ABSTRACT
A doctor by training, Döblin worked first in a psychiatric hospital in Berlin before moving to his own private practice in the poorer part of the city. He came into contact with Herwarth Walden, Else Lasker-Schüler and Peter Hille in the Café des Westens and wrote for Der Sturm: his first novel, Der schwarze Vorhang, first appeared in instalments in this journal (in book form in 1919). Before the First World War he wrote a series of short plays, the best being Lydia und Mäxchen (‘Tiefe Verbeugung in einem Akt’), which was performed in 1906; it anticipates Pirandello in many ways. A collection of Novellen appeared in 1913, bearing the title of the first story, Die Ermordung einer Butterblume, an account of mental disturbance and, in fact, little more than a catalogue of neuroses. In 1915 Döblin achieved his literary breakthrough with the novel Die drei Sprünge des Wang-lun: the theme is the question of how the individual should stand in relation to his environment (the ‘three leaps’ being a demonstration of decisive change in the life of the protagonist). Döblin’s second major novel, Wadzeks Kampf mit der Dampfturbine (1918) concerns transformation, adaptability and assimilation in a modern (Berlin) setting. Wallenstein (two vols), which appeared in 1920, deals with the historical figures of the Thirty Years War but also hints at wider issues-the role of the individual during a time of massive upheaval. Döblin published two plays in 1920 (Lusitania and Die Nonnen von Kemnade); an amazing science fiction novel, Berge, Meere und Giganten, appeared in 1924, an attempt to describe the development of the industrial world up to the year 2500. (The book owes much to Marinetti’s Mafarka le futuriste, which Döblin greatly admired.) Man and nature are locked in a gigantic struggle: with the help of energy gathered in ‘turmaline veils’ the ice of Greenland is melted, but monsters are generated which threaten man by their enormous proliferation. In great contrast is the ‘epische Dichtung’ Manas (1927), a work steeped in Buddhistic quietism and acceptance. Döblin’s masterpiece is without doubt Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), a novel hailed as the most radically modernist work of the 1920s. Comparisons have been made with Manhattan Transfer and Ulysses (Hans Henny Jahnn and others referred in their reviews to the Irish novelist): interior monologue, collage and montage convey the density as well as the fragmentary and elusive quality of life. The book documents Franz Biberkopf’s passage through the roaring city in the form of an enormous Moritat. Biberkopf sinks from one stage of degradation to another: obstinate, gullible, and at times violent, he is crushed beneath a force stronger than he. Visions of Job, of the Great Whore of Babylon and ‘der singende Tod’ accompany this tale of one who ultimately gains insight; he cannot live for himself, but only as part of a teeming multitude. Some of the quietism of Wang-lun has been achieved, and the question at the end of Die drei Sprünge answered affirmatively.
