The text below was submitted to the website as a comment. The questions it raises seemed interesting and important enough to merit promotion to a Guest Post (this site’s first!). The commenter, David Lempert, kindly agreed.
We welcome readers’ views on the questions raised by David.
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Dear Chris,
Thank you for your dedication to Alfred Döblin, to helping to make some of the gems of German literature accessible in English, and to opening your website to discussion on German identity and German culture. Döblin was part of this discussion a century ago and it is this discussion is as important or more important today for Germans (and for Europe and the globe) than ever.
I have been in Germany for 30 months, starting with little knowledge of the language or culture and developing increasing skill and appreciation in both. I am also collecting information for a future ethnography of German culture that will describe the continuities in how Germans see the world and shape their society and also how they interact with other cultures, today and in the past. At the same time, I am examining how German Jews looked at German culture as insider-outsiders, to also understand Jewish-European culture as it evolves.
Now that I am watching German films in German and beginning to read German literature, it struck me how limited it seems, compared to other European literature. So much of the classic work I have read thus far (Goethe, Schiller, Hoffmann, and several contemporary authors) seems to be influenced by Christian theology/personal philosophical-moral questions or fantasy/emotion or poetry on nature, with little depth in examining the overall culture, how it works, how it changes, how it could be changed. I wondered why there was so little real science fiction (other than horror) to predict and imagine the future, so little historical fiction with social science analysis (and almost a suppression today of Marx, Spengler, Weber), not so much real satire (which requires an understanding of how a society works and what can and cannot change and how), and how much focus there is, instead, on technique and play (e.g., impressionism).
After watching the 1931 film version of Berlin-Alexanderplatz, I stumbled onto your site and see that there was indeed Döblin. He seems to be the exception that proves the rule. Or perhaps I am wrong (and may very well be given how new I am to German literature). Perhaps Döblin is an example of a trove of works and authors that are forgotten or that are just outside the ways of thinking in German society today.
Here in Germany, I am often in bookstores and flohmarkt(s) looking at what books people read today and have from the past, and am also asking about authors. After 30 months, this is the first I have heard about Döblin. My neighbor (an engineering Ph.D. in her early 40s) knows of him only from a Gymnasium assignment in her final year, to take a brief look at how different authors write “about cities”, for which she read a few pages of Berlin-Alexanderplatz. She knew little more.
I would welcome comments on your site and from others about the seemingly “missing” genres in Germany (historical fiction with a basis in social science; science fiction/ utopian/ dystopian fiction, social criticism), their development, suppression, role today and their fit with “German” culture and German minorities and Jews.
I would also welcome comments on what German literature really gives insight into German character and culture in a way that isn’t just religious morality or philosophy or a narrow point in time but that finds truths that are seen over generations.
Döblin seems to have had that perspective or at least was asking those questions and offering literary formats to generate them. I assume you also find him exciting for these reasons and perhaps have your interpretations about what he found that was true in the 1920s, in the eras before that, and that is still true today.
Best,
David Lempert, Ph.D., J.D., M.B.A., E.D. (Hon.)
Visiting Scholar, Humboldt University of Berlin
1 Comment. Leave new
The comment below reached me via a personal email. The writer kindly gave permission to post it here.
From Dr Isabelle Weiss :
“What’s missing in German Literature?” is a rather provocative question. I do hope that Dr. Lembert may be granted a few more years in Berlin to provide the answer before he sits down to write the definitive ethnography of German literature and culture.
In the first instance perhaps the question highlights the strange phenomenon that Döblin’s work did not receive the interest that it deserved, neither before the war nor after. Before, at least his name was known to readers of newspapers and magazines, where his texts were published regularly, but after 1945 he had become a stranger in Germany, not wishing to return. Literary tastes by then had moved on, or rather a “Schlussstrich” had been drawn: “Stunde Null”, “Trümmerliteratur” or “Kahlschlag” had arrived. Gruppe 47 had their own ideas about what constituted worthwhile writing; their objective was to clean up the language of propaganda, anything “baroque” and elaborate was suspect. Döblin and Albert Vigoleis Thelen did not fit into their straitjacket and were ostracized. Döblin disappeared from public awareness and died more or less in obscurity, only to be re-discovered to some degree in 1978 (his 100th anniversary) when some of his books were re-published, and thanks to Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s TV series Berlin Alexanderplatz. Thelen never even had a chance.
Günter Grass acknowledged Döblin as his “teacher”, and W.G. Sebald wrote his PhD thesis on him, though subsequently became more and more critical of him. On another note it is perhaps interesting that Sebald appears to be less known in Germany than he is in the UK, and the Spiegel’s bestseller list often contains more books written in English than in German. One detects a certain unease in the reading public’s relationship to writings and authors in their own language – but that is the subject of a different debate.
Perhaps Dr. Lembert is troubled by the fact that while in the original Weimar there was a select circle of outstanding literary figures, Goethe, Schiller, Klopstock, Wieland, Humboldt, who were in constant contact with each other, during the Weimar Republic there was a multitude of playwrights, poets and writers who had little in common and pursued each their own goals. Kafka, Gerhardt Hauptmann, Robert Walser, Hermann Hesse … were all engaged in their own pursuits, and not corresponding with each other. While they were all writing in German, they lived in geographically different places, they drew their inspiration from very diverse sources and obsessions. Perhaps for that reason the impact on their readers was also rather limited in scope and did not create a sense of unity in the new Republic. Perhaps Gerhardt Hauptmann with his early attempt at social protest had the best chance of rallying people around him and becoming the voice to be heard. Sadly in later years, he lost that initial appeal. And Thomas Mann was perhaps too complex and too conservative a personality to provide cultural leadership and a unified vision.
But do we have this in other culture? Do we need it, whatever it is?
Isabelle Weiss