Döblin

[This page by Michael Navratil]

Alfred Döblin (1878-1957)

Alfred Döblin, a German writer and doctor, is considered one of the most important prose writers of the first half of the 20th century in his language, a reputation founded almost exclusively on the success of his 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz. Döblin, however, was also a prolific essayist, journalist and playwright. His novels range in genre from socio-critical and historical novels to works of science fiction.

Alfred Döblin was born in 1878 to a family of assimilated Jews in Stettin (today Szczecin, Poland). In 1888, he and his mother moved to Berlin after his father had abandoned the family. Döblin graduated from secondary school in 1900 and went on to pursue a career as a doctor. In 1910, Döblin began contributing to the newly founded Expressionist magazine Der Sturm. Two years later, Döblin married Erna Reiss with whom he would have four children. His first collection of short stories Die Ermordung einer Butterblume; The Murder of a Buttercup was published in 1913.

Döblin’s first novels were published during World War I, while he worked as a military doctor. After the war, Döblin wrote for various newspapers and magazines and co-founded the Gruppe 1925 (‘Group 1925’), an association of leftist writers opposed to the restrictive cultural politics of the Weimar Republic. Acclaimed though little read at first, Döblin’s literary breakthrough came with the publication of his novel Berlin Alexanderplatz in 1929.

Döblin fled Germany and Nazism in 1933. After a brief time in Switzerland, he spent the first years of his emigration in France, where he wrote counter-propaganda texts against Nazi Germany. In 1940, he fled for Portugal and finally moved to Hollywood, where he worked briefly as a scriptwriter for Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer. He and his family converted to Catholicism in 1941, an act which was met with rejection by many among the German émigrés.

In 1945, Döblin returned to Germany, where he first worked as a literary inspector for the French military government. During the following years, he contributed to various newspapers both in Western and Eastern Germany. Disappointed with the political restoration in Germany, however, Döblin returend to France in 1953.

Due to his progressing Parkinson’s disease, Döblin was forced to spend more and more time in sanatoriums. He died during a stay in Emmendingen, Southern Germany, in 1957.

Aesthetically, Döblin’s work can be located between Expressionism and the neo-Naturalist positions characteristic of ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’ (‘New Objectivity’) in the Weimar Republic. In his 1913 essay Futuristische Worttechnik (‘Futurist Word Craft’) he offered a critical examination of Marinetti’s Futurism in Italy and proposed his own style, which he called ‘Döblinismus’, as an alternative. After World War I, Döblin distanced himself from Expressionism in his essay Von der Freiheit des Dichtermenschen (‘Of the Poet’s Freedom’). Despite these critical comments on literary developments of his day, Döblin’s own work, with its emphasis on montage technique and simultaneity, its renunciation of psychological analysis, of causality and of traditional modes of narration, its ‘Kinostil’ (‘Cinema style’), and its experimental literary reactions to modern technology and city life, shows significant parallels both with Futurism and Expressionism.

Döblin’s work has been an important influence on writers as varied as Bertolt Brecht, Günter Grass, Wolfgang Koeppen and W. G. Sebald.

The success and recognition of Berlin Alexanderplatz stand in stark contrast with the languid reception of the rest of Döblin’s œuvre. Despite continuing scholarly interest in his work, none of his other novels is known to a broader public today.

Works include:

Die Ermordung einer Butterblume (1913); The Murder of a Buttercup

Die drei Sprünge des Wang-lun (1915); The Three Leaps of Wang Lun

Wadzeks Kampf mit der Dampfturbine (1917); Wadzek’s Battle with the Steam Turbine

Wallenstein (1920)

Berge, Meere und Giganten (1924); Mountains, Seas and Giants

Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929)

Babylonische Wanderung (1934); Babylonian Wandering

Pardon wird nicht gegeben (1935); Men Without Mercy

Der unsterbliche Mensch, Ein Religionsgespräch (1946); The Immortal Man, A Dialogue on Religion

November 1918. Eine deutsche Revolution (1949/50); November 1918. A German Revolution

Hamlet oder Die lange Nacht nimmt ein Ende (1956); Tales of a Long Night

Further Reading in English

Robert Craig, Alfred Döblin: Monsters, Cyborgs and Berliners 1900-1933 (Cambridge: Legenda, 2021)

Steffan Davies and Ernest Schonfield (eds.), Alfred Döblin: Paradigms of Modernism (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009)

David B. Dollenmayer, The Berlin Novels of Alfred Döblin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988)

Roland Dollinger, Wulf Koepke and Heidi Thomann Tewarson (eds.), A Companion to the Works of Alfred Döblin (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004)

Devin Fore, ‘Döblin’s Epic: Sense, Document, and the Verbal World Picture’, New German Critique 33:3 (2006), 171-207

Wulf Koepke, The Critical Reception of Alfred Döblin’s Major Novels (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2003)

Further Reading in German

Alfred Döblin (München: text + kritik, 1972)

Oliver Bernhardt, Alfred Döblin (München: dtv, 2007)

Roland Links, Alfred Döblin: Leben und Werk (Berlin: Volk und Wissen, 1965)

Gabriele Sander, Alfred Döblin (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2001)

Wilfried F. Scholler, Döblin − Eine Biographie (München: Hanser, 2011)

Web Link in English

https://beyond-alexanderplatz.com/

Beyond Alexanderplatz - Döblin’s other works available free in English translation