Epic Novel (excerpt) | German | Germany
August, 2018Döblin’s epic novels of South America, later united as the Amazonas Trilogy, were written in Parisian exile and published in 1937-38 by an émigré firm just before the outbreak of war. So their reception was severely limited (after 1933 Döblin’s books were banned in Germany), and even after the war it took almost three decades before decent editions began to appear. Since the 1980s, Amazonas has attracted more critical attention than any other epics (apart, of course, from Berlin Alexanderplatz).
The theme of Amazonas is not so much South America (although Döblin’s imaginative powers, first revealed in The Three Leaps of Wang Lun, his "Chinese novel" of 1916, are still playing at full strength here, as the excerpt shows). Rather, Europe is the theme, and the guiding impulse: the Nazis did not emerge from nowhere.
The trilogy lays out a remarkable and multifaceted critique of Europeans and their history since the 16th century age of conquests: a critique at odds with the Eurocentric schoolroom dogma of "progress" and "enlightenment" that for so long treated the world’s "people without history" as resources for exploitation and extermination.
The prose, as in so many of Döblin’s books, is vivid and direct, conjuring almost cinematically scene after varied scene, with many voices and changing moods. It is unfortunate that the linguistic pyrotechnics of Berlin Alexanderplatz have for so long overshadowed those other epics where the linguistic virtuosity works in more reader-friendly ways. (Check out the several Döblin excerpts already published by the Rail, in its print edition and here at InTranslation.)
The excerpt featured here, the beginning of the trilogy, presents Amazonian communities as yet untouched by Europe. The search for the "land without death" is a counterpart, in terms of human yearning, to the crazed European search for El Dorado which will be so powerfully depicted in later sections.
- Chris Godwin
Epic Novel (excerpt) | German | Germany
December, 2016This excerpt presents to English readers for the first time Alfred Döblin’s dystopian epic of the future Berge Meere und Giganten ("Mountains Oceans Giants"), written in 1921-23 and published in Berlin in 1924.
In 1921, the lifelong city-dweller Döblin became seized by an overwhelming sense of Nature: “The Earth fetched me…I experienced Nature as a secret…as the World Being: weight, colour, light, dark, its countless materials, as a cornucopia of processes that quietly mingled and criss-crossed… I often became frightened, physically frightened, giddy in the face of these things--and sometimes, I confess, even now I feel uneasy” (Die neue Rundschau, June 1924).
For the first time in his writing career, he took a break from his day job as a neurologist to give expression to this feeling. The result was a monstrous 500-page vision of the next seven centuries, as humanity continues to give technology free rein regardless of adverse consequences for humanity and the world.
H. G. Wells, meet Hieronymous Bosch! Wells the Fabian, in The Shape of Things to Come, saw the solution to humanity’s problems in World Government and a better sort of committee. Döblin’s darker view is a literary counterpart to Bosch’s dark and powerful imagery. Try reading it with Bosch’s The Last Judgment at hand!
Mountains Oceans Giants explores themes relevant to our times: globalisation, consumerism, wealth concentration, mass migration, murderous elites, lust for power, headlong technological “progress” that often makes life worse for its supposed beneficiaries and the natural world.
The excerpt describes the development of synthetic food, marking a radical break between humans and their natural and social worlds.
- Chris Godwin
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