Döblin in Exile (2)
Flippant and untimely, or profound and appropriate to the time? Irresponsible “comedy” in the face of calamity, or black humour as a response to unstoppable evil? As we saw in the previous post, by 1948 Döblin himself had changed his mind about his novel of exile.
The Origins of a (mistimed?) Epic
Having fled Berlin in February 1933 with the handwritten opening chapters of his new epic novel, begun some three months previously, Döblin spent the rest of the year completing it. Until August he and his family were in Zurich, where Döblin confesses to an apparently perverse mood of exhilaration despite having lost both his medical practice (which had provided not just a steady income but close daily contact with “ordinary” Berliners) and all his earnings from writing in Germany. Then, considering Zurich too expensive (and “infested” with Comintern activists), he moved the family to Paris, where his poor French “infuriated” him. In the autumn he returned to Zurich for a few weeks to finish his new novel in a German–speaking environment. (See previous post Döblin in Exile (1) for more details.)
Through surviving letters we can trace the novel’s progress to publication:
23 Nov 1933 to his friends the Rosins: “My novel (title probably Conrad who will not atone) will appear in the spring.”
2 Jan 1934 to H Gollong: “My new novel’s finished and delivered… will appear in March, an extensive creation, depicts the path of suffering and fun of a tyrant, a Babylonian god, through every human foible of drink, love, money-grubbing, until he becomes a poor little human.”
12 Jan 1934 to the publisher G. Bermann: “It is thoroughly a work of mine, I stand by it, no casual job.”
As with all his epic fictions since The Three Leaps of Wang Lun, the composition of the new novel followed a familiar pattern. First, a seed plants itself in him, a hint of a topic and a theme triggered by something that somehow captures his attention, or at least his subsconscious. As the seed sprouts, he begins to search out materials to nourish it, his mind serving almost as a medium through which the theme can emerge into the world. In his post-exile memoir Schicksalsreise (Destiny’s Journey), he writes:
I see myself placed in front of a picture, shoved into landscapes and situations that emerged in me – I can’t say I thought them up or invented them. I could neither summon these phantasies nor protect myself from them. And there was one curious aspect to this. One never stepped into it alone, even if it seemed so to one at the time. I never sat alone at my desk. I was always surrounded by a great company: by words, by language. Words came along with me. But the words here were something other than words out there, which serve to communicate and signify. What entered into my study served for constructing, playing, shaping. They wore a kind of spirit-clothing. They weren’t allowed to bring in anything else. A strange business, writing. I never started until the ideas had reached a certain ripeness, and that occurred when they began to clothe themselves in language. Once I had this image, I dared to set out with it, in my pilot boat, out of the harbour, and out there I soon spotted a ship, a huge ocean steamer, and I stepped aboard and off I went. I was in my element, I voyaged and made discoveries, and only months later came home from such a great journey, sated, and could tread dry land again. My voyages behind the closed door took me to China, India, Greenland, to other ages, and out beyond Time. What a life.
The new novel published by the exile publishing house Querido Verlag in Amsterdam, was titled Babylonische Wandrung, oder Hochmut kommt vor dem Fall (Babylonian Exile, or Pride Goes Before a Fall) – hereafter ‘B.W.’
The “preambles”
The novel as a whole, and each of the seven Parts, is preceded by a short Preamble of the sort Döblin had first adopted, like a compère at stage left, in Berlin Alexanderplatz. Here are the eight Preambles:
A great lord has landed in certain difficulties and has to forswear his customary extravagances. Hooking up with two others no better than he, the poor beggar leads in their company a life that takes him to many cities, of which, to indicate the extent of their travails and the setbacks they encounter, we name only Baghdad, Constantinople and Paris.
A great deal from the spheres of love, drink and confidence trickery crosses their path, matters to which hitherto they have had no exposure as either actors or victims. Each wonderful city reveals its architectural charms, its virtues and vices, its historical background, its lively commercial life – to which they contribute in various ways.
Slowly the great lord, standing on the shoulders of the other two, manages to find his feet. He wins through, his soul unruffled.
In the end, he who never consented to undergo these trials has to admit: the journey was a long one, but worth it.
It is also incidentally the story of an Adam, who meets numerous Eves but nary a sin, and quits Paradise with a heavy heart.
And incidentally the story of a tyrannical ruler who makes himself out to be divine; his harassed progress through the joys and miseries of our existence, his rise to a poor simple human.
Part One: Prelude in Heaven
A rich haughty lord, Conrad by name, finds to his consternation that he has become insolvent. He must leave his sumptuous palace along with just a single companion, and adapt to a totally transformed way of life.
Part Two: Babylon
The lord, Conrad by name, still unclear as to the extent of the catastrophe that has befallen him, tallies his available assets. He convinces himself that his ruin is complete. But he is not disheartened.
Part Three: Baghdad
The Babylonian party, soon grown to three – they can only be described as a pack of rogues – slogs through with thievery, deception and begging, first in Baghdad, a city located today in Iraq with 150,000 inhabitants of whom 90,000 are Muslims, 50,000 Jews and 10,000 Christians.
Part Four: Constantinople (I)
The trio, having made a precipitous departure from Baghdad, settle down effortlessly to an easy life in Constantinople (Istanbul). Each of them does all right in his own way. One loves, another drinks, the third grows rich.
But love and the bottle show their dark side. Only money-making proceeds in a steadily rising line.
Part Five: Constantinople (II)
We are still in Constantinople, and recall:
The trio, having made a precipitous departure from Baghdad, settle down effortlessly to an easy life in Constantinople (Istanbul). Each of them does all right in his own way. One loves, another drinks, the third grows rich.
But love and the bottle show their severe, bitterly severe, mortally severe dark side. Only money-making proceeds in a humane, conciliatory, steadily rising line.
Part Six: Zurich
Our garland of cities should not fail to include gentle Zurich. One of our trio requires a climatic health resort.
The second has meanwhile drunk himself to death, the third has encountered business difficulties. As always, the lover has the worst of it.
Part Seven: Paris
The end of the road. We are in Paris.
The haughty lord, an erstwhile bankrupt, is filled with wonderment at this city, despite the difficulties that in this very place land him in the most lamentable situation. He shall be rewarded for his fortitude and unshakeable good cheer. So it is not far from Paris that he finds the words to say: “The journey was long, but fruitful!” and the other fulfils what we promised at the start: this is the story of a tyrant who makes himself out to be divine, his rise to a poor human.
What the critics said about B.W.
Although large parts of Germany’s book world – writers, editors, publishers, critics – had gone into exile and were working to keep the culture alive, the reach of any new literary production was severely constricted. The first edition of B.W. (in April 1934 by Querido Verlag Amsterdam, which during the 1930s established a long list of exiled writers, including almost all the big names) attracted a scant four reviews in exile literary journals. Two were unfavourable, one favourable on balance while noting difficulties, the fourth very positive. It’s worth looking at these in some detail, as they reveal shallow reading, prejudice and mistaken analyses that have coloured the reception of B.W. until now.
.1. In the first issue of the Neue deutsche Blätter (edited by Oscar Maria Graf, Wieland Herzfelde and Anna Seghers between September 1933 and August 1935) the critic Albin Stübs waxed furious that a writer in these times could pen a work so useless for “the struggle”:
So it begins: an intelligent writer of bourgeois background decides to write a book. He is gifted with a craftsman’s nimbleness and a certain solipsism. He has read much and learned a bit, and apart from that – why should he keep quiet about it – he sits in the Zurich Central Library… The reference materials provide the writer with the substance, the filling of the novel, all he needs to do as soon as a word- or symbol-association pops up is to select, add to, or transform something, rather in the modern vulgar style… As a grown-up late European he is on the most familiar terms with all the heroic sagas and all branches of knowledge, he can clap Kepler on the back, and borrow Hercules’ club in order to fling giants into the abyss…
The writer, always concerned with his beloved Ego, appears in this book in the most varied modifications…: as narrator, as Nursie telling fairy-tales, as advocate for his heroes, as his own compère (when he often indicates within his plot that he can’t know everything because he’s sitting not in Constantinople but in the library in Zurich), but in particular he steps forth with literary clowning…
We see him sit there, the writer, with his infantile self-reflections: see what an original fellow I am … Amid a hundred mirrors that make him in turn big, small, skinny, enormous and ridiculous, there stands a vain inflated Ego. In this Hall of Mirrors from which there is no exit, Dr Alfred Döblin offers the literary St Vitus Dance of a narcissist…
.2. In Das neue Tagebuch (published in Paris and Amsterdam between 1933 and 1940) Ludwig Marcuse (who would become a fellow Hollywood exile) wrote: “Shame that this corpulent work has no index! “ He continued:
Well – thinks the reader who has not read Döblin – a didactic show-off, shovelling handfuls out of the encyclopaedia to fatten a slender travelogue/love story up to 700 pages. And truly, the reader does sometimes wheeze asthmatically under this didactic fat. Now and then, when he runs out of puff, in ironic resignation he finds it astonishing that the writer was content with only 700 pages, that he exercised the self-control not to relate every tale about every Alexander …
But however often the reader is tempted to interrupt as with an old chatty aunt: “Come to the point, Mr Döblin!” – we suddenly find ourselves carried away by a narrative stream of a breadth and spate which in the age of the “art novel” is nothing short of epical. Döblin has the playful insouciance of an ancient teller of epic tales. He takes devilish delight, like the ancestors of every novelist, in telling everything he knows, what he’s heard, what he imagines; and so newspaper reports and Baedeker guides and specialised research and his moods and his thoughts and a hundred residual memories are melded by a huge, original, even atavistic passion for storytelling into a tale whose dimensions seem not of this climate. Döblin is a contemporary anachronism…
The confused hubbub of the Döblin world is matched by the confusion of feelings in the reader’s breast about this unusual novel. But slowly and surely, sympathy for this book grows. Open up the volume and read the very first section of the first chapter: how the Babylonian-Chaldean-Assyrian god Conrad, a little old monkey on his high throne of stone, wakes up. I know of no reality that for me is more real and unforgettable than this outgrowth of Döblin’s imagination. What a plethora of ghosts that will not depart! What power to bewitch the reader, who just now thought the author was delivering nothing more than somewhat decayed material from a post-mortem room of the spirit. During the reading – this cannot be denied – one is often enough filled with rage against the author. At the moment when the god Conrad is finally transported from his blessed dream into our death, one begins to flick slowly back through the volume, re-read, reconsider, reconsider, reconsider, re-read – and senses that once again a close friendship will be formed between us and this book.
.3. In De Weegschaal (no information found on the Dutch or German Wikipedia sites) one E Horbach (no information) wrote –
A most remarkable book. It is confused, incoherent, anecdotal, a conglomeration of historical, geographical, astronomical, technical knowledge, that seems to have been copied willy-nilly out of an encyclopedia. And then the style! We are already somewhat accustomed to Alfred Döblin, but this takes the biscuit! …
The tyrant, who believed himself divine, is harried through the joys and misery of human existence, and slowly is able to rise to the level of poor human. He acknowledges his sins: megalomania and vanity … Truly, a right meagre outcome for the laborious trudge (Wandrung) through Döblin’s difficult book.
.4. In Die Sammlung (“The Collection”, published by Klaus Mann in Amsterdam between September 1933 and 1935; Aldous Huxley was a patron) Döblin’s friend Hermann Kesten wrote the most appreciative review:
… “What a writer wants,” said Goethe, “and whether that tendency suits us and what he achieves, that’s for the critic to test.”
What does Döblin want with his latest novel Babylonian Exile?
This exile is the mythical Fall of Man. One who was divine descends into quasi-divinity, into the wearisome and scarcely consoling frailty of humankind. Does Döblin want to depict the emptiness of life, as he piles up an almost endless heap of the human, mixes the fantastic with the scientistic, denounces the poorly concealed normality of business, love, religion, the many countries, cities, the history and histories, the observation, and finally, following the pretty schema, settlements and farming depicted with voluptuous rapture?
Does he strive for religion, improvement, beauty? He loves the plenitude of events, distrusts the way the world goes, and hates whatever is mean. He sees the world and looks in many books and narrates fabulously like the Homeric bards. He fabulates. He has the imagination of a born storyteller. He possesses the German language in such rich profusion that now and then he seems possessed by it. Everything interests him, and he evinces the pretty pretence of the epicist to know everything.
His new novel … is the fable of a Babylonian god, Conrad, who takes a trip to our Earth and falls victim to its laws and becomes humanised, travelling through the barbarism of our age, the ancient path of the gods, migrating from east to west from Babylon and Baghdad via Constantinople and Zurich to Paris. Conrad, who retains only the memory of being a god and only in this is indistinguishable from us mortals, freeloads his way through life, love, the sciences, peoples, the many strange fates, a passive hero, an adventurous traveller, a melancholy dilettante of life, like every hero of a great comic novel, indeed of all comedy …
This satirical, ironic, often witty novel has no tendency, rather a hundred tendencies. It critiques modern life, but perhaps does not want it any different, for today is so wonderful in stupendous and manifold ways, so rich in diversions and blessed with hustle and bustle. It would much rather rhapsodise the world … Döblin depicts everything, all the profusion of worlds past and present, now and then he forgets the material, sometimes loses the theme, but the narrative never stalls. This constitutes the secret of his language, which actually lies out in the open. He seems to credit the profusion of his luxuriant language to an “artistic error”. Döblin, wallowing in associations, obeying the idle dictates of imagination, seems to write down everything that occurs to him … Döblin scoffs at the law of the realists that depicting means “leaving out”, he declines the strict parsimony of the Classical style, he natters, relates, rhapsodises, recollects, remarks on everything, forgets to mention nothing, laments, philosophises, quotes, describes and invents a world of poetic wonder. He develops an entire poetics of omnipresent memory. He relishes (as we relish with him) the magic of the fairytale, of meaningful play with reality. He is a Romantic, he speaks with a thousand tongues, and narrates the in the end bitter, bittersweet, fairytales of our world ….
This ever pleasing, always exciting, uncommonly entertaining novel by the remarkable writer Döblin belongs with the very rare and extraordinary comic novels of our tragic epoch …
All were reprinted in Alfred Döblin im Spiegel der zeitgenössischen Kritik (AD reflected in contemporary criticism), eds I Schuster and I Bode, Francke Verlag 1973.
B.W. in English
Now, having whetted your appetite, here translated are the first two Parts of Babylonian Exile for you to download. I hope the background provided in my two posts on Döblin in exile adds to your enjoyment:
Babylonian Exile Part One: Prelude in Heaven
