DÖBLIN’S EPICS: FULL HOUSE!

With the publication in October 2024 of Citizens & Soldiers, the missing first volume of November 1918 – A German Revolution, all of Döblin’s epic novels are now available in English (including two titles – Wallenstein, and The Babylonian Exile – downloadable from this site pending formal publication one day).

Citizens & Soldiers – Introduction

Here, for the first time in English, is the first volume of November 1918: A German Revolution, Alfred Döblin’s mammoth fictional recreation of the two fateful months between the Kaiser’s abdication and the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. The English translation by John E Woods, published in 1983 by the now-defunct Fromm International and available only in the used-book market, not only omitted this first volume entirely, but also cut some 57,000 words from the subsequent volumes. Several of those cuts are restored here.

November 1918: the missing first volume

Towards the end of 1937, having just completed his South American trilogy The Land without Death, Döblin embarked on a new project, one much closer to home. As a military doctor in Alsace he had witnessed firsthand the chaotic scenes in Haguenau and Strasbourg following the Kaiser’s abdication and the Armistice, and had written about them for the Fischer periodical Die neue Rundschau.

He and his family (now with three small children) left Alsace on 14 November 1918 with his hospital’s staff and patients, reaching Berlin several days later. In March 1919 he witnessed the savage repression of the uprising in Lichtenberg, the eastern Berlin district where he had settled; his sister Meta, who lived nearby, was killed by grenade shrapnel as she fetched milk for her children. In his essay “On Cannibalism he vents his anger on both the ineptitude of the insurgents and the callousness of the Social Democrat Minister of War, Noske.

Citizens and Soldiers presents a vivid panorama of fictional and historical individuals, scenes and events over a period of two weeks in November 1918. It appeared in Amsterdam and Stockholm in October 1939, shortly after Britain and France declared war on Germany. So it had little chance to circulate, and only two reviews are known, both in exile periodicals. (See below for excerpts.)

When Döblin (a French citizen since 1936) returned to Germany in November 1945 as an officer in the Public Education Directorate of the French Occupation Authority in Baden, his main role was to censor German publications. he also planned to found a new cultural magazine – Das goldene Tor (The Golden Gate) was launched in October 1946 – and to explore republication of at least some of his own works: a new edition of Wang Lun appeared in 1946, and the first Amazonas volume in 1947.

In November 1947, after meeting representatives of the Karl Alber Verlag about their intention to publish November 1918, Döblin wrote to the publisher:

I myself discovered at this meeting that … the Censor (not I, in this case) had meanwhile rejected the first volume as not opportune for the French Zone. It is beside the point that I consider this rejection as unjustified and unfounded, of course the motive is political, they don’t want to stir things up in Alsace. Anyway, as I had predicted, the first volume is out of the question for the French Zone.

The remaining three volumes (A People Betrayed; The Troops Return; Karl and Rosa) appeared in West Germany successively in autumn 1948, spring 1949 and spring 1950. This truncated postwar edition was the basis for the Woods translation in the 1980s. (Woods seems never to have seen the first volume: on page 34 of A People Betrayed the Apothecary says he returned from Strassburg “by train”, instead of by buggy as recounted here in Chapter 1.) In Germany the missing first volume was first re-published in 1961 (four years after Döblin’s death) by the East German firm Rütten & Loening in a 4-volume hardback edition of November 1918. In West Germany, dtv produced a 4-volume paperback boxed set in 1962 (reprinted 1978 and 1995); and in 2008 Fischer issued November 1918 as four separate titles in hardback – very attractive, but with disappointingly little introductory apparatus – and in paperback in 2013.

November 1918: composition

In summer 1937 Döblin came to know a French Germanist, Robert Minder. They became close friends, and Minder a staunch advocate of Döblin’s works up to the 1980s – when he was sued by Döblin’s son Claude for revealing sensitive family secrets; he died before the case came to court.

The two men made a trip together in Alsace in May 1938, to refresh Döblin’s memories of the First World War and its chaotic ending. The manuscript of Citizens and Soldiers was completed in January 1939. In March, excerpts began to appear in the exile weekly Die Zukunft (The Future).

By May 1940 – a week after the German assault on France and the Low Countries began – the MS of the middle volume was complete. After the evacuation on 10 June of the French Ministry of Information, where he had worked on counter-propaganda since October 1939, Döblin entrusted the MS to Minder as he began a desperate and exhausting trek across the middle of France to meet up again with his wife and youngest son, including a tragi-comic incident where they missed each other by one day heading in opposite directions through the same little town. At some point he retrieved the 600 page MS from Minder, and hauled it all the way from Marseilles across Spain and Portugal to Lisbon, and then across the USA to Los Angeles.

By September 1941 this MS had been typed up, and Döblin revised and enlarged it to the extent that it had to be printed as two volumes in a four-volume “trilogy” (not a novel, he insisted, but a “work of narrative”). The final part, Karl and Rosa, was completed in February 1943, after both Alfred and his wife Erna had suffered serious illnesses; they were also in dire financial straits. The complete typescript of the latter three volumes was completed by September 1943, thanks to the loan of a steno-typist from the European Film Fund.

The place of November 1918 in Döblin’s oeuvre

The First World War never left Döblin. His last novel untouched by the War was Wadzeks Kampf mit der Dampfturbine (Wadzek’s Struggle with the Steam Turbine), written between August and December 1914 but not published until mid-1918. His choice, in mid-1916, of the Thirty Years War for his next big project (Wallenstein) was an attempt to grapple with the meaning of the recent War: not just the politics, but the demonic forces lurking in the human psyche. (There were demons already in the Wang Lun novel. Carl Jung was at this time working his way towards understanding the same dark forces that he would later elaborate as the Collective Unconscious and The Shadow.)

The several essays Döblin published in 1919-20 under the pseudonym Linke Poot (“Left Paw”) are not merely reportage: they attempt to expose the roots of a profound social and spiritual malaise. The dystopian epic Mountains Oceans Giants (1924) points seven centuries ahead to a world where 20^th century trends continue to a dreadful culmination; the Urals War is the First World War redux. In the 1927 verse epic Manas, the hero’s obsession with discovering the roots of sorrow and death lie in his wartime revelation: “This man I have just killed is – me!” The South American trilogy (1937-38) traces five hundred years of Europe’s ‘civilising’ encounters with native populations; the subtext throughout is “the Nazis did not come from nowhere”. And Döblin’s last big novel, Hamlet: Tales of a Long Night (written 1948, published 1957 in East Germany) continues the themes (guilt, demonic bad faith, a meaning to life beyond the everyday) explored so thoroughly in November 1918.

November 1918: reception

Only two reviews of the 1939 edition have been found. In the exile periodical Mass und Wert 3 (1939/40), A M Frey noted the implications of the indefinite article in the title: “We speak of THE French Revolution, but A German …”, hence Döblin is investigating and describing “a deviant kind of revolution, an attempt, an insufficiency, a dubious endeavour … a failed experiment.” Citizens & Soldiers shows why that is so:

…the ‘respectable’ behaviour, the self-righteous cluelessness of the Soldiers Councils, … the devastatingly unfounded trust in their good cause, … the cunning pretence of their opponents to yield while they gathered strength for the future…

Frey notes how the city of Strasbourg forms the spatial centre of the novel, this capital of the Reichsland Elsaß-Lothringen (Alsace-Lorraine),

which never received the courtesy of being an equal member state of the federal empire, rather a quasi-colonial appendage … never more than halfway German… Döblin’s gift for encapsulating while spreading out, his overview into the small which in a magical way serves to illuminate the big and the whole, his observation and appreciation of the apparently incidental, his seemingly cool recording of a thousand banalities – all at once this multiplicity comes together to the reader’s inner eye as a magnificent picture pregnant with meaning …

Hermann Kesten, in the final (1940) issue of the Paris-based periodical Das neue Tage-Buch, wrote:

With Döblin it is not only people who figure in the narrative, but also ghosts that sometimes appear in a naturalistic framing … blood corpuscles and bacteria play an active role. Nature and History are not thereby anthropomorphised, rather they act biologically and biographically… This novel is a magnificent epic picture-book, where scenes of individuals are the cue for mass scenes, where individual fates are drawn out from the fates of masses … The author shows events from many sides and the perspectives of many people … Invalids and madmen, presidents and generals, workers and intellectuals, citizens and soldiers, all equally significant in an epical rank-ordering that has nothing to do with social and intellectual gradations, all equal in the eyes of poetic justice: bacteria and Herr Ludendorff.

Döblin paints a sad picture of Germany’s condition in 1918: the general weariness and dissolution, businesslike ideals and little religion, more obedience than a sense of what is decent, confused junior officers, moral neglect, and an absence of political goals. He shows revolutionaries with no plan or idea, malicious or stupid citizens, glib leaders, smoke with no flame.

The complete editions from the 1960s on seem to have attracted little critical attention until the 2008 Fischer hardbacks. Jan Süselbeck, in November 2008 wrote

And so we have in many narrative retrospectives an emotionalising tableau of war experiences 1914-18, which put deeply in the shade the comparatively one-dimensional works of Ernst Jünger or even Erich Maria Remarque, which have shaped our concept of literary representations of the First World War up to the present day. Many doctoral dissertations, many conferences and collections of papers will be needed to come anywhere close to doing justice to Döblin’s novel.

And in the FAZ on 23 November 2008 Eberhard Rathgeb wrote

The best book on the revolution comes from the writer Alfred Döblin. It is called November 1918, and was written in exile. The novel is a singularity, and not just within German literature. In a grand manner he composes facts, fictions, events, experiences, history, philosophy, politics, poetry, diagnoses and drama, life-world and forms of life. It’s the blue pool into which anyone should dive who would like to find out how it feels, revolution, history, and yourself in the midst of it. You can learn much from this book. Above all the reader learns in these 2000 pages what it means to discharge your duties as a historical person. In the German Revolution of 1918-19 no one gets anywhere just by reading the newspaper and chewing bread rolls.

Passages cut from the Woods translation

The major cut in the Woods translation was an entire novella-length storyline featuring the failing writer Erwin Stauffer, who is introduced briefly towards the end of Citizens and Soldiers. Although interesting as a fictionalised (and rather burlesque) reflection of Döblin’s own life, this is tangential to the main storylines of the novel, and so is not included in the present volume. (I shall post it on this website in due course.)

Other cut passages feature characters developed to some extent in Citizens and Soldiers, whose appearance in the subsequent volumes would have required tiresome backfilling. These are appended to the present translation.

One cut, a recap of American history from the Mayflower to Woodrow Wilson, has not been restored.