Expect No Mercy – Another Berlin Novel

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Expect No Mercy Parts 1 and 2

Expect No Mercy Part 3

INTRODUCTION

Pardon wird nicht gegeben (translated here as Expect No Mercy) is a seeming oddity among Alfred Döblin’s extensive output of fictions: no “epic”, but a social-realist novel in the 19th century tradition. A closer look throws into doubt such a slick genre-label.

In 1934 Döblin was settled with his wife and three of his four sons in the outskirts of Paris, a more stable exile location than Zurich – two years later, Döblin, his wife and the three younger sons would become naturalised French citizens – although the loss of German-speaking surroundings added to other wrenching losses: his medical profession, his German readership, and the sustaining milieu of working-class Berlin. The critic Hermann Kesten, reviewing the first post-War edition of the novel, recalls:

…we would meet three or four times a week in a café, mostly with our wives, and he was as a sandlark, laughing and chatting, making jokes and pranks, owlish eyes twinkling behind the heavy spectacles, heartily cursing the dismal literary crew inside and outside …

His conversation was like his novels: full of quirky notions and magnificent fantasies, replete with wordplay and absurd humour, with the startling naïveté of a cheeky child or a spiritually homeless medical man. He had the virtues of the shortsighted: exaggeration and absurd over-precision, he was ready with imagery, sharp-tongued, he was at the high point of his life and his polytheism … For the first time he had money in his hands … He berlinerised jauntily in French. (H Kesten, Die Zeit 15 Sept1961)

But “beneath the tough Berliner cheerfulness lay a deeper stratum: something gentle, nested in itself, the mystical core around which his most essential being revolved”.

His compulsion to write (“He could never turn off the spigot,” noted Günther Anders, and a nagging unease about the failings of German society and character – his own family not excluded – that had led to the catastrophe of 1933, caused him to spend six months “skirmishing around” on this “little Berlin novel. Family history with autobiographical component.” A letter of August 1934 mentions “a very real big city novel, deals with marriage, I write very simply (at least I think so), narrate what I know”. It was the first novel in more than 20 years to require no long hours in libraries and museums: “…it should be a personal experience. What experience? My family.”]

Expect No Mercy is no quirky outlier, unconnected to what came before or after:

I thought of Berlin, of the distant world now lost to me, and examined in spirit … how it had all come about. I had to … draw into this landscape a person, a Manas and a Franz Biberkopf, so that he (and I) might be tested and undergo experiences.” (Döblin Epilog, 1948)

Three more epic novels that followed, and some major essays, pursued the question of “how it all came about”; the “all” now expanded to encompass not just the German calamity, but the wider canvas of Europe’s half-millennium of global conquest and “progress”.

Expect No Mercy contains not a single place name – yet we are clearly in Berlin. Not a single date – yet we are clearly presented with a (condensed) history of Germany from unification in 1871 to the economic and political collapse that began in 1929. Not a single surname; many characters have not even a forename, merely an occupation. Yet each is clearly delineated. One of the few contemporary reviews makes an astute observation:

What distinguishes this book as something special is the writer’s gaze, his particular way of seeing – one which is no mere receptive process but which itself emits light, a curious kind of light in which people and things stand and appear in a particular way. In a remarkable fashion the writer becomes an explorer: the object is one among many, the style is of secondary importance, but the gaze, the direction of the gaze, is decisive. … The light of this gaze sharply distinguishes things and people, their actions, their behaviour, their relationship to the ‘real’ and the ‘unreal’. … here the palpable and the impalpable together are real … People, place, time are all real, but lack all specificity.

The Big City is never named, yet it’s real: the essence of big city. Not an abstraction, not a collection of commonalities, or a phantasmagorical Utopia, but “it’s enormously, more strongly real in every detail” than any particular city with local colouring; drawn from an internal perspective, not an external gaze. The time is clearly the early 20^th century, it’s no alternative history, rather the essence of an age:

Precisely this skill – of turning the concrete into something like the essential and in so still making it alive – gives the representation of temporality an incredible power, an enormous inner truth. It’s a very new and very great creative act, this manner of allowing essences of people, places and times to appear as realities. (H Schütz, 1935)

The structure is linear, presented in three simply-labelled parts: Poverty, Boomtime, Crisis. These summarise the recent history of Germany, although the First World War is left quite out. For all the traumas the War had caused, Döblin believed it had made little impact on the 1920s: underlying pre-War attitudes and political structures had survived the superficial change from Reich to Republic.

In Part One, a widow (referred to throughout as “the mother”) brings her three children from the provinces to the Big City. Her husband has died suddenly after sinking her dowry into an extravagant development project, leaving a mountain of debts. She has to throw herself on the mercy of a brother, a furniture manufacturer, who provides a bare minimum of support.

In 1888, when Döblin was 10 years old and the family seemed well on the way to a prosperous middle class status, his father eloped to America with an employee half his age, leaving the mother with a pile of debts. She had to take herself and her five children to Berlin, where relatives provided grudging support.

The unpayable debts plunge the mother into despair; she attempts suicide but is saved by the elder son Karl. He is fascinated by the city and desperate to start earning, but falls in with bad company: a group of semi-feral youths who become involved in an anarchist bombing. With the police hot on their tail, Karl’s older friend Paul (a political cynic, also a father substitute?) invites Karl to run away with him. But the mother locks Karl in, for he is now her only hope for a breadwinner. Karl’s spirit is broken, his capacity for love destroyed. For the rest of his life he is to be “roasted slowly over a fire.”

Part Two begins by jumping forward fifteen years to Karl’s wedding day – a delicious set-piece of satirical observation comparable to the opening banquet scene in Wallenstein. We then retrace the intervening years, in which Karl is apprenticed to the uncle’s furniture factory, and is advised by a wise master craftsman not to kick too hard against the traces. Karl’s only attempt to resist the path his mother has set him on ends with her slapping his face – he now a grown man! All resistance crumbles; he will now work doggedly at the prescribed career.

The mother, meanwhile, discovers how to blossom among city society. Karl is promoted from the shop floor to the executive suite, and it’s time he found a wife. “And so Karl surrendered to love, that most terrible, most implacable of forces. Love had never yet looked into his heart and put it to the test.”

In order to support the family, Alfred’s eldest brother, 15 year old Ludwig, became apprenticed, first at a linen goods and furniture wholesaler, then at his uncle’s timber business. Well aware of their mother’s severely practical view of life, Alfred and his elder brother Hugo had to conceal their artistic leanings: Alfred hid his juvenile writings, Hugo enrolled secretly in acting school.

The marriage becomes a prison for the wife, Julie. Karl institutes a stern regime: weekly inspections for housekeeping derelictions, and as for the intimate side of marriage – an occasional performance, with nothing of the revolting libido of the lower classes. Their evening chats revolve around inconsequential matters; out of the question that they should exchange confidences. She is a status symbol, as are the two children placed in the care of a nanny.

Alfred’s marriage to Erna, like his father’s marriage to his mother, was urged by the two families, despite wide divergences in the personalities of the two partners. The mother came from an ambitious commercial family; but the father was a talented feckless man, who played the violin, taught his children piano, and even composed some songs, but was forced into a business career. Erna, one of the first female medical students in Germany, should have been a good companion to Alfred – but he (already in the fourth year of an affair with a young nurse, which started when she was just 16) was appalled to learn that Erna had had pre-marital “adventures”. She apparently showed little understanding of literary matters, but insisted on typing up Alfred’s copious manuscripts.

Little sister, Marie, who was handed over to the childless Uncle and Aunt, dies a few years later. (Alfred’s elder sister Meta was killed by shrapnel in March 1919 as she fetched milk for her children during the Spartacist uprising.) The younger brother, Erich, is a delicate boy, prone to fits when there is any excitement. He studies pharmacy, and is provided by Karl with a corner chemist’s shop. He develops a philosophy of human relations which sees the family and its mutual obligations as a cause of much unhappiness. This proves disastrous when he marries: he cannot understand why his young wife wants permanence, and babies:

The wonderful outcomes of his educational methods melted away before his eyes as tempest followed tempest. He no longer dared even hint that the time for them to part was drawing near. He felt squeezed into a situation he found unnatural. She felt life was at last following its normal course … the cheerful fat man was … entangled in a snare.

Part Three is longer than the first two parts combined. It brings to the fore the wider context of the 20^th century, as the global economic downturn spreads its tentacles into every corner.

When his uncle dies and the aunt cashes in her share of the firm (at considerable risk to its stability), Karl becomes sole owner, and a leading figure, respected but not well liked, in the manufacturers’ association. Debates constantly focus on how to influence government responses to increasing bankruptcies and unemployment, but heaven forbid they should involve themselves in politics!

As his shoulders start to sag under the weight of responsibilities, Karl wonders whether to engage Julie in discussion about the business. But – impossible! Instead he starts a conversation representing their home as a sacrosanct space, with strong walls against the outside world. Julie responds by calling it a fortress, and him Herr Kommandant. Her suppressed emotions break loose, and she bites his lip – hard. An affair with a young diplomat follows; eventually she leaves Karl, and manages to abduct the two children.

Karl undergoes a breakdown. He trashes the “Museum”, his cabinet of curiosities that includes a suit of armour and an elaborately inlaid antique cabinet, and takes a room in a shabby suburban hotel on a street frequented by prostitutes. He allows his suppressed libido free rein.

In February 1922, at a Lenten ball, Alfred made the acquaintance of a young photographer, Charlotte  (Yolla) Niclas. They talked deep into the night – she had read his Wang Lun and could ask intelligent questions about it. They quickly became lovers. At first Alfred could introduce her to the family as an admirer of his works (what we nowadays would call “a groupie”), and she took many delightful photos of the children. Erna even welcomed her on a houseboat holiday. But the nature of the liaison could not be concealed forever; and difficult scenes ensued. Yolla was sure Alfred would leave the family to marry her; but Alfred refused to follow his father’s bad example. They remained soulmates until Alfred’s death, despite obstacles to their meeting, or even letter-writing. The influence of Yolla can be seen in Mountains Oceans Giants (1924), where for the first time Döblin created a credible rounded female character, Venaska. (But the lit. crit. industry does not like to talk about this.)

To keep afloat, Karl embezzles the savings of Julie’s uncle, and breaks the law by sending idle machinery abroad where it can be put to productive use. Eventually an arrest warrant is issued. At this point, Karl’s old friend Paul turns up out of the blue; he has spent his life travelling and agitating – Karl’s lost alternative history – and is back to foment insurrection. As battle lines are drawn between the government and insurgent factions, Karl plans to go over to the insurgents. The plan goes ironically awry. The end.

Ludwig, now owner of a timber business, suffered financial disaster as the Crisis took hold; his marriage was on the rocks, a former flame he approached turned him down, and he blew his brains out in a Berlin station toilet.

Lastly, some comments on style. The reader is encouraged to stay alert for the sound of words and phrases and sentences. Döblin had an acute ear, and never put pen to paper until “the ideas had clothed themselves in words”. Take the third paragraph at the start of the novel:

… the boys came running, they’d spotted a growing black speck down along the rails, it drew nearer rumbling and jouncing, the locomotive’s iron scutcheon loomed bigger and bigger, the rails juddered in time to its pounding, it rolled mightily in, belching steam, its breathing slowed, it lumbered, panting heavily, to a squealing halt.

Plain words, but they provide a soundtrack to the scene’s rhythm. Equally important is Döblin’s visualisation, e.g.

… leaned both elbows on the kitchen table where a stump of candle flickered in a beer bottle. The lad stared at her, frightened. Her dark shadow climbed brokenly over the wall with the water pipe, up to the ceiling. The sinister apparition squatted over the room, listening, demanding talk.

As the critic quoted above said: “Here the palpable and the impalpable together are real.”

But the most notable and pervasive element of style is the blurring of the boundary between (objective) narrative and (subjective) interior monolog. Something like this goes back as far as Jane Austen, e.g.

The hair was curled, and the maid sent away, and Emma sat down to think and be miserable. – It was a wretched business, indeed! – Such an overthrow of everything she had been wishing for!

The German concept of “erlebte Rede” (“experienced speech”) partly covers it, as does the more modern English concept of “free indirect speech”. It begins on the very first pages (italics added for clarity):

Now and then they took a break to consider the crates piled like a little bulwark behind the women, here’s crockery, here’s more crockery, Mother’s stuff, little Marie’s stuff, here’s the old clock.

Along with the three children she brought with her a shrivelled heart, and poverty. The first round was lost, would there be a second.

…in the end she had no option but to press her inheritance into his hands, her money, she was trembling, no, he must take it, what else is it good for.

He had helped with the mowing, by now they must have begun stacking, that lovely big farm, now we have nothing. He stood outside the street door, what shall I do, Mother’s at her wits’ end, she’s out of her mind, who can I turn to. He forced himself to move, trudged on. On to somewhere. He studied the passers-by, how does this one earn a living, where does this one get it from, or that one, how do they come by it? How did Father come by it. If I was in the country now I could hire myself out, this is the busiest time, whyever did Mother bring us here.

Theory talks of transitions between 1st person and 3^rd person; but Döblin can achieve the effect entirely using 3^rd person:

He was startled, he was looking for work and the mother knew it, but she was staring at him and enticing him to stay home and she seemed to think it not so important, she was so fickle, so strange. He picked up his cap, brushed his jacket and followed her out to the stairs.

The reader will find further examples on almost every page.

Expect No Mercy now shares with Berlin Alexanderplatz the distinction of two translations into English. The first version of the latter title (by Eugene Jolas, 1931) has legs: it was still being republished in 2004. The 2015 translation by Michael Hofmann is a welcome addition, rather than a substitute.

The first translation of Pardon wird nicht gegeben (Men without Mercy, T & P Blewitt, Gollancz 1937) was never reprinted and is now hard to find. The title is inaccurate, since one of the most merciless characters is The Mother. The English text is workmanlike, but rather ponderous. I hope this new translation will be found enjoyably readable – a worthy addition to other Döblin titles that have recently, at long last, found their way into English.