The Pilgrim Aetheria

A Christmas Tale

He considered it “the favourite of all his works”. Yet The Pilgrim Aetheria remained unpublished in his lifetime, and still suffers almost total neglect. Now readers of English have a chance to engage with a skilfully wrought and intriguing tale.

Download The Pilgrim Aetheria pdf file (99 pages; 2.5 Mb)

Döblin worked on this novella for three years (1947-49). Two excerpts in a Catholic magazine were all that appeared before his death in 1957. Its first appearance in 1978, two decades later, attracted almost no attention, and since then only a handful of scholars and critics have commented on it. This is, I believe, the first translation into any language. (CORRECTION: A French translation appeared in 1991.) Meanwhile his most famous work, Berlin Alexanderplatz, continues to attract whole shelfloads of appreciation.

Yet his widow Erna assured friends that this “work of grace” was Alfred’s “favourite of all his works” (letter to Sascha and Ludwig Marcuse, 23 July 1957).

The conversion

On 30 November 1941, Alfred Döblin, his wife Erna, and their teenage son Stephan were baptised at the Roman Catholic Church of the Blessed Sacrament in Los Angeles. (Their eldest son Peter, who worked as a book designer on the East Coast, was baptised separately around the same time.) The Döblins had been taking instruction from three Jesuit priests since the start of the year, just a few months after their arrival in the USA in September 1940 – the beginning of their “second exile” after harrowing months on the run from Paris to Lisbon, as the Nazis consolidated their defeat of France.

For a year and a half Döblin insisted the conversions be kept confidential, revealed only to a few very close friends. He expected negative reactions from two sides: firstly from fellow Jews, who would be shocked by a seeming betrayal, especially given the great help Jewish organisations had provided in securing travel funds, exit and entry visas, and an employment opportunity at MGM; and secondly from other exiled intellectuals – mostly rational, irreligious children of the Enlightenment – who would find such “backsliding” hard to fathom, perhaps caused by a pathology of some kind.

He went public on 14 August 1943, at a party to celebrate his 65^th birthday attended by many luminaries of the German exile community: writers, actors, scholars, musicians, people in the film business. His revelation, delivered apparently in a hesitant and impromptu manner (no record exists), was received as negatively as he had feared. Bert Brecht wrote a widely quoted poem (“Embarrassing Incident”) and in his work journal expressed dismay:

helli organised a party for DÖBLIN’s 65^th. heinrich mann gave a wonderful opening speech, read from döblin’s books, sang chansons, played a kreislerian piece on the violin, and at the end döblin made a speech against moral relativism and for a solid mass of religious stuff, whereby he injured the irreligious sensibilities of most of the partygoers. a fatal feeling seized the more rational attendees, something like the understandable dismay when a fellow prisoner undergoes torture and spills the beans. of course döblin has received some especially dreadful blows: the loss of two sons in france, his unpublishable 2400-page epic , angina pectoris (the great converter) and life with an uncommonly stupid and philistine wife.

The last spiteful remark no doubt reflects Brecht’s real anger at his old friend’s “backsliding.”

Thomas Mann, more sympathetically, thought rather lamely that “Jews and Catholics must have it easier” than Protestant humanists such as himself. Gottfried Benn, in an essay much quoted by the unreligious, declared that “God is a bad stylistic principle” compared with Art. (He did not explain why Art should be a better stylistic principle.)

Döblin and religion

Döblin was born into a Jewish family in Prussian Stettin (now Polish Szczecin) in 1878. His grandparents were part of the great 19th century migration of Eastern Jews into the growing cities of the Prussian and Austrian empires. In 1928, at his induction into the Prussian Academy of Arts, he declared: “I shall never forget that I come from Jewish parents.” Yet all through his childhood the family were minimally observing. In 1912, at the time of their marriage, he and Erna formally quit the Berlin Jewish community; their first son Peter, born that year, was baptised Lutheran.

While still at school, Döblin had arrived at the profound(!) conclusion that “God is the good in the world”. His years as a medical student led him to distrust materialist explanations of human mental states. Over the next half-century he sought continually to understand human beings, their place in Nature and on the Earth, and the cosmic mystery of consciousness. His great epic novels were attempts to delve beneath everyday “realities” to deeper underlying realities – good and evil, the ways that human beings deal with Fate, and the demons that lurk in the human psyche.

During those decades, Döblin confronted issues that were clearly religious, even while he had little time for increasingly moribund organised religions. In an essay written during the First World War and published just after, he begins by expressing his frustration:

carry God as an active element within me, wave him away, am ashamed of him and the myths that surround him, rage against the stigma, feel enslaved – and again he tempts, is there is there. He comes upon me like an autonomous thing I can’t remove from my house – like a fellow tenant in this house, actually. But I don’t want him, I have no use for him, he’s inside me like a corpse. I have to find out what makes him so eternal; It’s not a matter of getting rid of the ghost, but of finding my way to what I’m clearly looking for, to what still clings helplessly to the corpse, the ghost, a historical flower that lost its roots and dried up long ago.

(‘Beyond God’. Die Erhebung, vol. 1 (1919), reprinted in Kleine Schriften 1 (1985), pp.246-261. The following quotes are from the same essay.)

He finds official orthodoxies unsatisfying: “The world is richer and darker than those legends suppose. It’s easy to free myself from them. But not from the mythical in general that lurks within them.” Organised religion deals with people as a social collective, rather than as individuals each with a soul, yearning for metaphysical explanations. His literary mind leads him to suspect the Gospels: “How can one find Jesus behind all this?” he asks, having re-read them after some years:

The fourfold presentation of essentially the same events bore the stamp of literary productions; I had the impression of standing across from authors who wrote as they felt, about whatever was weighing on the heart; goodness knows what lies behind it, and how many excerpts from contemporary anecdotes and literary products I was presented with.

During the 1920s Döblin turned to Nature in his search for understanding, producing two books on natural philosophy (Das Ich über der Natur, and Unser Dasein): prayers to the World-being by an apparent atheist. Meanwhile, on a long trip to Poland in 1924, Döblin encountered vibrant communities of unassimilated Jews, including very poor but very erudite scholars. He was also struck by the magnificent altarpiece in the cathedral at Cracow, made by the 15^th century sculptor and woodcarver Veit Stoss. The sight of the Crucified Man resonated with a religious sensibility that had expressed itself in his epics: the Daoist-flavoured Three Leaps of Wang Lun (1916); and Wallenstein (1920), which explored the base motives underlying warring Christian factions, and revealed demonic forces lurking beneath everyday reality. He dedicated Mountains Oceans Giants (1924) to the “Thousand-named Nameless One”, later explaining (in ‘Remarks on Mountains Oceans Giants’, 1924): “I keep saying ‘Nature’. It’s not the same as ‘God’. It’s darker, vaster than God. The total whirling secret of the world. But still something separate from God.” His later epics continue to feature demonic intrusions into the everyday world.

Döblin’s major 1938 essay Prometheus and the Primitive  summarises several millennia of Western history as a conflict between forces that see the world as a resource for plunder, and those that view it as a source of wonder.

The reasoning behind the conversion

Conversion was not a surrender to mysticism, nor an escape from seemingly insoluble political problems. Döblin was keenly aware of historical trends and deeds. His South American trilogy The Land without Death (1937-38) explored the brutal impact of Enlightenment rationalism in the Conquest; contrasted it with native animism; and depicted brilliantly the efforts of Jesuits to provide native tribes with a worthwhile life on Earth, rather than baptising them simply as a prelude to slavery and death. (The anti-religious Voltaire declared the Jesuit efforts “a triumph of humanity”.)

The Jesuit enterprise in Paraguay and Brazil was cancelled by “enlightened” European rulers. Hence it seemed futile to combat ever worsening inhumanity from a secular “Enlightenment” standpoint. Concepts like Democracy and Civic Virtue and Art were no substitute for transcendent notions of active forces beyond the Self. Rather a conception of humanity made in God’s image needed to be asserted politically.

While still in Los Angeles, Döblin wrote a large work in a genre hardly known since the 18^th century: a religious dialogue called The Immortal Human. This was well-received by churchgoing reviewers and readers when first published in West Germany, and then ignored. He also composed a substantial second dialogue, Struggle with the Angel: a tour through the Bible. First published posthumously in 1978, it too has been largely ignored.

The Pilgrim Aetheria

For three years (1946-49) Döblin crafted his only explicitly Christian work of fiction. It has been almost ostentatiously neglected by Döblin scholars, and has found few readers. Yet it is an artfully constructed tale, full of the author’s customary irony.

Amid the flood of scholarly works on Döblin since the 1970s, the very slight attention given to The Pilgrim Aetheria has tended to dismiss it as edificatory propaganda, or as an attempt at self-justification. Its complexity has remained almost totally unexplored. Here we find themes of justice and righteousness; no simple scheme of perpetrator vs. victim; Aetheria, Simri, Pausanias are complex characters who undergo transformations. Even angels take on satanic features. Evil is shown unsparingly to be a permanent component of human existence.

Aetheria’s journey is depicted with great literary skill. Consider for example how even late in the day she reveals fateful decisions which she has concealed from earlier confessions, and maybe from herself. The line between supernatural (or divine) interventions and Aetheria’s state of mind is often blurred, right to the final depictions of the experience of dying. Döblin’s narrative talent here continually walks a fine line between the supernatural (demanding total suspension of disbelief) and psychological plausibility.

I hope that this first English translation of The Pilgrim Aetheria  will stimulate new interest in Döblin’s late works, and to their relationship to his own life – Simri’s decrepit condition reflects Döblin’s own sufferings from Parkinsonism and other maladies – and the strange currents of European mentalities since the mid-20^th century, where belief in a Primal Mind / God has been replaced by the ability to believe in anything.

Download The Pilgrim Aetheria pdf file (99 pages; 2.5 Mb)