Six Excursions into the Döblin Range

I sent this review to the London Review of Books before Christmas, with a cover note chiding them for namedropping Döblin several times before his works were readily available in English, and then ignoring the several translations published in the last decade. They haven’t responded.

The Epic Modernist Alfred Döblin: A Reader’s Guide to his Major Fictions in Six Excursions. David R Midgley, Camden House, December 2025. 257 pp. £95 HB; £19 digital.

Here we have the culmination of half a century’s enquiry and subtle analysis by Professor Midgley into the Central European cultural ferment of the early 20^th century, more particularly how it helped to form a major writer, who in turn was a significant participant in that era’s unsettled cultural, intellectual and political life.

This is actually two books. One (characterised by the copious footnotes and other scholarly apparatus) is aimed at researchers and students in academic German Literature departments, and requires little comment here beyond noting its comprehensive coverage of German lit. crit. activity around Döblin over the last sixty years or so. The other (the text) is aimed at helping general Anglophone readers to approach and appreciate Döblin’s major fictions.

Ten years ago, when so little of Döblin had been translated into English, such a venture would have been pointless – describing a painting to a blind person. But over the past decade, all of Döblin’s major fictions have at long last become available in English (though not all are yet published in book form); a website has showcased numerous fiction and non-fiction works by Döblin and some other neglected Modernist contemporaries; and a podcast has led listeners over two seasons through Döblin’s life and works in a conversational setting.

Yet Döblin is still largely ignored or brushed aside in Anglophone bookish circles: rarely noticed even in major journals –  apart from Berlin Alexanderplatz, which as soon as it appeared in 1929 eclipsed and still eclipses all his other works.

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This review will first sketch the current landscape of Döblin’s presence in the German and Anglophone worlds, before commenting on the Readers’ Guide (hereafter “Midgley”), and its prospects of reaching the wide readership it surely deserves.

The Döblin landscape in German

Within a few years of their father’s death in 1957, Döblin’s surviving sons (second son, Wolfgang, a mathematician of genius, had killed himself in 1940 rather than be captured by the invading Germans. His parents first learned of this tragic fate in 1945) organised the start of a systematic republication campaign, for after 1945 the appearance of his writings during exile was spotty and uncoordinated, and many earlier works had not reappeared at all. A “critical edition” approach was rejected, since the scholarly resources for such were lacking, and the first products would take too long to reach publication. Instead a “selected works as standalone volumes” was launched through the Walter-Verlag, initially with minimal introductions. This series proceeded into the present century under a succession of editors with varying amounts of editorial apparatus. Some missteps occurred along the way, e.g. when the editor Walter Muschg decided to leave out the third volume of the Amazonas Trilogy (a.k.a. The Land without Death). The ensuing furore embarrassed the publisher, and showed that Döblin was even in the 1960s seen as worth defending.

Half a century later, the Fischer Klassik imprint (Fischer had been Döblin’s sometimes despairing publisher between 1915 and 1933) assembled during the 2010s a 29-volume library of well-edited and usefully-introduced Döblin works in attractive individual-but-matching paperback covers. Several of the titles are compendia: writings on politics and society; on aesthetics and literature; on Jewish questions; on Döblin’s own life and works. (Another publisher – dtv – has brought out some heavyweight critical editions, e.g. of Wang Lun and Wallenstein, with copious materials from the archives.)

But even these roughly 14,000 pages are not a Complete Works. Notably missing are two volumes of Letters; four volumes of Kleine Schriften (miscellanea/ shorter pieces, in chronological order); a collection of transcripts of radio broadcasts, some from around 1930, others from the post-WW2 decade, and a volume of theatre reviews from the early 1920s, written for a Prague German-language newspaper, the foreign earnings proving a godsend during the hyperinflation.  (Some of these items are hard to find, with rare offerings on the secondhand market asking several hundred Euros apiece. Fischer is unlikely to reprint or add to its series, since all Döblin’s works will enter the public domain in 2027.)

Alongside this ready access to almost all of Döblin’s oeuvre, the German reader can easily find helpful guides to his life and works, including a 900-page biography (Wilfried Scholler 2012); a handy pocket-sized 400 page Reclam paperback (Gabriele Sander 2001) covering Döblin’s life, fictions and essays; a tightly-edited multi-contributor Döblin-Handbuch (Sabine Becker 2016); and a wonderful 550-page catalogue from the Döblin centenary exhibition at the German Literature Archive in 1978. Döblin is also frequently discussed in the German mainstream and literary press, on air, and on the Internet; and in some ancillary books, e.g. on Döblin’s Berlin, on his wartime sojourn in Alsace-Lorraine, and on his decades-long relationship with Yolla Niclas. (Midgley alludes to her merely as a “family friend”. The effect of this relationship on Döblin’s writing is still a taboo subject.)

The Döblin landscape in English

While more of Döblin’s works have become available, especially in the last five years, along with more information about his life (his Wikipedia page has expanded greatly in recent times), he has not yet broken through to the consciousness of the more literate part of the population – the sort of people who at least know roughly who Dostoyevsky was, or Proust, or Thomas Mann, or Borges.

The first of Döblin’s works to be translated was, of course, Berlin Alexanderplatz (Eugene Jolas 1931, reprinted many times up till 2004). Jolas still stands up well beside Michael Hofmann’s new translation (2018). Another Berlin novel, translated as Men without Mercy, was published by Gollancz in 1937 and never reprinted (though Midgley notes a 1976 New York reprint, which seems to have vanished without trace).

In the early 1980s, two more epic novels appeared in English, both published by Fromm  International, which disappeared early this century.

• Döblin’s final major work, Hamlet – Tales of a Long Night (R & R Kimber 1984) was written in 1946 but not published until 1957, shortly before his death, but only in East Germany.
• November 1918 – a German Revolution (John E Woods 1983), an enormous recreation of the tumultuous months between the Kaiser’s abdication and the murders of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, appeared as two large volumes titled A People Betrayed and Karl & Rosa. Woods, alas, does not exhibit here the same mastery of language shown in his superb translations of Arno Schmidt and Thomas Mann. The publisher gave no indication that the first volume of Döblin’s epic novel was missing entirely, or that a complete novella length story line had been excised. (The missing first volume of November 1918  appeared in 2024 as Citizens & Soldiers. The excised novella (“Stauffer and the Women”) can be found on my website.)

Döblin’s earliest major fiction, The Three Leaps of Wang Lun (1916), was translated in 1991 – this reviewer’s first foray into the world of Döblin’s imagination. A second edition appeared in 2015, unfortunately marred by several OCR misreadings (e.g. “dung” > “clung”. (As is usual with multinational conglomerate publishers, I was given no opportunity to proofread.) Bright Magic, a selection of short stories translated by Damion Searls, appeared in 2016, to some excitement in New York literary circles.

Then between 2021 and 2024, four more epic novels appeared in English. The UK publisher Galileo had spotted my website, and asked very diffidently if he might publish some of the translations found there. Mountains Oceans Giants and Manas appeared in 2021; The Land without Death (The Amazonas Trilogy) in 2022, and Citizens & Soldiers in 2024. Of these, only Mountains seems to have attracted substantial reviews, e.g. here and here. Two self-published Döblin translations have also appeared recently : the novel Wadzek’s Fight against the Steam Turbine (1918) by Anne Thompson, and the criminological study Two Women and a Poisoning (1924) by Imogen Taylor.

My website currently hosts five more Döblin titles in translation, as downloadable PDFs:

• the two remaining epics: Wallenstein (1920 – a massive recreation of the Thirty Years War, written within earshot of the guns of Verdun); and The Babylonian Exile (1934), begun just before the Nazi takeover and completed in Zurich’s Central Library; it depicts a fallen Babylonian God (cursed by Jeremiah for his sins) making his way as a human being through 1920s Europe;
• a new translation of the Berlin family novel previously translated (inaccurately, given that one of the most merciless characters is female) as Men Without Mercy. It is now titled Expect No Mercy;
• two compilations: German Masquerade. Writings on Politics, Life and Literature in Chaotic Times is a substantial selection of Döblin’s non-fiction from 1905 to 1955. The Cutting Room Floor brings together eight pieces which for one reason or another were lost to sight or excised from manuscripts before publication. These include Döblin’s contribution to MGM’s film Mrs Miniver, which never made it to the final cut, so he missed out on the Oscar for Best Script; the novella-length story line cut from the Woods November 1918; and The Pilgrim Aetheria, Döblin’s only explicitly Christian fiction, never published during his lifetime and largely ignored after publication in the 1970s.

So readers can now locate pretty well all the Döblin texts considered by Midgley – the first time this has been possible in the Anglosphere, and hence a propitious moment for such an enterprise.

The Epic Modernist Alfred Döblin. A readers’ guide to his major fiction in six excursions.

Midgley’s stated task is to help Anglophone readers “recognise and appreciate Döblin’s literary achievement and identify and engage with those dimensions of his work that particularly appeal to them.” He likens this task to “mapping a mountain range” rather than a single mountain. He will not, he says, aim to be exhaustive, but rather to provide readers with enough to help them explore further. He suggests three factors which have contributed to the persistent “thinness” of Anglophone awareness of Döblin: the “ambitious reach” of each major novel; the “bewildering diversity” of his subject matter; and the difficulty of pinning Döblin down to any specific programme. He quotes Döblin scholar Adalbert Wichert: “There is no autonomous, closed Complete Works of Döblin. The cultural and political oscillations and ruptures penetrate the entire oeuvre … They are altered stances towards altered world situations.”

How then can one best present a writer of such profusion and complexity? One possible approach – tackling each major work chronologically – would obscure continuities and contradictions across multiple works. Another approach – searching for “some underlying system of ideas” – would  obscure the “dynamic complexity and the allusive subtlety that often combine to generate the most striking effects in his narratives”.

So Midgley adopts a third approach:  to take “six excursions” across the whole landscape, with each excursion focused on one aspect of continuing relevance. The six aspects are: Person; Power; Nature; Culture; Narrative style and technique; and Ideas and beliefs.

Before embarking on his first excursion, Midgley provides several useful pages on Döblin’s life, his attachment to Berlin and its dialect, his part in the Modernist ferment with a particular project to revitalise the novel and reshape the role of the author. Midgley also addresses (especially in the final “excursion”) Döblin’s contacts with philosophers,  and how Döblin’s professional training as a neurologist was brought to bear on the fictional depiction of human behaviour, which he saw as typically too complex to pin down with any systematic psychoanalytical construct.

Midgley notes, rather sceptically, Döblin’s account of the “vision” that initiated his massive novel of the Thirty Years War: the fleet of Gustavus Adolphus sailing through the forest where he was walking while on a convalescent cure in 1916. Here a remark by Günter Anders (who does not appear in Midgley) on Döblin’s creative processes may be useful. In his Introduction to Mensch ohne Welt: Schriften zur Kunst und Literatur, (C H Beck 1984, p. xxx) he says that Döblin was “incapable of fully turning off the spigot of production”:

that as a writer he outstripped himself, that he created characters whose fullness of experience, powers of thought, sceptical acumen were endlessly bigger than his “own”; in philosophical terms: that his creations outshone the creator; in psychological terms: that in a post-hypnotic amnesia he betrayed no sign of his actual depths, and to some extent had no notion of those depths, had no understanding of them at all.

The Six Excursions

While Döblin is “unquestionably a demanding author”, he provides “an abundance of enriching experiences”. So Midgley advises beginning readers to “identify a theme or issue that interests them” and trace it as they explore a selection of his works. It is with this in mind that he has organised the body of this book. Each excursion covers several works from across Döblin’s writing career, to show how a theme or mode of writing is deployed in a range of contexts. The six chapters amply justify this approach.

• Person

This heading goes beyond “self” or “ego” to explore how Döblin handles interactions between people, the ways in which personal and social factors influence behaviour in given circumstances, and the “forces we may imagine to be at work in the human mind”. Here Midgley discusses mainly later works: Men without Mercy, Hamlet, and Berlin Alexanderplatz.

• Power

Here the focus is on the major historical (and future-historical) works – Wallenstein, Mountains Oceans Giants, The Land without Death, and  November 1918 – which deal with the “social and political dimensions of historical development.”

• Nature

Midgley first looks at the range of innovative ways in which the short stories present Nature. He then examines how Döblin combines his medical training with philosophical speculation, and how this manifests in Manas, The Land without Death, and in the ghastly consequences of human meddling in Mountains Oceans Giants.

• Culture

This excursion considers how Döblin deals with European conceptions of The Other, and how he challenges prejudice. Cultural differences are key aspects of Wang Lun, and of The Land without Death.

• Narrative Styles & Techniques

The wide range of narrative skills employed throughout Döblin’s career is examined. The legends, myths and fables incorporated in some of the epics are considered, e.g. the Fulani theatrical troupe in Mountains Oceans Giants, and the storytelling structure of Hamlet. The “spectacular diversity of narrative techniques” employed in Berlin Alexanderplatz is explored.

• Ideas and Beliefs

The final excursion considers the intellectual and religious ideas drawn on in the epics, noting how Döblin kept a critical distance even as he applied these ideas. Here Midgley includes Döblin’s account of his escape from France and the family’s conversion to Christianity while in Los Angeles, as well as the religious fervour of two characters: Becker in November 1918, and Alice in Hamlet.

Conclusion

Overall the structure and approach taken by Midgley works very well, except in one respect, alluded to at the start of this review. Namely, that he attempts to address two different kinds of reader in the same volume.

On one level, this works quite well. It is possible to go through the text as a normal unscholarly reader without paying much attention to the scholarly footnotes, and still learn a great deal which will enhance the experience of reading Döblin.

On another level (that of marketing, we may say), the approach seems unlikely to reach its goal. The print version, at £95 in the UK, will find its way to a few university libraries, but otherwise will go unnoticed. The more reasonably priced digital version might reach a slightly wider circle of readers, though even these are likely to be already committed readers of Döblin, rather than casual explorers.

To fulfil Professor Midgley’s ambition of reaching a wide generalist readership, the text portions of this undoubtedly very useful book should be cut free from the weighty academic apparatus (copious footnotes, comprehensive bibliography of mostly German publications) and be published by a good generalist publisher as a modestly priced paperback in the “Introduction to —” genre.

Perhaps, if I may be so bold, such a reshaped text might actually be combined with the other “guide” to Döblin’s epics published by Galileo a year before Midgley’s! My Adventurous Reader’s Guide offered 72 excerpts from the epic novels, grouped under 17 themes. Midgley would make a perfect companion to this rich selection of Döblin’s epic prose, and then the Anglosphere might begin to catch up with Germany in its recognition of a great and under-appreciated European writer.

C D Godwin

December 2025