Döblin settles accounts with his father
The family catastrophe that broke over the Döblin family when Alfred was ten years old remained an unhealed trauma for decades. Not until his 50th birthday was to be the occasion for a celebratory volume did he make a painful effort to settle accounts with his father, and rise above his personal bitterness to see the event in a wider context of family and society.
Content Here
The Catastrophe
In 1888, when Alfred was ten years old, his father absconded from the family home in Stettin with a pretty employee half his age. The family, which had slowly but surely been entering on a prosperous middle-class existence, was immediately plunged into destitution. They had to migrate to Berlin, reliant on the charity of his mother’s relatives.
Its impact on Alfred
In a first attempt at autobiography in 1917-18, Döblin asks:
“Is there such a thing as a father you can look up to? It must be such a lovely cocooning feeling. It’s hard on someone like me, who for hours at a time, days, even months, is haunted and nobody offers him shelter…”
There follows a rather sketchy and superficial account of the catastrophe and its consequences, with just a few descriptions of his father: he was “a superior kind of master tailor or maker of ready-to-wear clothing; he employed a number of tailors and cutters, as well as seamstresses and sewing girls.” At synagogue his father “sang in the choir. His father was very musical, played both violin and piano to an average standard, taught the older children the basics… He also sketched little pictures, which he coloured in.” On the other hand, he “tended to lash out, beatings were not infrequent.”
Ten years later, Alfred steeled himself to confront the trauma, and understand if not condone its causes. At the start of a long, complex series of essays titled ‘A First Look Back’ he is enticed by a supposed interlocutor to provide three accounts. The first is somewhat defensively jokey – clearly more is lurking beneath the surface; the second reveals continued bitter feelings for the father – the writer cannot yet rise above his personal trauma; while the third achieves a more balanced perspective, in which the father’s situation – pushed into an arranged marriage with a woman of quite different temperament – is depicted with a certain sympathy. The writer has been able to broaden the focus to the social, inter-generational dynamics.
The first five sections of ‘First Look Back’ are translated below. Or if you prefer, you can download the PDF.
- Dialogue in the Münzstrasse
- Arrival in Berlin
- Setting the scene for a catastrophe
- The tale is retold
- A third time!
From ‘A First Look Back’
By Alfred Döblin (1928)
Translation © C.D. Godwin 2020
THE FAMILY CATASTROPHE
1. Dialogue in the Münzstrasse
It’s midday. I’m sitting in a little café on Alexanderplatz, and it occurs to me: here in this district, in the east of Berlin, I’ve sat ever since I arrived in Berlin forty years ago. Here I went to school, a few gaps came – university, internship, war, but always a return to the space between Alexanderplatz and Jannowitzbrücke, later even farther east, out towards Lichtenberg. It occurs to me: I’d like to go away from here sometimes, to the west. Where there are trees, the Zoo’s there, the Aquarium and the Botanical Gardens with the steamy hothouses – ah, those are fine things.
Good day, Doctor.
Good day.
How’s it going? In a café, in broad daylight?
It’s my usual time. (If only I knew who this fellow is.)
How’s the practice going?
Thanks for asking, one year much like another. We muddle along.
And the children? You know, you have to get away from here, this is really no place for you. You must go west, mix with people.
Hm, and how?
I should tell you, Doctor, I’ve often seen you here, but I was busy, well, I could have told you what you needed, but you don’t want it.
Goodness, whyever not?
No, no, don’t be miffed. You don’t want it. I can tell just by looking at you. It’s not the practice or anything like that.
Now you really do have my attention.
Be my guest. (Sits at my table, keeps his hat on – that’s usual here). A doctor told me, colleague of yours, it’s other things entirely. Yes. Look here, have you ever heard of it, sexual humiliation by a woman? (I’m flabbergasted, shocked, for Heaven’s sake what’s going on.) Well, it’s all linked. Lots of people don’t want, really don’t want, what they ought to, even if they could. You’d never think it. Doctor told me, straight off the bat. It’s not impotence, the opposite. First you say: what a wimp, no guts, then out it comes: he just doesn’t want to. Humiliates himself. For pleasure, playing games. Funny, eh? Such goings on.
For Heaven’s sake. (It’s the Freud fraternity, this is what they peddle.)
So, what do you think?
First I’ll finish my coffee. There. Now tell me, what sort of pleasure is that supposed to bring with it?
(He whispers in my ear, pushes his hat back, grins.) Sadism! Against himself!
(I’d expected this, burst out laughing, can’t stop. The café falls apart.) Amazing, what you encounter in the Münzstrasse.
(He beams.) So, what say you, my little doctor? (He says ‘little doctor’, soon we’ll be dividing our assets.)
I’ll just light a cigarette. You too? Well then, as I said, that’s really something! Hang on a moment, I must have another laugh, a few bits in there still. There, it must all be out now, this time it reached all the way to the Reichstag.
So what about what I said, my little doctor?
Excellent. But it’s just that I can’t do any business with it.
(The fellow frowns.) That’s what they all say.
Take a look out the window, past the maitre d’. See the people, lots of grey simple people, walking past, doing something. That’s us working people, proletariat. Take a look at them, and then at me.
Done. I’ll take the difference in Prussian bonds, please!
Pay attention, now it’s the Bible: This is my heart, and this is my blood, something of the sort. In the New Testament. These people here and this street, that’s the blood. And the heart’s sitting here. These people, that’s the air, and I’m the lungs. And then: there’s the army, and here a soldier sits.
(He sniffs, gives me a suspicious look, scratches his chin.) I don’t understand.
If you wanted to know my life, I mean my whole life, earlier, you’d understand soon enough. With no sadism at all. How it all hangs together, what they call life. When you look back, there’s a clear logic to it, a meaning. You were talking of Freud, his guff about humiliation, or Adler. According to them the whole world is made of defects. First there’s a hole, and then something develops around it. But as for me, in principle there’s nothing to be done with it! Defects – I have some, like any respectable person. And anyway, it’s written: this is my home, and I get along fine here, I get along wonderfully. (Though sometimes I’d like to be among green, see a tree for once, or a little lake.) I’m a toad and I croak happily around the district. Without any sadism. Or masochism. Those I deliver only in novels. I’m a working man and a proletarian. And anyway, if you were to take me to Kurfürstendamm I’d croak around there just the same. There’s no way I’ll be intimidated. I was created by the dear Lord God and he fashioned me from a great lump of clay. Some other gentlemen, I name no names, he put together in error, they slipped away from him on Shabbes, or at dessert – (The fellow sniffs, and makes himself scarce.)
- Arrival in Berlin
Could I ask you, Doctor, instead of this dialogue – which of course may well be dreadfully interesting – to tell us rather something about yourself?
Well, I came to Berlin forty years ago, having already been born. I came to Berlin in a condition not so different from my birth, ten years earlier, in Stettin. It was to some extent an after-birth. But no one noticed anything. (Really, in Stettin I was only pre-born.) So we travelled from Stettin to Berlin. On the train my mother chatted with people who knew the city. Our district, Blumenstrasse, is very badly made (they said), lots of factories and smoke, the language is very lively and flows like a river. I never dared say anything, or rather, ask anything. I suffered birth pangs. I was afraid, ever more afraid. It affected my stomach. The pangs grew worse. And as we drew nearer the buildings of Berlin, I was at the end of my tether. I stood at the window, it was dark, late evening, I couldn’t hold it in. There was the child, it ran down my trousers, I felt better, I stood in a puddle. I sat down relieved. –
Later we travelled through the great strange city, and there a second miracle happened. At a brightly-lit station we got onto a train. Off it went, through the night, sped along for a few minutes, and stopped. And – we were back at the same station. I thought I must be mistaken. But the game repeated itself twice, three times. We moved, the same station came, then we got off and were soon home. Had we travelled in a circle? But why, what for, and in the end we had arrived. Only as a mature man did I see through the riddle. It became clear and clearer: we had taken the Stadtbahn. At night the stations of Berlin all look the same, especially if you come from Stettin. We had gone from Friedrichstrasse to Jannowitzbrücke. But it was an unforgettable experience; even today it exercises a calming effect on me.
There were six of us making this magical journey: my mother, forty-two years old, and us five siblings, a bunch of Stettin sprats, four boys and a girl, I the second youngest. We had shaken from us the dust of Stettin (the water too, in my case). For something had happened to us. We had been expelled from a little Paradise.
- Setting the scene for a catastrophe
In Stettin on the Oder there once lived my father, Max Döblin, and he was a merchant by trade. But that’s not really a trade: he was owner of a ready-to-wear clothing business that failed. Whereupon he opened a tailoring shop that did well. This man was married, and over the course of years achieved, not money so much, but five children. One being me. He was blessed with many inclinations and gifts, and you might well say that what his gifts brought in, his inclinations took away. So that this man’s nature acquired a remarkable equilibrium. One day this equilibrium was upset in a particularly violent manner; how and why I’ll report in a moment. Anyway, in his agitation this man decided to travel to Mainz. Anyone who knows Stettin will be astonished by this. For when someone in Stettin becomes unbalanced, he doesn’t travel to Mainz. Maybe to Gotzlow or Podejuch or, if the case is serious, to the local loony bin. But Mainz is unusual. And there was a snag, which no one noticed, not even I, though I was already over nine at the time. The snag was: when my father set off for Mainz, he never arrived. The destination of the train was a clue. It was heading for Hamburg.
And when the train stopped in Hamburg, the motion in my father continued on. Even Hamburg wasn’t the destination. Not Mainz, not Hamburg, it should and must lie farther off. It was America. Between Hamburg and America lies water. Twenty-nine ocean-crossing fliers have already drowned in that water. My father wanted to and had to go across, the urge in him was so strong. He took ship.[x] Although my father’s equilibrium had been upset, he had enough sense not to fly – maybe because at that time there were no aeroplanes. Anyway: he went by ship, like Columbus before him, and so arrived. I don’t know if the Statue of Liberty was already there in New York harbour in 1888. For sure my father erected one in his thoughts. So far had the Stettiner to travel to regain his equilibrium. Such a strange fate. He said he wanted to go to Mainz, but already the ticket was wrong, the train went another way, water came, and there he was in America.
Nor did he travel alone. He took along a mechanic, a doctor, to restore his balance, a body-doctor, body-mechanic. That it was a young girl is irrelevant. Women are suited to many professions, become lawyers, officials, ministers, why not mechanics. Indeed, the good sense of our America-traveller is also evidenced by his taking along a girl and not a man. For who knows better how to restore balance, in all perturbations of the horizontal and vertical state, than a young innocent girl. The girl who crossed the mighty ocean with him, his chosen girl, was called Henriette, surnamed – let us say – Hecht [= Pike]. A fish name, note, such as the watery region brings with it. But – a puzzling play of Nature, a paradox – she was entirely flesh. Clearly Pikes had changed their nature in the course of generations, and so she stood there all charming before the man who was my father, and he found contentment in her.
My father had two eyes, a left and a right. With the right eye he looked constantly upon his family. But the left was to a considerable degree independent. While the right eye was always dimmed with cares, thickly clouded and prone to showers of rain, the left laughed and was happy, and the high pressure zone was a long way off. So that the strange difference between the two eyes should not be noticed, he wore golden eye-glasses. These masked it all, and so he became a serious man – which he was indeed – a man of many facets.
My mother was a simple woman. And because her husband often removed the glasses at home, she knew he had a wandering eye. And like any woman, she was curious to know where it wandered to. The puzzling play of Nature, in itself, interested her not at all. Pure science was no concern of hers. Just as later she had no organ with which to fathom the wondrous events related above, consisting of her husband setting off for Mainz but the train that entered the station was heading for Hamburg on the Elbe – blind violence of technical forces – and hardly had the train arrived when the husband was seized by impetuosity and had to go to St Pauli down by the harbour, was stowed away on a ship and would and must cross the ocean even though it’s so deep and later many drowned in it. None of this interested my mother. Until the end she contented herself with: Husband’s gone off with another woman. A dreadfully simple formulation. My father later suffered greatly under it. Or let’s say: suffered a little. Or let’s say: not at all. For he had the foresight not to come back.[xi]
So my mother was tremendously interested in Stettin, where my father’s eye did its wandering. And the more she sought to expose the secrets of his left eye, the darker the shadows over his right eye. But this didn’t shock her. It was a matter not of heroics, rather of temperament and unreflectiveness, which easily modulate into heroism, to their detriment.
With his wandering left eye my father noticed many people in Stettin: inhabitants of both sexes, taxpayers of both sexes. But he wasn’t interested in whether or how much tax they paid, rather whether they were male or female. He made a naïve simple classification. He was a kind of flesh-fancier. Male flesh he discarded at once. Leaving the female. Lots of that in Stettin. I can’t form a clearer picture, because at that time I was so small. But I recall how as a very young boy a servant girl often led me by the hand out into the street, there were pushchairs, and our walk took us to a dancing-parlour. There I sat on a bench, and in the hall a lot of grown-ups danced, big men and big women, the women identified by their dresses, the men mostly in uniform, with moustaches, soldiers, enormous men sweating profusely. My father, too, must have discovered such girls in Stettin, and the joy of discovery gave him no peace. Just so do famous scholars go by night into their laboratory, peer into their microscope, or calculate, or adjust their apparatus one more time, begin to distil in the middle of the night, determine the melting point. In the end: isn’t discovering a human being, a human type, not equally remarkable and unsettling and exciting, at least for the one who does it? And conversely: is discovering a new element or a chemical bond intellectually different, is it delightful in a different way, exciting, inflaming in a different way than discovering a new human? Thus is love linked to the joy of discovery. My father must have searched a lot and discovered a lot. He practised his science thoroughly and with persistence, and it would have opened great vistas for him if this science had ever been officially recognised. This was clearly the discipline wherein lay his greatest talents.
And while my mother otherwise took no interest in his many other inclinations – for he composed, wrote poems, drew – she was thrown headlong with him into this one passion. At least here a certain nuptial bond connected her and her husband. When the husband went off on his warpath and his left eye leapt into action, she too became agitated. The storyteller must alas avow that she was not so well armed on the warpath as her husband. He carried roses, while she brandished an umbrella. He was loaded up with tenderness and higher manly gifts, she on the other hand with anger. He went like a stag alone in search of water, while she carried projectiles to disturb his drinking. That was the difference between the married couple. She thought of her children, the family and that he was her wedded spouse, while he: How lovely to walk arm in arm in the sunshine – ha, it wasn’t his wife’s arm. It wasn’t even always the same arm. The man lived in deepest turmoil. He had discovered Nature’s breadth and the manifold variety of Stettin’s females. He varied the sources of his enlivening. Only late on did he accustom himself to one, and that was the w0rst thing of all, for it so happened that the source was not his wife. Actually it would be true to say that the opposite would have been a coincidence. For there are notoriously many millions of women in the world; why should a man love precisely the one he’s married to? It would be a very remarkable conjuncture! That’s how it was with my father. The wife, the strong woman with the umbrella, drew near. Armed with anger, and a decided aversion to finding here anything to “understand”. She bore herself with legitimacy, pathos, claims. The tragedy commenced. Thundering Jupiter revealed his presence. Thus do people stroll among greenery and a cloud gathers, and it begins to pour. You think of strolling through greenery, and already you’ve forgotten the umbrella.
When back then in Stettin the thunderstorm set itself going in our house and showed no sign of stopping, the husband, it seems, thought of savages in Africa. They have nothing on, but there’s a roof of thatch over them. When a husband thinks of another arm, it’s bad enough; but when he thinks of another roof, then it’s dangerous, and the consequences can hardly be averted. Under the constant storms my father began to dream, mainly of Mainz, but the train was headed for Hamburg, then the sea came, and America. What came next was not in his dream. That’s the worst thing about dreams, they end too soon. He should have dreamed about what came after America.
- The tale is retold
Tell the story again. – Who, me? Why? – Don’t ask. Just tell it to me again, please. –
Hm. Well, if it must be –
One morning in Stettin there was a dreadful uproar at home, crying and screaming, my mother ran one flight up, conversations with her older siblings, strangers came. A letter had arrived from Hamburg, my father, forty-two years old at the time, was on his way to America. He wrote in his pathetic grandiose style – the man knew how to write to you, the most moving letters – “Mountains of gold shall I present to you.”[xii] This was all preceded by years of quarrelling between husband and wife, affairs with women. Finally it revolved around a young girl, one of his employees, twenty years younger than him, a seamstress called Henriette. My mother smoked her out. Incidents of assault and battery occurred, even, if I remember aright, between the married couple. There was utter turmoil in our Stettin home, mother’s relatives came, business friends of father’s, assets were seized, my mother was still paying off debts years later. Us children of course removed at once from the better schools and sent provisionally to a little private tutor lady. That’s life. Sauve qui peut.
While all this was going on over and around us, the day beginning in commotion, grief and tears and ending the same way, while my mother was sounding the alarm to her relatives and begging on our behalf – the man who established this family was traipsing around New York with that girl twenty years younger than he, sitting with her in music halls, keeping a jealous eye on her, and he stayed there for months[xiii] in New York in love and joy, until the money was gone.
Then he returned to Europe and lived with the girl in Hamburg until the day he died[xiv]. My mother called him a bigamist, but it wasn’t true. She divorced him only quite late[xv], when she came into an inheritance.[xvi] In Hamburg he led a modest quite miserable existence, and towards the end relied on assistance.[xvii] Once he had us come to visit him in Hamburg – had there been a quarrel with Henriette, or had be become mindful of his duties? But the word ‘duty’ did not exist in his vocabulary – he swore it was all over with the girl. The oath lasted not even half a year. Then anonymous letters came, and back we were in the east of Berlin. Once he pretended he wanted to work in Berlin, had already found a position, but this or that failed to suit him, he disappeared with no farewells, a telegram came from the Lehrter station, and – he was back in Hamburg, his old haunts.
The man felt comfortable in Hamburg in his poverty and penny-pinching. My eldest brother visited him occasionally, spoke to the companion, they lived together in a poor part of the city, proletarian, clean rooms. At the end the man had a distinguished white beard, wore gold-rimmed glasses and looked like an old grade-school teacher. He was very active in Freemasonry.[xviii] In the end he fell ill: throat cancer. He died of it. My brother accompanied the body to the rainy cemetery, no one else went, and made sure the grave was left tidy. He, who had suffered more than any from the catastrophe, had a difficult encounter with the woman. She too was ailing, could hardly move. She said she was innocent in everything.
– The husband rescued himself in a criminal manner from what must have been a difficult situation. He was uncouth enough to dump his whole family onto his wife’s relatives. He thought to himself: they won’t starve, the shirt is nearer than the coat. Overnight he cast us all into poverty, made beggars of us. He was a scoundrel, taken all in all.
– It’s not right, you say, to utter such a stern judgement over a close relation, one’s own father, now deceased? I would not be my mother’s son and have lived through it all if I were to suppress this tone. I can pronounce a judgement only with words; he pronounced judgement over us in the sternest possible way, with deeds: You lot are stifling me; and he withdrew from us all the duties of his heart and his paternal duties under law. I have no impression that he found this difficult. The father pronounced judgement on his family, but it was, considering all the circumstances, not necessary to judge his family so harshly, with such dismissive cruelty. With due respect to personality, you make it too easy on yourself if you believe you can fulfil your personality by destroying your responsibilities. We do not live in a Bedouin state, a father is not all-powerful over his family, he should be content with my response. If the sins of the father are to be visited on the children unto the third and fourth generations, then the children have the right to haul the father before a tribunal and raise a complaint. The man’s dead. Before the great purifying filter into which we shall all pass, I’ll call a halt and keep silent.
- A third time!
You must tackle it a third time. You must speak about it one more time. – But about what? This affair? I’ve told it twice already. Why then? – You’ll see, you know it already, just make a start. – I don’t know. – Start!
His parents were strict people. – That’s good. Start with the parents. – They married him off at twenty-five. – Well well, you know it all, young man! Always so fluent. – He was weak, pliable. He offered little resistance, let himself be married, he was a good match for the Freudenheim woman, handsome chap with money. Dear God, but these are no excuses. – We want to see for ourselves. Go on. – Not much more to go on. They have children, his business fails, he sets up a tailoring workshop. Then – What then? – Then his parents died.[xix] – Ah. So. His parents died. – Yes. – That must have been an important factor? – I need to look into it. Let me look into it. So his parents died. They had married him off. The man’s on his own. This gives the wife a certain difficulty. But I’ve forgotten something. – Please. – It’s hard for me to talk of it, but I probably should. Well then: husband and wife did not get along. – Because it was arranged? I mean, because his parents had organised it? – That too, from his point of view. But that’s not the point. They didn’t belong together. Not at all. – Hm, hm. – Yes. It’s probably not nice of me to speak of it. – I think people should be comfortable speaking the truth. It clarifies. Maybe you’ll have a better view of other things too. – The wife, my mother, was hard-headed, she came from a merchant family. He, the Hamburg fellow, was a happy-go-lucky type, a gifted creature. He had many gifts. – Such as? – He wielded an entire arsenal of gifts. He played violin, piano, without ever having lessons. We ourselves had our first music lessons from him. The piano, I still recall, was for a long time a casing without legs; the top was mostly used during the day for cutting cloth. Dust from the fabric dropped between the keys, it had to be cleared with bellows. The man composed. One of his pieces was even arranged for the organ by the music teacher in our school, the Friedrich-Wilhelm Realgymnasium in Stettin. He sat over books on composition. He sang, and not badly. He wrote occasional poetry, could sketch rapidly. He was clever at designing clothes. Really an amazingly talented fellow; so many artistic things. This profusion of gifts came I believe from his mother’s side, his mother was née Jessel; Leon Jessel, composer of the ‘Tin Soldier’ and other operettas, was a cousin. But nothing my father did prospered.
Firstly he was happy-go-lucky and never persisted at anything, then of course at home they never let him learn anything; this made him very fed up; and later his family clung to his legs. That was us, five kids, and the wife. He was also a creature of impulse, with no ambition. In this man, I can still see him before my eyes, was something soft, slack, weak and idle. So he and his gifts went on living. He maundered along, never felt really unhappy. A weakling, all in all. But not an ignoble animal.
– It’s all very good, what you say. You see how necessary it was for you to begin again. So, continue in your own good time. – These are bad things I speak of. I know them well, though I don’t like to remember them. It leads straight to me. – But please, we have time. I’m not forcing you. Will it be so very hard? – No no, it’s all right. So, where was I, my mother, yes. My mother hadn’t much respect for him. She called him an ‘educated bootboy’. An evil phrase. A bad chapter, this pride in business and money in my mother’s family. They were all very lively, active, practical people, earners and a few even gourmets. Anything beyond was unknown! No, not unknown, but ridiculous! An excuse for scorn, for irony. Like when Indians or Blacks come to us and children mock them in the street. Dreadful. It was from that side that one of the bombs came that flew over the marriage of my mother with this multi-talented wimpish man. That’s it. I have to say it.
I can speak of it because I too have learned to know this scorn, this narrow-mindedness, this bitter overweening hardness. I would never have dared, had no right to dare, to show my scribblings at home. For many years no one at home knew that I wrote. And when in 1906 a little theatrical piece of mine[xx] was performed in a matinée together with a play by Paul Scheerbart[xxi], it was not under my name, the name of my family, but under a pseudonym.[xxii] But earlier, in 1902, this domestic pressure had already caused something almost serious, in fact only tragic-comic. Because I avoided putting my name to my scribblings, I had sent my first novel (it lies even now in my desk drawer) to Fritz Mauthner (at the time a critic in Berlin, since him there’s been no theatre critic of any gravity in Berlin) but under a pseudonym. Mauthner’s eyes were giving him trouble, he lived in Grunewald, after writing to me at the Anatomy Institute where I was then working he used my fake address, asked me to visit him and read the MS out loud to him, his eyes were giving him trouble. A truly strange shyness and dread held me back from paying him a visit. Now, I know where the shyness comes from. I already had a bad conscience about my works. I was imbued with it. Unto the second generation. I once ventured to Grunewald to look him up. But I’d arranged it quite cleverly so it was already dark and in the darkness I couldn’t find my way to him. From a safe haven I wrote him a letter, in which without giving any reason I asked him to send back the MS. And now the real tragi-comedy begins. Mauthner sent the MS to my fake address, a parcels office. Oranienburger Strasse. And when I turned up there to fetch my MS, they wouldn’t give it me. Parcels were to be handed over against proof of identity. But how could I prove it. I showed them Mauthner’s postcard. It wasn’t enough. I was baffled – and remained baffled. I dared not explain the facts. That bad, horribly bad conscience! The second generation! Oh, it’s a torment. To think such things are possible. They’d have opened my MS, and I, I’d have died of embarrassment. So the MS remained unclaimed at the parcels office. It irked me for months. The handwritten MS of my first novel (Jagende Rosse) was thrown away by the parcels office, or pulped, I had no copy. I made a resolution: from sketches, drafts and my memory I rewrote the whole thing, in bitterness, despondency. In a thoroughly black mood the whole time.
Yes, it went on like that, and nothing changed. When I was already a doctor and a book of mine appeared, my mother asked: “What are you doing that for? Don’t you have a profession?” She meant my medical practice. To mollify her I had to tell her I earned a little from it. It wasn’t true. (Now, actually, when she’s no longer living, I find that the woman was not so wrong. Really I should have let it be –). To her it was just playing around, my writing, a pastime unworthy of a serious person. That was still a definite character trait in people who came from modest circumstances into the Reich and had to earn a living, and strangely it was utterly different from what I found later in Poland among the Jews that impressed me so deeply: reverence for the book, reverence for the mind. My father had carried around such a spillage of gifts. Ethnologically, he was a victim of migration. All his values were re-evaluated and devalued. That’s why, that’s why his marriage failed to thrive. Not until my generation has a sense, a joyful sense of our origin and the ancient reverence slowly and painfully re-emerged. I – I survived the great migration.
My mother, I can go on now quite calmly, it was after all good that I said it, my mother had no respect for her husband. Her brothers too had no time for him. So the man, now I see it more clearly, the man, who was anyway a skirt-chaser, now he began to breathe the air outside the home, the air that home denied him. Gradually the man became a phoney rebel; phoney; he didn’t dare escape. As long as his parents were alive he kept his head down. Then he became defiant, I could say: braver, more decisive. He was often caught out. Quite clearly he neglected his wife. And he was growing older, he came to the dangerous forties, and now he had to encounter Miss H. It laid Fate on him like an experiment. He burst into flame, the man had probably never experienced anything like it, it was clearly a genuine, really strong passionate love. He was ripe for it. There was much in him lying ready for passion to stoke the fire and provide fresh logs. It was a life crisis. His cart starts jolting and lurching. At home the coldness, the lack of freedom, the quarrels grow worse. Then … suddenly he just leaves. Finally, finally. – Why do you say finally? – It just came to me. – You look pale. It must affect you deeply. Perhaps we’d better stop here. – No thanks. I can go on. I’m no longer a young lad, to be sent tumbling by an insight. I see it all clearly. I’m glad to let it all out. How the Gods are feared by the human race! They hold dominion in eternal hands, and wield it as they please.[xxiii] – May we continue? – Of course. It was my father’s life-crisis. He walked out, simply walked out, this man. It does me good to see it like that. Now, if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to pause for a while. – Good, good. We have time. – Let’s go on. So, my father swam away from Stettin.
Now he can do it. That’s how far he’s come. He goes quite easily. There’s no reason at all to think he’ll ever come back. Why would he? Pangs of conscience, should they arise, retreat behind the sense of a new existence, of freedom. Will his wife change? Not the slightest chance. She clings to him, he’s her husband, but in their natures they are strangers. There is no contact. With the tender young girl over there, he blooms. He feels good. It’s his element, his boundless element. His existence. He’ll stay with her. Maybe nothing will become of him, for all his gifts. His father wanted to force him to become something false. Result: desertion, the husband cheated of half his life, the family pauperised. They should have let him loose while he was young, or given him some coarse or clever woman, a tight rein or a very loose one. Now he is déclassé. Nevertheless: he’s alive, alive, understand, he lives in that class, on another continent, according to his nature. – We’ll stop there. It’s all been said, no doubt. For now. – Yes. But how should I sum it up?
As incontestable as his judgement upon the family is the family’s judgement upon him. I cannot touch on this. For the one who takes on others’ deeds, the deeds of the parents, the judgement will be severe. It does not come to judgement. Only to a bowing of the head. To a complaint perhaps in another direction. In the end we are left with an insight, a lesson, a warning, for now, for those of us who are still alive.
0O0
A collection of autobiographical essays was prepared by Döblin as his 50th birthday approached (10 August 1928), for a celebratory volume called Alfred Döblin: Im Buch – zu Hause – auf der Strasse, edited by Döblin and his friend Oskar Loerke (reader for the S. Fischer publishing house). Twelve excerpts were published in the Frankfurter Zeitung in July 1928. This text and notes are based on Schriften zu Leben und Werk, edited by Erich Kleinschmidt, Walter Verlag 1986.
Münzstrasse runs from Alexanderplatz towards the (Jewish) Scheunenviertel (‘Warehouse Quarter’).
1904/5 at Freiburg im Breisgau.
Nov. 1905 – Aug. 1906 as Assistant Doctor at the municipal asylum in Regensburg.
Jan 1915 – Nov. 1918 only short leaves in Berlin, while living as military doctor in Saargemünd and Haguenau.
Railway bridge over the Spree, a short way southeast of Alexanderplatz.
AD moved to Lichtenberg in 1919, after setting up his practice in the Frankfurter Allee.
Street, no longer existing, from Alexanderplatz to Andreasstrasse.
[x] Max Döblin sailed on the Rhetia on 8 July 1888, arriving in New York on 23 July. He sought out a tailoring shop called ‘Döblin’ which had been in business on Broadway since 1867; maybe the owner was a relative. The attempt failed, and in September he returned to Hamburg with his paramour Henriette Zander.
[xi] Not quite accurate. Max Döblin lived with the family again for half a year (April-Sept 1889), having sought since January to be reconciled with his wife. In 1895 and 1897 he made two long visits to Berlin, where the family was again living.
[xii] From Terence, ‘Phormio’; no doubt here a vague trivial memory.
[xiii] Actually barely one month.
[xiv] On 22 April 1921, of throat cancer. Alfred’s eldest brother Ludwig attended the funeral.
[xv] In spring 1908.
[xvi] From her well-to-do elder brother Rudolf Freudenheim.
[xvii] From eldest son Ludwig.
[xviii] No evidence for this has so far come to light.
[xix] Father 1881, mother 1886.
[xx] Lydia und Mäxchen (written 1905). It had already been performed in December 1905 (in Döblin’s absence) in the salon of Herwarth Walden’s ‘Society for Art’
[xxi] Scheerbart’s piece was a grotesquery called Herr Kammerdiener Kneetschke.
[xxii] ‘Alfred Börne’. But Döblin’s cover was already blown. In a letter to Walden of 2.12.1905 Döblin expresses annoyance that several attendees already knew he was the author.
[xxiii] From Goethe’s play Iphegenie auf Tauris.
