| Alfred Döblin | |
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Döblin c. 1930 |
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| Born | Bruno Alfred Döblin 10 August 1878 Stettin, Pomerania, now Szczecin, Poland |
| Died | 26 June 1957 Emmendingen, Germany |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Nationality | German |
| Period | 20th century |
| Genres | Novel |
| Notable work(s) | Berlin Alexanderplatz, Wallenstein, Berge Meere und Giganten |
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Alfred Döblin (10 August 1878 – 26 June 1957) was a German novelist, essayist, and doctor, best known for his novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929). A remarkably prolific writer whose œuvre spans more than half a century and a wide variety of literary movements and styles, Döblin is one of the most important figures of German literary modernism.[1]
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Bruno Alfred Döblin was born on 10 August 1878 at the house at Bollwerk 37 in Stettin (Szczecin), a port city in what was then the Province of Pomerania. He was the fourth of five children born to Max Döblin (1846-1921), a master tailor from Posen (Poznań), and Sophie Döblin (1844-1920), née Freudenheim, the daughter of a merchant.[2] Their marriage was characterized by a tension between Max's multifaceted artistic interests—to which Döblin would later attribute his and his siblings' artistic inclinations[3]—and Sophie's cool pragmatism.[4] The Döblins were assimilated Jews, and Alfred was confronted early on with the anti-Semitism of the outside world.[5]
His parents' marriage dissolved in 1888, when Max Döblin eloped with Henriette Zander, a seamstress twenty years his junior, and moved to America to start a new life. The catastrophic loss of his father was a central event in Döblin's childhood and would be formative for his later life.[6] Shortly thereafter, in October 1888, Sophie and the five children moved to Berlin. Döblin's parents briefly reconciled in 1889, when Max returned penniless from America; the family moved to Hamburg in April 1889, but when it came to light that Max had brought his lover back with him and was leading a double life, Sophie and the children returned to Berlin in September 1889.[7]
The sense of being déclassé, along with rocky experiences at school, made this a difficult time for Döblin.[8] Although he had early been a good student, starting in his fourth year of Gymnasium his performance tended toward the mediocre. Furthermore, his oppositional tendencies against the stern conventionality of the partriarchal, militaristic Wilhelminian educational system, which stood in contrast to his artistic inclinations and his free thought, earned him the status of a rebel among his teachers.[9] Despite his hatred for school, Döblin early became a passionate writer and reader, counting Spinoza, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, as well as Heinrich von Kleist, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky among his most important early influences.[10]
After receiving his Abitur in 1900, Döblin enrolled at Friedrich Wilhelm University (now Humboldt University of Berlin) and began studying general medicine. In May 1904 he moved to Freiburg im Breisgau to continue his studies, concentrating on neurology and psychiatry. He began his dissertation ("Disturbances of memory in Korsakoff's Psychosis") in the winter semester of 1904-1905 at the Freiburg psychiatric clinic. His dissertation, completed in April 1905, was published that year by Berlin's Klett Verlag.[11] He applied for assistantships in Berlin and in Stettin, where he was apparently turned down on account of his Jewish origins,[12] before taking a short-lived position as assistant doctor at a regional asylum in Regensburg. On 15 October 1906 he took up a position at the Berlin psychiatric clinic in Buch where he worked as an assistant doctor for nearly two years. He then transferred to the city hospital "Am Urban," where he dedicated himself to internal medicine with a renewed interest. He opened his first private practice in October 1911 at Blücherstrasse 18 in Berlin's Kreuzberg neighborhood, before moving the practice to Frankfurter Allee 184 in Berlin's working-class east.[13]
While working in Buch he met Friede Kunke, a 16-year-old nurse from a protestant background with whom he became romantically involved.[14] In the spring of 1909 he met Erna Reiss, the 21-year-old Jewish daughter of a factory owner. Despite his continued involvement with Friede Kunke, he was reluctantly engaged to Erna Reiss on 13 February 1911 and married her on 23 January 1912; his younger brother Hugo and Herwarth Walden served as best men.[15] During the early part of his engagement to Reiss, he had been unaware that Kunke was pregnant: their son Bodo was born on 14 October 1911 and was raised by his grandmother, Elise Kunke, in Schleswig-Holstein following Friede's death from tuberculosis in 1918. Until the end of his life, Döblin maintained loose contact with Bodo, and his treatment of Frieda became a lasting source of guilt.[16] Döblin's first son with Erna Reiss, Peter Döblin, was born on 27 October 1912.[17]
During his studies in Berlin, Döblin had fed his interest in philosophy and art by attending lectures and getting into Berlin's cultural scene; during this time he wrote two longer essays on Nietzsche as well as a few literary works, including the novel Der Schwarze Vorhang (The Black Curtain).[18] Introduced by a mutual acquaintance, Döblin met Georg Lewin, a music student better known as Herwarth Walden, who founded the Expressionist journal Der Sturm in 1910. Der Sturm, modeled after Karl Kraus's newspaper Die Fackel (The Torch), would soon count Döblin among its most involved contributors, and provided him with a venue for the publication of numerous literary and essayistic contributions.[19] Through Walden Döblin made the acquaintance of poet Else Lasker-Schüler. At regular meetings at the Café des Westens on Kurfürstendamm or at the wine bar Dalbelli, Döblin got to know the circle of artists and intellectuals that would become central to the Expressionist movement in Berlin, including Peter Hille, Richard Dehmel, Erich Mühsam, Paul Scheerbart, and Frank Wedekind, among others.[20] In October 1911 he met the painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, who painted several portraits of Döblin between 1912 and 1914 and illustrated some of Döblin's literary works.[21] Döblin's early novel Der Schwarze Vorhang was published in Der Sturm, and in November 1912 the Munich publishing house Georg Müller published his collection of novellas under the title Die Ermordung einer Butterblume und andere Erzählungen.[22] His most important literary work of the prewar period was his novel Die drei Sprünge des Wang-lun, which he completed in May 1913 and published in 1916. He began writing Wadzeks Kampf mit der Dampfturbine (Wadzek's Struggle with the Steam Turbine) the following year, completing it by December 1914 although it was not published until 1918.[23]
To avoid conscription, Döblin volunteered in December 1914 and was posted to Saargemünd (Sarreguemines) as a doctor. Despite an early enthusiasm for the war, he soon developed a pacifist disposition. His son Wolfgang was born on 17 March 1915, followed by the births of Klaus on 20 May 1917 and Stefan on 7 December 1926. In Saargemünd the family lived in a small apartment at Neunkircherstraße 19; due to their financial situation they had to give up their Berlin apartment at the end of February 1915.[24]
At the end of August, 1916, Döblin was awarded the Fontane Prize (including a monetary award of 600 Marks) for Die drei Sprünge des Wang-lun, which tells the story of political upheaval in 18th century China.[25] Spurred on by this success, Döblin set himself to work on his historical novel Wallenstein, set during the Thirty Years' War. Sick with typhus, Döblin had to interrupt work on the novel in March 1917, but was able to use the university library at Heidelberg during his convalescence in April and May to continue researching the Thirty Years' War. Returning to Saargemünd he came into conflict with his superiors due to the poor treatment of the patients; on 2 August 1917 he was transferred to Hagenau (Haguenau) in Alsace, where the library of nearby Strassbourg helped complete Wallenstein by the beginning of 1919.[26]
At the beginning of 1919 Döblin moved into his new apartment and medical practice at Frankfurter Allee 340 in Berlin. The immediate postwar period was a turbulent time for him—his financial situation was dire, and the death of his sister Meta on 12 March 1919 as the result of an injury sustained during skirmishes between the Spartacists and nationalist troops in Berlin brought home the precariousness of the situation in Germany in the aftermath of the November Revolution.[27]
In February of 1921 he met the 21-year-old photographer Charlotte Niclas; the close relationship between the two was to last many years, despite their age difference.[28] The same year, during a family vacation to the Baltic coast, he began preparatory work on his science fiction novel Berge Meere und Giganten (Mountains Seas and Giants), which would be published in 1924. In 1920 Döblin joined the Association of German Writers (Schutzverband Deutscher Schriftsteller), and in 1924 he became its president.[29] In November 1921 he began reviewing plays for the Prager Tagblatt, and in 1925 joined the Gruppe 1925, a discussion circle of progressive and communist intellectuals including Bertolt Brecht, Johannes R. Becher, Ernst Bloch, Hermann Kasack, Rudolf Leonhard, Walter Mehring, and Ernst Weiß, among others. It was likely Brecht, who counted Döblin among his significant influences, who introduced him to Erwin Piscator in 1928.[30]
At the end of September 1924, he set out on a two-month trip through Poland, subsidized by the Fischer Verlag and prompted in part by the anti-Semitic pogroms of 1923. His description of his travels to Warsaw, Vilnius, Lviv, and Krakow, among other cities, was published in November 1925 under the title Reise in Polen (Journey to Poland).[31] From 1926 to 1927 Döblin worked on his free verse epic Manas, about a figure from Indian mythology, which was published in May 1927. Manas, like his philosophical tract Das Ich über der Natur published the same year, proved to be a failure with the public.[32]
Thus despite his continued rise to prominence within the intellectual world of the Weimar Republic—in 1928, for example, he was elected to the prestigious Prussian Academy of Arts with the persistent support of Thomas Mann—literary and economic success continued to elude Döblin.[33] This changed with the October 1929 publication of his novel Berlin Alexanderplatz which earned him national and global fame.[34] He soon began transforming Berlin Alexanderplatz into a radio play and agreed to cowrite the screenplay for the film version that premiered on 8 October 1931.[35][36] The early 1930s marked the high point of Döblin's fame. During this time he busied himself with lectures, readings, and the effort to contribute to a collective intellectual response to the growing power of the National Socialists.[37] Just over a month after Hitler's ascension to power, Döblin left Germany, crossing into Switzerland on 2 March 1933.[38]
On May 10 there will be the auto-da-fé, I believe the Jew with my name will also be present, fortunately only in paper form. In this way they honor me. [...] how will it be later on, in 1 year, 2 years, when will the publishing houses also be "coordinated"? Abroad, I can’t be a doctor anymore, and why write, for whom? I cannot think about this fatal chapter.
After a brief stay in Zürich, the family moved to Paris.[40] Döblin's closest acquaintances during this time were Claire and Yvan Goll, Hermann Kesten, Arthur Koestler, Joseph Roth, Hans Sahl, and Manès Sperber.[41] Here he also saw Robert Musil, with whom he had kept up a sporadic relationship for over a decade, for the last time.[42] Döblin finished his novel Babylonische Wandrung at the end of 1933.[43] In 1935 he began work on his Amazon Trilogy, which narrates the colonization and Christianization of South America and was published in 1937-1938.[44] During this time he also began work on his novel November 1918, a trilogy of historical novels about the failed revolution in Germany following the First World War, (Vol. 1: Verratenes Volk (A People Betrayed), Vol 2 Heimkehr der Fronttruppen (Return of the Troops), Vol. 3 Karl und Rosa (Karl and Rosa).[45] In May 1939 he briefly visited the United States to take part in a PEN congress in New York. With other writers, he met with Roosevelt at the White House, and saw his old Berlin acquaintance Ernst Toller again, who was suffering from severe depression and killed himself shortly thereafter.[46]
After the start of the Second World War the family fled Paris; Döblin's manuscripts were able to be brought into safekeeping in the basement of the Sorbonne[47]. Between the start of the war in 1939 and the German occupation of France in 1940, Döblin worked for the French ministry of information, writing counter-propaganda texts against Nazi Germany with a group of French Germanists and journalists, as well as artists like Frans Masereel.[48]
In 1940, aged 62, he was again uprooted by the German invasion of France, and spent arduous weeks in a refugee camp.[49] On 3 September 1940 Alfred, Erna, and Stefan boarded the Nea Hellas in Lisbon, reaching New York six days later; in October they moved to Los Angeles.[50] Döblin worked briefly for Metro Goldwyn Mayer writing screenplays for 100 dollars a week, but his contract expired in October 1941 and was not renewed, despite the interventions of Thomas Mann and others.[51] An agnostic Jew,[52] Döblin—along with his wife Erna and son Stefan—converted to Roman Catholicism on 30 November 1941, citing Søren Kierkegaard and Baruch Spinoza as influences.[53][54]
Döblin completed work on November 1918 in the spring of 1943, but was unable to find a publisher.[55] The only work of his that was published in German during his American exile was a private printing of 250 copies of the Nocturno episode from November 1918.[56] Döblin was embittered by his isolation and setbacks in exile, drawing a strong distinction between his own situation and that of more successful writers less oppressed by material concerns, such as Lion Feuchtwanger and Thomas Mann.[57] In honor of his 65th birthday, Helene Weigel organized a party on 14 August 1943 in Santa Monica. In attendance were Thomas Mann, Franz Werfel, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Bertolt Brecht, among others. Heinrich Mann gave a speech, Fritz Kortner, Peter Lorre, and Alexander Granach read aloud from Döblin's works, and he was presented with notes of congratulation and praise from Brecht, Max Horkheimer, and Alfred Polgar, among others. Compositions by Hanns Eisler were performed, and Blandine Ebinger sang Berlin chansons. Yet the festivities were dampened when Döblin gave a speech in which he mentioned his conversion to Catholicism; the religious, moral tone proved alienating, and fell on unsympathetic ears.[58]
In 1945 Döblin's 18-year-old son Stefan was called up for military service in the French army. That spring had brought the good news that Klaus was alive and in Switzerland after a period working for the French resistance, and the grim tidings that Wolfgang was dead, having committed suicide five years earlier.[59] In October 1945 Alfred and Erna arrived in New York, sailing aboard the Argentine back to Europe. They first settled in Baden-Baden where Döblin worked for the French military government as official representative for the office of public education; he was tasked with approving manuscripts for publication, and vehemently opposed the approval of any texts by authors who had sympathized with National Socialism, such as Ernst Jünger or Gottfried Benn.[60] In postwar Germany’s conservative cultural climate, Döblin was unable to draw on his earlier success as an author, yet continued his literary engagement with a series of publications and journals that aimed to rebuild Germany's intellectual and cultural life, reintroducing the literature banned by the Nazis and fostering the growth of younger writers.[61] Despite these efforts, Döblin was disappointed by the apparent continuity between the Nazi years and the postwar climate.[62] His growing pessimism was fueled by his sense of isolation and marginalization within the postwar German literary scene.[63] In 1953 Alfred and Erna returned to Paris despite the invitation by Brecht and Johannes R. Becher to settle in East Berlin.[64]
His last novel, Hamlet, was published in 1956, and was favorably received.[65] Döblin's remaining years were marked by poor health (he had Parkinson's disease) and lengthy stays in multiple clinics and hospitals, including his alma mater, Freiburg University. Through the intervention of Theodor Heuss and Joachim Tiburtius, he was able to receive more money from the Berlin office in charge of compensating victims of Nazi persecution; this, and a literary prize from the Mainz Academy in the sum of 10,000 DM helped finance his growing medical expenses.[66]
Alfred Döblin died in the hospital in Emmendingen on 26 June 1957 and was buried two days later in the village cemetery at Housseras next to his son Wolfgang. Erna took her life on 15 September and was buried next to Alfred.[67]
In a 1967 essay, Günter Grass declared: "Without the Futurist elements of Döblin's work from Wang Lun to Berlin Alexanderplatz, my prose is inconceivable." Yet to the extent Döblin is known today at all, it is for just one work: Berlin Alexanderplatz, the subject of countless graduate papers and scholarly analyses, and also of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's spellbinding 15 1/2 hour TV adaptation of 1980. Modern, well-edited volumes of almost the complete oeuvre have been available in German since the 1980s, indicating the existence of at least some readership; and the Internationale Alfred-Döblin Kolloquien have been held every two years since the early 1980s. But only a handful of other works of fiction have ever appeared in English translations: The Three Leaps of Wang Lun (trans. C. D. Godwin, Chinese University Press, Hong Kong, 1991), and the November 1918 trilogy: A People Betrayed (which also includes The Troops Return) and Karl and Rosa (trans. John E. Woods, Fromm International, 1983 and 1987); Tales of a Long Night (trans John E Woods, From International, 1987; and the lesser-known big-city novel Men without Mercy (trans. Trevor and Phyllis Blewitt, Howard Fertig, 1976). Two works of autobiography have also been translated: Destiny's Journey (trans. Edna McCown, Paragon House, 1992), the harrowing account of Döblin's flight and exile in the 1940s; and the account of his mid-1920s Journey to Poland (trans J. Neugroschel, I. B. Tauris, 1991).
Another of Grass's observations may help to explain this neglect. Döblin, says Grass in the Akzente essay referenced above, "will discomfort you, give you bad dreams. He's hard to digest. The reader will be changed by him. If you're satisfied with yourself, beware of Döblin." But the reader who is prepared to take up the challenge can find many treasures.
The publisher's blurb for the Wang Lun epic in English, for example, calls this "the most sustained evocation, in any European language, of a China untouched by the West... Teeming cities and Tibetan wastes, political intrigue and religious yearning, life at Court and the fate of wandering outcasts are depicted in a language of enormous vigour." Döblin brought the same hallucinatory intensity of imagination and powers of depiction to another setting, South America, in the Amazonas-trilogie (1937). The continuing lack of an English translation of this epic is quite surprising, for the trilogy depicts with tremendous sweep, excitement and pathos the pre-conquest cultures of the Amazon and Andes, episodes of conquest and colonisation, and the doomed efforts of the Jesuits to save at least a fragment of the native population (a topic that may be familiar from the 1986 film The Mission).
Döblin's early association with the Futurists ended with Wang Lun. "Neither (Herwarth) Walden nor anyone else from the circle of the orthodox said a word about the novel... They developed into pure word-artists. I took another path," wrote Döblin in the Epilogue to his Autobiographische Schriften (Autobiographical Writings) in 1948. His writings from the 1920s on encompassed a tremendous range, in which he seldom repeated himself: literary theory, film and book reviews, reflections on philosophy and religion, and several epic works of fiction in the most varied styles. These include Berge Meere und Giganten (Mountains Oceans Giants, ), a dystopic science-fiction view of the far future; and Babylonische Wanderung (Babylonian Exile), a comic account of the god Marduk's adventures in 20th century Europe.