Else Lasker–Schüler and Herwarth Walden, and helped found the influential Modernist journal Der Sturm.
In 1912, when Döblin was in his mid-30s, a damburst of creative energy raised writing to at least an equal partner in his two professions. In that year he married and started a family, set up his own medical practice, and began his first epic novel, The Three Leaps of Wang Lun, which not only depicted an exotic civilisation entirely on its own terms as if Europe never existed, but did so in a language of great originality and power. He completed it just before the First World War broke out; published in 1916 it was awarded the Fontane Prize.
The War and its aftermath, for Döblin as for so many of his generation, was a life-changing experience. One German critic sees all of Döblin’s writings from 1933 on as an extended process of “literary grieving” . I would go further: all he wrote from around 1917-18 onwards stemmed from deep grief at the mess humanity had landed in with its Promethean worship of war, technology, money and power.
In late 1914 Döblin volunteered his medical expertise (meriting an officer’s salary) rather than wait to be called up (which would mean a private soldier’s daily pay). He spent the war years in Alsace (since 1871 a quasi-colony of the Reich), first at Saargemund, within earshot of the big guns of Verdun, then at Haguenau. He came into conflict with superior officers over poor nutrition of the patients in his care. On sick leave with a stomach complaint, he was able to spend time in the libraries of Strasbourg and Heidelberg, absorbing materials about the Thirty Years War, employed to great effect in his next huge epic novel Wallenstein. He witnessed the tumult in Alsace following the collapse of German military and civil authority on 10 November 1918 (see “Revolutionary Days in Alsace”) and revisited it twenty years later, fictionalised with many interweaved individual actions and reactions, in the first volume of his four-part novel November 1918: a German Revolution. (The English translation in the 1980s omitted the first volume; it is now available as Citizens & Soldiers, Galileo 1924). His disgust at the “incapacity” of Leftists who could orate endlessly but were helpless when faced with a need for action is clear in “Cannibals”.
Back in working class eastern Berlin, Doctor Döblin pursued multiple careers as cultural critic, theatre critic, playwright, essayist, radio broadcaster, and author of several more “modern epics”. In 1928 he was elected (against opposition from conservative members) to the new Section for Literature of the Prussian Academy of Arts, a platform which enabled him to press even more vigorously to loosen the hand of a conservative establishment – critics, professors, elitist writers – stuck in a moribund 19th century mindset that ignored the enormous changes wrought by technology, industry, urbanisation and new communications media. (See e.g. “The Construction of the Epic Work”.)
In 1929-30 the international success of Berlin Alexanderplatz for the first time brought a substantial income from writing. (To put it in perspective: sales of Alexanderplatz in Germany amounted to some 40,000 copies. When Thomas Mann was awarded the 1929 Nobel Prize, his Buddenbrooks was reissued in an edition of 700,000 copies!) At his wife’s insistence the family moved to the swankier West End of Berlin, which ended Döblin’s years as an insurance-based medical practitioner. (When, out of frustration, he tried to re-register with the insurance bureau, he was told he would have to be classed as a “newly qualified doctor”.)
Döblin’s flight into exile in February 1933, a day after the Reichstag fire, at first seemed a relief from the hopeless situation of the later Weimar years, a mood reflected in his burlesque novel Babylonische Wandrung (The Babylonian Exile, available here as Volume 1, Volume 2 ), written largely in Zurich. Moving to Paris (cheaper, but depriving him of the daily German language that so nourished his writings), Döblin, by now stripped of German nationality, was granted French citizenship on condition that two of his sons perform military service. (One, Wolfgang, a mathematician of genius, would be killed in the first weeks of the 1940 German invasion.) Despite the loss of his medical career – he was not qualified to practice in France, and lacked adequate French language skills – and his income from all sources in the Nazi Reich, Döblin collaborated on exile periodicals, and continued to write fiction (the Berlin family novel Pardon wird nicht gegeben (Show No Mercy); the South American trilogy Land without Death; the first parts of November 1918). Two notable essays of the late 1930s are included here: “Prometheus and the Primitive”, a perceptive take on western civilisation; and “The Historical Novel and Us”.
The German invasion of May 1940 forced a new flight into exile. After months of nightmarish adventures Döblin, his wife and youngest son managed to reach New York (where eldest son Peter was already working), and travelled on to Los Angeles, where MGM provided him, along with a few other exiles, a one-year contract as a writer (see “A year in Hollywood”). Trying but failing to secure publishers for English translations of his books, his MGM contract not renewed, Döblin for the first time in his life had to fall back on unemployment benefit and contributions from relief agencies, friends and relatives. During this period he and his wife converted to Roman Catholicism, a matter he regarded as purely private, but which upset close friends (see e.g. Brecht’s poem “Embarrassing incident”, and my introduction to The Pilgrim Aetheria).
Returning to France in late 1945, the Döblins were grieved to learn of Wolfgang’s death, but found their other missing son Claude alive and well – he had lain low in Marseilles, but fled to Switzerland as dangers grew. Alfred was appointed to the French Occupation Authority, and spent three years vetting publications and energetically promoting cultural renewal for a demoralised and largely unreceptive population. His final decade, marked by financial straits and worsening health, brought increasing recognition and honours.
He died in June 1957; his wife Erna committed suicide in September; both were buried beside Wolfgang in the little Alsatian village of Housseras. Alfred insisted that they could not be buried in Germany, because “they will desecrate our graves”.
In the 1960s serious efforts began to bring out new editions of Döblin’s works, including compilations of his scattered contributions to journals and newspapers. A dedicated archive was set up to house voluminous papers (including a trunkful found by chance in a Zurich warehouse). The 24-volume Collected Works published by Fischer Klassik over the past decade provide a firm foundation for ongoing scholarly investigations and translations (although this series is seriously incomplete, lacking four volumes of Kleine Schriften and the Briefe .) As his works enter the public domain in 2027, opportunities arise for innovative treatments to bring Döblin to the attention of a wider public.
I hope this first selection of Döblin’s non-fiction to be published in English will stimulate wider interest in a fascinating but under-appreciated master of 20th century German writing.
C.D. Godwin, Stroud, U.K.
New Year 2025
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