Expect No Mercy – to be published autumn 2026!

My translation of Döblin’s 1934 novel Pardon wird nicht gegeben will be published in October 2026 by Galileo, in a format and covers consistent with the rest of the Galileo Döblin series (Mountains Oceans Giants; Manas; The Land without Death (aka. The Amazonas Trilogy); and Citizens and Soldiers (the missing first volume of November 1918 A German Revolution).

This is a tremendous vote of confidence in this website’s efforts to bring Döblin to wider attention in English. Mountains Oceans Giants has gone into a second printing, but the other titles are still “slow burners”.

I have for obvious reasons deleted access to the PDF of my translation, but offer here my introduction to Expect No Mercy. (I’ve removed footnotes – they will appear in the published version.)

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 19^th 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.) The loss of German-speaking surroundings was 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 happy 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.

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.

There followed three more epic novels as well as some major essays, pursuing 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”.

Introducing the novel

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 history of Germany (condensed to about three decades) 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 reviews from the 1930s 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, the critic continues, 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 doing 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.

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: subterranean 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.”

To support the family, Alfred’s eldest brother, Ludwig, became apprenticed at 15, 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 brother Hugo had to hide their artistic leanings: Alfred concealed 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 of personality. Alfred’s mother came from an ambitious commercial family; but the father was a talented feckless man, who played the violin, taught his children piano, 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, but Alfred (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 too had had pre-marital “adventures”. She apparently showed little understanding of literary matters, but insisted on typing up Alfred’s copious sprawling manuscripts.

Little sister Marie, 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 they might influence government responses to increasing bankruptcies and unemployment, but heaven forbid they should become involved 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 was introduced to a young photographer, Charlotte (Yolla) Niclas. They talked deep into the night – she had read his Wang Lun and asked 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”); 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; 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 were soulmates until Alfred’s death, despite obstacles to meetings, 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.

Alfred’s elder brother 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.

Some comments on style

The reader is encouraged to notice 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, where the plain words provide a soundtrack to the train’s rhythm:

… 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.

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. In English, 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”. Some examples (italics added for clarity):

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 mowing, by now they must have begun stacking, the 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 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…

The reader will find further examples on almost every page.

The two translations compared

Expect No Mercy shares with Berlin Alexanderplatz the distinction of two English translations. 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 the present novel (T & P Blewitt, Gollancz 1937) has never been reprinted and is now hard to find. The title Men without Mercy is inaccurate, since one of the most merciless characters is The Mother. But why need a completely new translation? The reader is invited to compare the translations of the first six paragraphs of the novel, noting especially the clarity with which the scene is visualised. The Blewitts first, in italics, then Godwin

• They were waiting in their black clothes on the little uncovered station, the mother motionless in the hot sun between two peasant women, who kept pulling their gaily-coloured kerchiefs down over their foreheads and hitting out at the flies buzzing around their bare calves; shading their eyes with their hands, they peered out for the train, but there was no sign of it yet, still no sign, they had set out far too soon, they had been on their way since early morning, so as to have the moaning and the groaning, the leave-taking, over at last.
• They waited in their black clothes on the little station’s open platform, the mother motionless in the hot sun between two peasant women who kept pulling their bright headscarves low over the forehead and swatted at flies buzzing around their bare shins, they shaded their eyes squinting for the train, but there was no sign of it yet, still no sign, they’d set off far too soon, on their way since early morning so as to put all the wailing and leave-taking behind them.
• The mother stood there in her heavy widow’s veil, clutching flowers and handkerchief in her left hand, in her right carrying the little handbag with the money and the papers. The little daughter in the little black bonnet, with clean Sunday face and dress, clung tightly to the tail of her skirt, and, thumb in mouth, gazed at her two brothers, the big one and the little one, who, in cheap new jackets and over-tight long trousers, unaccustomed straw hats with mourning bands on their little round heads, were untiringly patrolling the track. From time to time they allowed themselves a moment’s respite in order to argue behind the women’s backs about the packing-cases which were piled up on the platform, forming a little bulwark: here was the crockery, here some more crockery, here Mother’s things, here Marie’s, here the old clock.
• There the mother stood in her heavy widow’s veil, her left hand clutched flowers and a handkerchief, in the right was a small handbag with the money and the documents. The infant girl with the little black bonnet,  scrubbed and in her Sunday best, held tight to her mother’s skirts, sucked her thumb and kept an eye on the two brothers, the big one and the younger, as they patrolled doggedly up and down the track in cheap new jackets and over-tight long trousers, unaccustomed straw hat with the mourning-band on each round head. 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.
• Then the tracks began to hum, the mother clutched at the child, two working men with railway officials’ caps came, smoking, out of the little station building, one of them seized an empty trolly and pushed it up to the packing-cases, the boys rushed up, they had caught sight of the growing black point out there on the tracks, with a rattle and a clatter it came nearer, the engine raised its black iron shield higher and higher, the rails sang out to the rhythm of its pounding, the train came rushing along belching forth steam, with a mighty effort it slowed down its breathing, panted heavily as it checked its motion, came to a halt with a scrunch.
• Then the rails hummed, the mother reached for the child, two men with official caps, cigarettes dangling from their lips, strolled from the little building, one grabbed an empty trolley and pushed it behind the crates, 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.
• The two peasant women rubbed their calves, twisting their old weather-beaten faces into a grimace of pain. One of the officials called out the name of the station, beckoned to the women, pulled open a carriage door in the front of the train, the packing-cases were wheeled to the rear, the peasant women followed the mother, dragging along a heavy trunk covered with black oil-cloth. The youngsters clambered in first; the younger one knelt gleefully on the seat and looked out of the window. The mother followed slowly with the little girl. The child was handed to her into the carriage, they all heaved and pushed the trunk, the boys clamoured for the packing-cases, but they had already been stowed away in the luggage-van. Then the whistle blew, the door banged to, the two peasant women on the platform stepped back, pulled the corners of their kerchiefs over their eyes.
• The peasants scratched at their legs, the ancient weathered faces twisted in expressions of grief. One of the men called out the station’s name, waved to them, pulled open a door at the front of the train, the crates were trolleyed to the rear, behind the woman the peasants came dragging a heavy trunk wrapped in black oilcloth. The boys clambered aboard first, the jubilant younger was already kneeling on the bench to gaze out of the window. The mother proceeded slowly with the little girl. The child was passed up to her in the carriage, everyone pushed and heaved at the trunk, the boys shouted “The crates!” – but they’d already been stowed in the baggage car. Then a whistle, the door slammed, the two peasants on the platform stepped back, dabbing at eyes with a corner of headscarf.
• The ponderous iron shell pushed its way past them and snorted out of the station. They could see the blissful face of the little boy and above it the mournful, inscrutable face of the elder. The widow sat in the middle of the seat, mute, her arm around the little daughter at her side, flowers and handkerchief in her lap.
• The heavy iron contraption began to move, snorted past. They saw the little boy’s delighted face, above it the older lad’s, solemn and withdrawn. The widow was in the middle seat, silent, arm about the little daughter, flowers and handkerchief in her lap.
• Then once more the shining rails were clear. The peasant women left the hot platform, made their way through the silent, noonday village, trudged for some distance along the winding high-road, and finally turned off into the fields. They tramped past a little plantation of birches, past a meadow, a farmyard, the gates of which stood wide open. Ducks were swimming in a pond at the side of the yard, from the farm came the lowing of cattle, the sound of hammering and of men’s voices. Flanking the farm and facing the high-road stood a two-storied inn with a high red roof. It was covered with scaffolding, shone out white and fresh above the plantation. A blue sign-board had recently been affixed to the roof, flashing the announcement in gold letters to the high-road: “Meadow Bottom Inn, Wines and Spirits, Refreshments. Below it a strip of linen bellied out, bearing the words: “Under New Management.”
• The shining rails were clear again. The two peasants left the hot platform, plodded through the noon-quiet village, then a long trek down the winding road until they turned off into fields. They trudged past a small birch grove, a meadow, farmyard with wide-open gate. Ducks swam on a pond, from the yard came the lowing of cattle, hammering, and men’s voices. Flanking the farm towards the road was the two-storey inn with the high red roof. It was clad in scaffolding, loomed newly whitewashed over the birches. A blue signboard had just been suspended from the eaves, its gleaming gold lettering sparkled onto the road: MEADOWLAND Bar and Restaurant. A canvas banner flapped below: Under New Management.

***

This novel was recognised by discerning reviewers on first publication as a major work, perhaps even ranking above Berlin Alexanderplatz. But it found no wide circulation amid the hazards of exile, and adequate attention in Germany by critics and the public came only slowly between the 1960s and 1990s. Both as a psychological study of one individual, and as a big-city novel presenting a social panorama and a shrewd study of the Weimar collapse, it offers an absorbing and rewarding read.