Defenestrations
In (at least) three of his major fictions, and scattered through his other writings, we find females flinging themselves from a window to their death. What lies beneath this recurring trope?
WITH THE DEFENSTRATION OF PRAGUE, THE REBELS REALLY CROSSED THE RUBICON
To past generations of European schoolchildren, the notion of “defenestration” occurred only in a fixed phrase “The Defenestration of Prague”, which generally meant as much or as little as “The Ides of March” or “The Diet of Worms” (always good for a laugh, that one!), or “the Gunpowder Plot”. So let’s clarify for readers still not quite clear about the historical context.
There were actually three “Defenestration of Prague”: incidents where multiple people were thrown out of windows to add force to a political statement. The first two occasions (in 1419 and 1483) languish in the background; the third is generally taken to be the last straw that plunged Central Europe into the Thirty Years War.
In 1618, members of the Protestant Bohemian nobility, objecting to the Catholic ruler trampling on their rights, threw two senior Catholic officials and their secretary from a third-floor window at Prague Castle into the dry moat below. All miraculously survived, Catholics claiming by the intercession of angels, Protestants alluding to a fortuitously placed dungheap.
One of those defenestrated was William Slavata, who figures largely in Döblin’s Wallenstein. So much for history. Now for the fictional cases.
THREE FICTIONAL DEFENSTRATIONS, ALL REMARKABLY SIMILAR
In Chapter 58 of Wallenstein (written around 1918, published 1920) we read:
On one of these days the empress Eleonore, the lady from Mantua, threw herself from a window of her bedchamber at the Hofburg to lie shattered on the courtyard cobbles. After she had learned by chance of Ferdinand’s absconding, her unhinged behaviour caused her to be confined and closely watched. Her dear Countess Kollonitsch had allowed herself to be diverted for an hour as they both looked out of the window down over the courtyard. They chatted as before; the crafty lady from Mantua tied a blue veil around her happy friend’s black hair, over her eyes, knotted it with some force under her giggling friend’s chin. As Kollonitsch squealed and tried to undo the knot, she calmly pulled a stool across, clasped her hands in prayer, let herself fall forward calling on Mary, down onto her lamenting face.
In Mountains Oceans Giants (written 1922-23, published 1924), towards the end of Part 3 (but cut from the English translation), we read:
She sat up beside Marduk. She shook herself. She felt her way to the bench in the dark. Marduk’s voice: “Who’s there?”
“Me. I’m sitting here. Sitting on the bench.” No, she had not been defeated by Marduk. That, that must be something different. Quite different, terrible. She dropped to her knees by the bench, sank to the floor. Oh to hold something soft, a doll a child. She stroked the floor. “Up, up,” it sobbed in her. “I don’t want to live.”
She stumbled, went very softly on bare feet.
“Who’s there? Be careful of the walls.”
“I’m just going to the window.”
She stood at the window, La Balladeuse whimpering sobbing in her closed mouth, fists drumming on the wall. With a groan she pushed the window open into the dark night, her body half over the frame, leaned out further, head down. Lifted her feet, with a cry. As Marduk ran towards her, she slipped away, kicked her legs. The big black window was empty.
In the third volume of The Amazonas Trilogy (written 1937-38, published in 1938), we read:
July came. Therese, delicate and pale, stepped one morning after a good night onto the balcony of her hotel room, dressed in a morning gown. The streets were very quiet, Heinrich was coming to take her on an excursion. He had a blue car. She saw it rolling up the street. It was her lover, her beloved. He climbed out, saw her, waved, she waved back. He waited at the car, her beloved.
She felt the lovely young wonderful day and all the joy that awaited, the brightness and lustre and sweetness around Heinrich and Marie and how it would decay and she must annihilate it.
And no more reflection, a firm hand grasped her and led her back into the half-dark room. Therese unlocked the door, she was in the corridor, her thoughts clear, the passage, where is the door, here are the bathrooms, the firm hand guided her.
She opened the frosted glass window overlooking the forecourt. Nothing forced her, it was her own will, she pulled herself up onto the windowsill, knelt on the parapet, and stretching her arms out to the lovely severe face of her man, dust motes dancing in the sunlight, let herself fall into the shadows.
And then, from 1920, we find in an essay by ‘Linke Poot’, this casual reference:
…And all the sleek horses, steeds groomed and ungroomed, lions with their terrible smell, little flitting butterflies, black beetles, Parliamentary bigmouths, fraudulent millions, assault on a girl and a leap from a window, holes in socks, children’s cries, the blue Adriatic, …
What motivated, over a period of twenty years, such a recurring trope?
THE MYSTERY SOLVED?
It was not until Döblin approached his 50th birthday in 1928 that he felt able to put to paper an autobiographical hint of the origin of this rather gloomy obsession. Among the papers relating to his extremely artful ‘First Look Back’ but not included in the 1928 publication, he mentions, without embellishment, the fraught relationship between his mother and his older sister, whose only hope of making her way to a life of her own was to find a husband – looking for a job was out of the question for a young woman of her class (however impoverished):
But now and then something fiery, wild, uncultivated broke out, and almost always only in interactions with her only daughter, the second-eldest child. Quarrels with her were almost the order of the day. Dozens of times the tormented daughter, whose future was totally opaque and hence oppressive, screamed that she would leave home. During one quarrel Mother wanted to hit the girl, who was 17 or 18 at the time. She fled crying and screaming from room to room of the third floor Landsberger apartment, beside herself. Finally she jumped onto the windowsill in the front room, flung open the window, and seemed ready to jump out. Mother stood frozen in the doorway, in horror called out to the eldest son, the daughter shouted threats that she would jump and take her own life if people wouldn’t leave her in peace. The episode ended with everyone crying, mutual recriminations. Eldest son went around raging: “The curse of the mother lies on the family.” For Grandmother had once cursed her entire family; the stupendous wording often made an appearance, with ritualised gestures.
The sister, Meta (who would be killed by shrapnel while fetching milk for her children during the March 1919 Lichtenberg uprising), was born four years before Alfred, who would thus have been 13 or 14 at the time of this traumatic family quarrel. The Grandmother’s Curse is a nasty addition to the emotional upheaval.
Still, it seems strange that ten years after externalising the event (while still not making it public), Döblin seems unconsciously to have allowed the suppressed trauma to re-emerge as he wrote the Amazonas episode.
