Our Mission

Our mission is simple: to introduce you, the everyday reader of English, to a great but neglected German writer. A writer whose vast and varied output has been eclipsed by just one novel. A writer whose reputation has grown steadily in Germany in the past few decades, while readers of English still have almost no access to him.

We shall provide extensive excerpts in English from Döblin’s works (and full translations as far as copyright concerns allow). Not just from his epic novels, but also from his insightful essays and journalism on literature, politics and nature, and from his autobiographical writings.

We shall provide a context for Döblin’s works, exploring such questions as:

• Who is this writer?
• What drove him to write?
• What is special about his art?
• How did circumstances (war, revolution, exile…) impact on his works and their reception?
• What were his enduring concerns, and how did he give them expression over a turbulent half-century?
• How have critics assessed his works? How far are we still from a fair and rounded view of Döblin?
• Why is he so neglected – apart from THAT one novel?

In short, we aim to stimulate informed discussion among interested readers of English about Döblin’s legacy – his strengths and weaknesses, his convictions and contradictions, his life and his art.

We welcome feedback and inputs from our readers!

What Contemporaraies Thought of Döblin

He is the greatest epicist of the new German generation: in a twofold sense, in that his epic work not only presents a significantly new picture of the past, but manifests, through the character of its artistry, the trajectories and purposes of our age… He is the Energiser, whose noisy, colourful, tough energies overleap every life form and sweep in a wild flood over cosily descriptive narrative art. His language does not follow the contours of inner and outward reality, but blooms like an organism. Objects are rousted out and put on show by hidden energies. – Rudolf Kayser

What Döblin writes is a kind of primal verse, raw and passionate, a quite unstable ongoing mixing and umixing conjured as if for the first time from the fabric of prose. This achievement is as daring as it is successful, as extraordinary as it is surprising….I do not know what influence this book will achieve, or if it will overcome the opposition it will undoubtedly not be spared. … But on cool reflection I can confidently assert that this work ought to attain the greatest influence! – Robert Musil

I know of no attempt in literature that pulls together so boldly and directly the human and the divine, piling on every kind of action, thought, desire, love; first kneading a new tone in order to create new forms and new content. Here perhaps the true face of “Expressionism” reveals itself for the first time, and after all the stammering attempts of the last ten years – in which one had an inkling of something, but could not grasp it – we have the real thing in the form of a novel. And a Homeric power wrote it. – Max Krell

This ‘Linke Poot’ (‘Left Paw’ – Döblin’s pseudonym in his political journalism) flourishes a rapier where Heinrich Mann jabs – and he has more wit than Prussia has brutality, which is saying something. He busies himself gently, incisively, playfully, impudently and passionately with the new Germany. It’s a quite new kind of wit, the like of which I’ve never seen in German literature. – Kurt Tucholsky

Döblin is an irritating man, fizzing with natural talents and the strongest sensitivities, masculine in a somewhat trenchant way that allows him to go at every important object in a manner that is as easily casual and trifling as it is unsentimental and thoroughly serious. … Anyone who read The Three Leaps of Wang Lun knew that the most important novelist in today’s Germany had announced himself. – Friedrich Burschell

If Döblin were merely a Proteus, now turning up in Chinese costume, now in the Baroque, now as a modern workman, he would be a great artistic player. But his self-transformations have a firm, albeit hidden, central point, or rather two focal points of experience: whether in China or the age of Wallenstein, in Alexanderplatz or in his new novel on the Amazon River, the question is always: action or non-action. – Ferdinand Lion

Very few people can read Döblin’s books through to the end, but many buy them and they all assert somehow that Döblin is a great storyteller, though they have to concede that it’s deuced hard to listen to him. – Thomas Mann

The stylistic influence that Döblin has exerted on the narrative approaches of German writers since 1945 can compare only to that of Kafka. Wolfgang Koeppen, Arno Schmidt, Günter Grass, Uwe Johnson, Hubert Fichte – they all come (to use a phrase Dostoevsky applied to Gogol) out of his coat. – Marcel Reich-Ranicki

Döblin didn’t lie right. He never arrived. For the progressive Left he was too Catholic, for the Catholics too anarchic, he denied the moralists any theses they could cling to. Too inelegant for evening radio, too vulgar for the schools broadcasts; Wallenstein and the Giants book were impossible to consume; and the emigrant Döblin dared in 1945 to return to a Germany that was about to dedicate itself to consumption. That’s where the market stands: Döblin’s stock has not been and still is not properly valued. – Günter Grass

And finally, two recent reviews of English translations of Döblin –

is an evocative brutally self-doubting book and a perfect reminder to serious English-language readers that Doblin wrote a small shelf full of such books (translations of all those books – and of Doblin’s large assortment of excellent nonfiction, including a slew of lively book reviews – would be most welcome, should this volume spark a wave of new interest among the literati). – Steve Donoghue, Open Letters Monthly, 2015

…despite lengthy protestations that Döblin’s novel  has ‘good bones’, all I hear is an uncomfortable rheumatic creak… Our current political climate has made a reinvestigation and reappraisal of interwar literature inevitable. Since that is the case, let us focus on books that might improve our understanding of that time and are actually a joy to read… All of which leads me to this conclusion: perhaps Döblin was forgotten because his novels are boring. Are we still allowed to say that? – André Naffis-Sahely, Literary Review, 2018