Alfred Döblin

Alfred Döblin: The Doctor Who Rewired the Novel

On 2 March 1933, a little over a month after Hitler took power, a fifty-four-year-old physician and novelist crossed the border into Switzerland. He had already worked out what was coming. "On May 10 there will be the auto-da-fé," he wrote, "I believe the Jew with my name will also be present, fortunately only in paper form." He was right about the book burning and right about the date. Four years earlier he had published *Berlin Alexanderplatz*, a novel that a 2002 poll of a hundred international writers placed among the hundred greatest books ever written. He would spend the next twenty-four years being progressively forgotten.

Stettin, and a Father Who Left

Bruno Alfred Döblin was born on 10 August 1878 in Stettin, then Prussian, now Szczecin in Poland, into an assimilated Jewish family. His father Max was a master tailor from Poznań with artistic leanings; his mother Sophie Freudenheim came from a merchant family and had none. In July 1888, when Alfred was ten, Max abandoned the household and eloped to America with a seamstress. That October Sophie moved her five children to Berlin's working-class east, to the Blumenstraße. The desertion was the central event of Döblin's childhood and shaped everything after it.

He was a rebellious gymnasium student and a voracious private reader — Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kleist, Hölderlin, Dostoyevsky. He took his Abitur in 1900 and enrolled in medicine at the Friedrich Wilhelm University, moving in May 1904 to Freiburg im Breisgau to specialize in neurology and psychiatry. His dissertation, completed in April 1905, was on disturbances of memory in Korsakoff's psychosis.

Two Careers at Once

Döblin worked at a Regensburg asylum, at the Berlin psychiatric clinic in Buch from 1906 to 1908, then at the city hospital Am Urban. In October 1911 he opened a private practice at Blücherstraße 18 in Kreuzberg and later moved it to Frankfurter Allee 184 in Berlin's east end. He kept treating patients throughout his literary career. The clinic and the novel were the same project by other means: he saw the city's poor at close range, daily, for decades.

His literary life began in secret. Still a schoolboy, he wrote a novel, *Jagende Rosse*, dedicated to Hölderlin, and sent it to the critic Fritz Mauthner under a false name to keep it from his mother. He could not retrieve the manuscript and rewrote the whole thing. His second, *Der Schwarze Vorhang*, dealt with sexuality, hatred and sadism, and already contained the montage techniques he would perfect twenty years later.

Through Georg Lewin — who renamed himself Herwarth Walden and founded the Expressionist journal *Der Sturm* in 1910 — Döblin entered the Berlin avant-garde. At the Café des Westens he moved among Else Lasker-Schüler, Erich Mühsam and Frank Wedekind; Ernst Ludwig Kirchner painted him repeatedly between 1912 and 1914. He published *Die Ermordung einer Butterblume und andere Erzählungen* in 1912 and *Wadzeks Kampf mit der Dampfturbine*, written in 1914, which the young Brecht admired for its stringent refusal of a tragic tone.

The breakthrough was *Die drei Sprünge des Wang-lun*, finished in May 1913 and published in 1916 — a historical novel of eighteenth-century Chinese upheaval that won the Fontane Prize and 600 Marks in August 1916 and marked younger writers permanently. Lion Feuchtwanger, Anna Seghers and Brecht all took from it; for Brecht it supplied an impulse toward the theory of epic theatre.

War, Politics, Epics

Döblin volunteered in December 1914 to avoid conscription and served as a military doctor at Saargemünd on the Western Front. Like most German intellectuals he began enthusiastic and quickly turned pacifist. In August 1917 he was transferred to Hagenau in Alsace after clashing with superiors over the treatment of patients.

His personal life was tangled and left permanent scars. At the Buch clinic he became involved with Friede Kunke, a sixteen-year-old Protestant nurse; their son Bodo was born in October 1911. Friede died of tuberculosis in 1918 and Bodo was raised by his grandmother — a lasting source of guilt. In 1909 Döblin met Erna Reiss, a medical student and factory owner's daughter; family pressure produced an engagement in February 1911 and marriage in January 1912, with his brother Hugo and Walden as best men.

After the war he moved left without joining a party, publishing satirical essays under the pseudonym "Linke Poot" — Left Paw — eleven of which appeared in 1921's *Der deutsche Maskenball*. He joined the Association of German Writers in 1920 and became its president in 1924. He wrote *Wallenstein* (1920) on the Thirty Years' War; *Berge Meere und Giganten* (1924), a science fiction epic ranging from the twentieth to the twenty-seventh centuries and dealing with urbanization, ecological catastrophe, genetic engineering, terrorism and totalitarianism; *Manas* (1927), a free-verse epic on Indian myth that Robert Musil said should have the greatest influence; and the philosophical tract *Das Ich über der Natur* (1927). In 1925 he joined Gruppe 1925 alongside Brecht, Bloch, Musil, Joseph Roth and Tucholsky. In 1928 Thomas Mann backed his election to the Prussian Academy of Arts.

Berlin Alexanderplatz

Published in October 1929, it made him internationally famous and became the iconic text of the Weimar Republic. Franz Biberkopf leaves prison after killing his lover, resolves to go straight, and is destroyed by something coming from outside — unpredictable, resembling destiny. He loses an arm; his lover is murdered. Around him Döblin assembled the city itself: advertising slogans, weather reports, tram schedules, Bible verses, slaughterhouse statistics, newspaper fragments, cut together in a literary montage that Walter Benjamin, in "Die Krisis des Romans," identified as a way out of the dead ends of the traditional novel. Döblin adapted it as a radio play and co-wrote the 1931 film for Phil Jutzi, starring Heinrich George; Eugene Jolas translated it into English the same year; Rainer Werner Fassbinder made it into a fourteen-part television epic in 1980.

Exile

Paris followed Switzerland. Döblin finished *Babylonische Wandrung* in late 1933, wrote the Amazon Trilogy in 1937–38 on the colonization and Christianization of South America, and began *November 1918: Eine deutsche Revolution*. He took French citizenship in October 1936. In May 1939 he crossed to New York for a PEN congress, met Franklin Roosevelt at the White House, and saw Ernst Toller, who killed himself shortly after.

When France fell he spent weeks in a refugee camp at Mende in Lozère and began attending mass at the cathedral there. On 3 September 1940 he sailed from Lisbon on the *Nea Hellas* with Erna and their son Stefan, reaching New York six days later and Los Angeles in October. MGM paid him $100 a week to write screenplays; the contract lapsed in October 1941 and was not renewed despite lobbying by Thomas Mann. On 30 November 1941 the three of them were baptized Roman Catholic at Hollywood's Blessed Sacrament Church, to the discomfort of the émigré community. At a sixty-fifth birthday party organized by Helene Weigel in August 1943, with Mann, Werfel, Feuchtwanger and Brecht present, Döblin spoke about his Catholicism and the room went cold. In five years of American exile his only German-language publication was a private printing of 250 copies of one episode from *November 1918*.

In 1945 he learned that his son Wolfgang, who had worked for the French resistance, had killed himself five years earlier to avoid capture by the Wehrmacht.

Why Alfred Is Called a Genius

The case is unusually concrete, because two major writers said it in plain words. Günter Grass declared in 1967: "Without the Futurist elements of Döblin's work from *Wang Lun* to *Berlin Alexanderplatz*, my prose is inconceivable." Brecht wrote in 1943: "I learned more about the essence of the epic from Döblin than from anyone else." W.G. Sebald was similarly indebted. The specific faculty is a kind of formal restlessness — Döblin never repeated a structure. He wrote a Chinese historical epic, a Thirty Years' War chronicle, a far-future ecological catastrophe, an Indian verse epic and a Berlin street novel, and invented a different architecture for each. What he called *Tatsachenphantasie*, fantasy of fact, was an interdisciplinary poetics that pulled psychiatric, anthropological and theological discourse directly into the sentence. The critic Sabina Becker calls him perhaps the most significant representative of literary modernism in Berlin.

The honest counter-case is that this restlessness cost him a readership and possibly a body of work. Only one of his books is genuinely canonical; the rest are admired chiefly by other writers and by specialists. He is routinely described as an under-recognized or forgotten author, vastly less read than Mann, Kafka or Grass. Some of that is historical accident — exile, the burning of his books, a postwar Germany that had no use for him. But some of it is intrinsic: Döblin's inventiveness ran ahead of any audience's ability to follow, and he showed no interest in slowing down for them. He is a genius by the testimony of the people who learned their trade from him, which is the most reliable kind of testimony and the least commercially useful.

Legacy

Döblin returned to Europe in October 1945 and worked for the French military government in Baden-Baden as its representative for public education, vetting manuscripts and vehemently opposing publication of anyone who had sympathized with National Socialism, including Jünger and Benn. He found postwar Germany's conservative cultural climate closed to him and returned to Paris in 1953, declining invitations from Brecht and Becher to settle in East Berlin. His final novel, *Hamlet oder Die lange Nacht nimmt ein Ende*, appeared in 1956 after a decade's delay and was well received. Parkinson's disease and long hospital stays consumed his last years; the Mainz Academy's award of 10,000 Deutsche Marks helped pay for treatment. He died at Emmendingen on 26 June 1957 and was buried beside Wolfgang at Housseras. Erna followed him on 15 September, turning on the gas tap in their Paris apartment. His papers are at Marbach; the international Döblin colloquia have met every two years since the early 1980s.