Citizens and Soldiers
The English translation of “November 1918”, Döblin’s massive four-volume epic of the failed German Revolution included only the latter three volumes (A People Betrayed, Return of the Frontline Troops, and Karl and Rosa. The first volume, ‘Bürger und Soldaten’, has not so far been translated. This post describes the circumstances of the epic’s composition and publication, and presents the first two chapters in English.
November 1918: the missing first volume
Towards the end of 1937, having just completed his South American trilogy Amazonas, Döblin embarked on a new project, one much closer to home. As a military doctor in Alsace he had experienced firsthand the chaotic scenes in Haguenau and Strasbourg that followed the Kaiser’s abdication and the Armistice, and wrote about them for the Fischer periodical Die neue Rundschau. (See “Revolutionary Days in Alsace” in the non-fiction collection German Masquerade, on this website.)
He and his family (now with three small children) left Alsace in 14 November 1918 with the hospital 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. His essay “Cannibals”, in the same periodical, reveals his anger at both the ineptitude of the insurgents and the callousness of the Social Democrat Minister of War, Noske.
November 1918 A German Revolution: Citizens and Soldiers presents a vivid panorama of fictional and actual individuals, scenes and events over a period of two weeks. It was published in Amsterdam and Stockholm in October 1939, shortly after Britain and France declared war on Germany. Unsurprisingly it had little chance to circulate, and only two contemporary reviews have turned up, both in exile periodicals. (See below for some excerpts.)
When Döblin returned to Germany in November 1945 as a member (with French military rank) of 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 – made its first appearance in October 1946), and to explore the 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.
But when in 1947 the question arose of publishing November 1918 A German Revolution, Döblin’s own work unit raised concerns about the first volume, because of sensitivities about the status of Alsace-Lorraine, main location of the novel’s action. This border region had been French territory since the 17th century; was annexed by Germany in 1871 after the Franco-Prussian War (a decision pushed by generals but opposed by Bismarck, who rightly foresaw the long term damage it would cause); reverted to France in 1918 (de facto) or 1919 (de jure, as part of the Versailles agreement). Apart from the war years 1940-45 it has since remained French.
Döblin eventually agreed that November 1918 A German Revolution could appear without Citizens and Soldiers. The remaining three volumes appeared successively in autumn 1948, spring 1949 and spring 1950. The English translation by the admirable John E Woods (published in the 1980s by the now-defunct firm of Fromm International in two volumes) used this truncated postwar edition. It is high time that English readers had access to the missing first volume.
In Germany, the missing first volume was first published in 1961 by the East German firm Rütten & Loening in their 4-volume hardback edition of the work. In West Germany, dtv produced a 4-volume paperback boxed set in 1962 (reprinted 1978 and 1995); and in 2008 Fischer issued four separate titles in hardback (very attractive, but with disappointingly little introductory apparatus), including the first volume; Fischer paperbacks followed in 2013.
November 1918: composition
In summer 1937, Döblin came to know a French Germanist, Robert Minder; they became great 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).
In May 1938 the two men made a trip together in Alsace, to help revive 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 pre-publication excerpts began to appear in the exile weekly Die Zukunft (The Future).
By May 1940 – a week after the German assault against France and the Low Countries began – the MS of the next two volumes had been completed. After the evacuation on 10 June of the French Ministry of Information, where he had worked on counter-propaganda since October 1939, Döblin initially 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. (I don’t know what kind of paper Döblin used, but the weight was probably similar to a couple of reams of printer paper, the bulk probably bigger.)
By September1941 the MS of the second/third parts of November 1918 had been typed up, and Döblin was busy revising and enlarging it to the extent that it would have to become a four-part tetralogy (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 by the European Film Fund.
November 1918: reception
Only two reviews of the 1939 edition have been found, reprinted in the valuable collection by Ingrid Schuster and Ingrid Bode Alfred Döblin im Spiegel der zeitgenössischen Kritik (AD reflected in contemporary criticism), Francke 1973.
(1) 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.” This first volume shows why that is so: “the ‘respectable’ behaviour, the 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 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 of 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 …”
(2) Döblin’s friend Hermann Kesten, in the final (1940) edition of the Paris-based periodical Das neue Tage-Buch, wrote:
“With Döblin it is not only people who are figures in the narrative, but also ghosts that sometimes appear in a naturalistic framing … blood corpuscles and bacteria play an active role. This is no anthropomorphising of Nature or History, rather Nature and History 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 the condition of Germany in 1918: the general weariness and dissolution, businesslike ideals and little religion, more obedience than a sense of the respectable, 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 2008 Fischer hardbacks attracted some attention. Jan Süselbeck, in a long essay at https://literaturkritik.de in November 2008:
“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 Döblin’s novel justice.”
Eberhard Rathgeb, FAZ 23 November 2008:
“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 middle 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.”
