Encounters with Doblin (2)
From 1937 to Döblin’s death, the French Germanist scholar Robert Minder was one of his closest friends and confidants. This essay, published in TEXT & KRITIK 13/14 (2nd ed., 1972) offers fascinating glimpses of the great writer in exile, and after.
Translation © C. D. Godwin 2021.
For words in bold, see the Notes.
Encounters with Alfred Döblin in France
My first encounter with D. dates from early summer 1937, in Paris. It was occasioned by my study, in French, of his latest novel Pardon wird nicht gegeben (Men without Mercy). He wrote to me on 8 June:
“It’s a notable joy for an author to see himself scrutinised so seriously. One flings off these light and fleeting things that come along and are at once grabbed hold of, so often one misses the mark, and now it’s expanding there, has a foundation, has a relation to what’s in front, to the right, to the left, remarkable. I can only thank you for your penetrating gaze and the circumspection with which you have engaged with me. May I offer you, as an author, hence from the heart, some materials for your book?”
From that autumn on, we saw one another very frequently. I had meanwhile become both his friend and his only patient. (He wasn’t allowed to practice medicine in France.) There were injections, good advice, and brilliant conversations about the world situation, of which the world situation took no notice. When the war broke out, Döblin at his own request was assigned to my bureau in the Ministry of Information by Jean Giraudoux, who had been promoted from writer and head of personnel in the Foreign Office to Secretary of State, a gain neither for literature nor for the state. The interlude ended with the general exodus from Paris in June 1940 – Giraudoux and the officers by car, as was fitting, we others in cattle wagons. Details can be found in Döblin’s memoir Schicksalsreise (Destiny’s Journey), in which I appear as “my friend”, and which goes on to depict his dramatic escape from Marseilles to Lisbon.
In September 1941 he landed with his wife and youngest son in New York, in October 1945 he came back, spent a few weeks in Paris, and in November took up his new post with the French cultural authority in Baden-Baden. In spring 1949 he moved with the office to Mainz, having in the meantime returned now and then to Paris, and after parting from the office he lived for about three years (spring 1953 to February 1956) in the apartment that his wife Erna had bought at 35 Boulevard de Grenelle. We would meet two or three times a week. In spring 1955 he dictated to me a sequence of unknown or little known reminiscences and experiences, to forestall possible cover-ups or falsifications. I shall not touch here on the problematic marriage, a true Strindberg marriage. The writer-doctor himself was fully aware of the connection between this love-hate relationship and an ineradicable mother-complex.
The final meeting took place at Easter 1957 in the convalescent home at Wiesneck near Freiburg. Once again Döblin uttered the fervent wish to be buried in the French village of Housseras, beside his son Wolfgang. He died shortly after being taken to the public hospital in Emmendingen, on the Rhine plain in Baden. The funeral in the eastern Vosges churchyard took place on 28 June. In September of the same year, Erna too was buried there.
What was Döblin’s relationship to France? How were his works received there? The answer to these questions is outlined below, based on numerous discussions with the writer, the memoranda he dictated to me, and our correspondence, amounting to more than 150 letters over twenty years. These raw materials can be fully mined only by a particular study.
*
Döblin had left Berlin at the last minute, on the day after the burning of the Reichstag; an order for his arrest had already been issued. He managed to stroll as a hiker across an unguarded meadow on the Swiss border near Kreuzlingen. Ludwig Binswanger, his psychiatrist colleague, took him in. Zurich was the next stop, once the family came to join him. Döblin felt very constrained in Zurich. His mind, eastwardly rambling, seeking the endless plains of his ancestors, bumped up against the Swiss mountains, the ironclad bourgeois tradition and need for security that lay unflustered behind the wall of Alps and bank holdings, that conducted humanitarianism on a mass scale, and silently put up with individual schizophrenic fissures and leaps – the wheat of C. G. Jung, Dürrenmatt and Max Frisch would one day flourish in this soil.
Paris, the metropolis, offered the writer a chance to immerse himself in the anonymity of the masses, that oceanic expanse that as a young boy he had experienced with a fascinated shudder during the migration from Stettin to Berlin, where he was a wave among waves, lost and at the same time buoyed up, carried by the surf of a tumultuous age. These are no metaphors: this was Döblin’s basic emotion. He sat deep in the tangled roots of things, quite silent and quite addicted, greedily sucked in their substance, and gave it out again as visionary reflexions, which are among the most magnificent creations of 20th century German prose.
Just imagine what it must mean for such an acute observer and at the same time such an intuitive, even vegetative, creative artist, to be forced by violence to break from that nexus into which he was feeling his way ever deeper, ever closer to the centre. Emigration was a horrific test for the 55 year old.
From October 1934 Döblin lived in a rather dark and small apartment at 5 Square Henri Delormel, a side street off the Avenue d’Orléans (today the Avenue du général Leclerc). The quarter is mainly occupied by ordinary people, livened by countless little shops. We would stroll for hours past corner shops, food stores, itinerant hawkers, would take a seat in one of the unremarkable cafés where thirty years earlier Lenin had hatched world revolution. For or against Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Marx, Hegel: such discussions took place too in Döblin’s apartment, with German émigrés. He needed conversation and communication, loved interlocutors like Manès Sperber, Hermann Kesten, Arthur Koestler, Joseph Roth, and like them he was combative, open-minded, dismissive, rapturous. Sparks flew. Reality began to glow. His 60th birthday was the occasion for a splendid party. Anna Seghers, Ludwig Marcuse, Arnold Zweig all gave speeches.
Döblin came into contact with French writers only sporadically. The PEN Club organised an official reception shortly after his arrival, but the other guest of honour was Alfred Kerr, with whom friends of Döblin and Musil had locked horns in Berlin. The joy was gone. Jules Romains belonged to PEN. The father of Unanimism and creator of a wide-ranging novel-cycle about Paris lacked anything of Balzac’s acute visionary power. And where Zola had hurled his J’accuse at the accusers of Captain Dreyfus, Jules Romains chummed up with Ribbentrop and glorified the Franco-German couple – a flexible chap from the Auvergne like his compatriot Pierre Laval. Enough was enough. Döblin turned away. More remarkable was the failure to connect with James Joyce, who had lived in Paris for years as an Irish emigrant. “We looked at one another and said nothing,” Döblin reported of their one and only meeting. Shortly after that I brought him together with an as yet hardly known student friend, Jean-Paul Sartre. The author of Nausée, like Simone de Beauvoir, sensed the greatness of Berlin Alexanderplatz despite the miserable translation, but Döblin maintained his reserve. He had decided in advance that his inadequate French placed him at a disadvantage with French contacts, he became absent, silent. For the same reason his encounter with the philosopher Jean Wahl, acutely sensitive to literature and one of the best authorities on Kirkegaard, bore no fruit. There were Babylonian speech confusions when one evening Jean Wahl brought along a young Chinese man to the Café des Deux-Magots, to discuss Wang Lun. This was in the war winter of 1939-40; with streetlights dimmed, we had to grope our way out into the darkness.
Apart from Berlin Alexanderplatz, only Wang Lun and Babylonian Exile had been translated. Poor sales deterred publishers from further experiments. Even The Blue Jaguar, which appeared after the war, did not sell. In May 1954 Sartre published a translation of the essay “On the metropolis and metropolitans” in his magazine Temps modernes. The Cahiers du sud had already in 1952 (no. 313) printed a half-surrealistic fairytale from early days, “Vom Hinzel und dem wilden Lenchen”, and even earlier a brief essay on modern literature (1927, no. 91). His enormous output had been reduced to these laughable proportions, while so many mediocre writers flourished in translation.
What more could we university people do? Place his books on examination lists; the candidates groaned. He himself was invited by the Sorbonne in December 1937 to give a lecture; in spring I had taken him with me to the University of Nancy, and then accompanied him to the University of Strasbourg. This afforded Döblin moral satisfaction, at a time when Germanists in Germany under the Nazi darkness indulged in Blunckery, Jörn-Uhlery and Hanns-Johstery.
The author of Berlin Alexanderplatz was often enough perceived as spewing poison and gall, rampaging around in shirtsleeves. Döblin was different: delicately built, urbanely cautious in his behaviour, not without elegance, with ironically pursed lips, and a typical stance, head slightly leaning back, listening and at the same time self-assured, as if about at any moment to let fly with some remark, which in a narrow circle he did gladly in a youthfully provocative and copious manner. Eyes behind thick lenses; the gaze partly keeping a sharp watch, partly absent; the shortsighted man had first to feel his way to an outside world that he took in with resonant eagerness through every nostril and pore and which ended up in the overwhelming surges of his inner vision. Beneath the cheerful Berlin hardness lay a deeper stratum: something gentle, at peace with itself, the mystical core around which there orbited his most intimate self.
To this inner core belonged, as an actual embodiment of transcendental love, the young Yolla Niclas, who entered his life as a redemptive female figure in February 1921; he himself dated his vita nuova from that encounter with the 19-year-old at a Berlin masked ball. He soon gave up the attempt to pull free of his family for her sake. He would not emulate his own father’s desertion of wife and children, which had once shaken his life to the roots. That way was closed off from the start by father-hatred and maternal bond, and forced Döblin into a life on two levels as an expression of the inner schism and insuperable ambivalence towards women: a material level with the spouse and four sons, a spiritual level with his beloved. From 1919 to 1940, not one of his works was written without the intimate participation of Yolla Niclas. This intuitively sensitive soul sister, as Döblin referred to her, at once enthusiastic and discreet, followed him to Paris, setting up as a photographer near the Place de l’Étoile, on the other side of the city. Distance played as little role here as it had in Berlin. The lovers met again and again; often, as both later assured me, employing a kind of extra-sensory perception.
The mystical character of the liaison demanded that it be kept a near-total secret from others. Even close friends were not initiated. The flight to America severed the external connection. Döblin lived in Los Angeles under the tyrannical supervision of his wife, who put a stop to any correspondence. Yolla Niclas married in New York. Inwardly, nothing had changed for them both. Shortly before his death, Döblin repeated to me that his deepest wish, which he no longer believed could be fulfilled, was to see Yolla again.
This was the emotional background to the works Döblin completed in Paris. Mornings were taken up with writing. He would retire to his tower, as he would say.
From Zurich he had brought the Babylonian Exile that he had begun in Berlin, and into the final parts of this gigantic capriccioso he worked in impressions of Paris. Into the Jean-Paulesque humour of this grandiose work, bitterness and a lament for our creature-misery break through ever more strongly. The book was published in 1934 by Querido in Amsterdam. A year later, the same publisher brought out Pardon wird nicht gegeben (Men without Mercy), a Berlin family novel that essentially recaps the fate of his elder brother Ludwig. He wrote to me about it:
“The book was written in about six months in Maisons-Lafitte near Paris; it’s the first novel I wrote doing no research, not gathering materials, etc. For one simple reason: it is and should remain a personal experience. The book was not meant to delve into extensive contemporary depictions. What experience? My family.”
This unwontedly classical composition seemed to Döblin himself to be a direct reflection of his French readings and environment. It remained an exception. The subsequent novels were composed once again in the old manner. The magician’s cave in which he brewed his potion was the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris.
How many days did he spend hunting down and excerpting from works, and even more in spinning out the thoughts they evoked, and the ensuing reveries. Assembling material was only preliminary toil. Suddenly enlightenment would come. The South American trilogy, The Blue Jaguar, emerged like this. The original title, Amazonas, was better. The book arose from his perusal of antique colourful atlases, where the great river rolled fascinatingly broad, deep blue, through the endless green wilderness. He wrote to me on 28 July 1938 from Brittany:
“For the beginning of the first volume, indeed for the urge to actually write something, I had only my old deep veneration (weak word!) for water, now the great river of my Amazonas; and the fact that, leafing through legends like the ‘Mother of the River’, I chanced on Sukuruya bound me quite tightly to the old theme, one of my Leitmotifs.”
With a spiritual intensity that finds adequate expression in artfully graduated prose rhythms, the first volume spins a fabulous yarn about the destruction of the Indians by the Spanish conquerors, the second about the founding of a Jesuit state in Paraguay. A New Jungle, the third volume, plays out in the big city jungles of Europe under cold power-types, who end up in the penal colony of Cayenne and are devoured by the jungle. Vast, as in the beginning, are the river and the forest at the end of the trilogy. Klaus Mann and Hermann Kesten were particularly bowled over by the psychological acumen of this much tauter volume. Written between 1935 and 1937, the first two volumes were published by Querido in 1937-38.
Around the same time Döblin was following up other trails at the Bibliothèque nationale. Since 1935 he had been reading deeply in Kierkegaard, since 1939 in Tauler. It was exciting to see how the preacher Tauler grew to become the secret key character in the new trilogy November 1918. The novel, a kind of artistically inflated accounting of the German revolutionary winter, utilises wartime experiences of Döblin’s in the military fever hospital at Hagenau near Strasbourg, which were refreshed by a trip we made together in Alsace in May 1938. Other facts for the book were drawn from my own memories and newspaper cuttings. The atmosphere in Alsace at that time is nowhere even approximately recreated: the North German weighed too heavily on the writer, as already shown by his wartime letters to Herwarth Walden. In spirit, this first volume of the trilogy is written from a Berlin perspective, and Berlin itself is the central point of the two subsequent volumes, which in terms of technique fall way behind Berlin Alexanderplatz. It was painful for those of us in the know to see what a caesura the emigration represented for Döblin, especially as a writer, as it had for Georg Gross. The crisis of the solitary individual forced the search for God more and more into the foreground. Rosa Luxemburg – a leading character in the third volume – is restyled in a scarcely responsible manner as a mystic. External events often work merely as montage, apart from a few scenes such as the Westphalian pastor’s visit to the sickbed, or the incitement of pupils and teachers against the lieutenant who has returned as a pacifist; he teaches at a Gymnasium in Berlin, and offers a non-conformist interpretation of Antigone.
This “narrative work”, as the subtitle defines, it was completed in America. The first volume had been published by Querido already in the first winter of the war. When he fled Paris, the writer carried with him the manuscript of the second volume, together with letters from Rosa Luxemburg and the preacher Tauler, which he had borrowed from the Sorbonne. That was Döblin: a ready tongue, Berlin mother-wit, and in his pocket visionary utopias. Later, when we separated as he went in search of his wife, the manuscript was left in my hands, a huge folder that survived the hazards of the road and were successfully restored to the writer a few weeks later – not to his joy; he wrote back to me from Toulouse in despair: “What the hell am I supposed to do with this clutter?” That was on 21 July 1941. On 8 August there came his first letter from Lisbon: the novel was with him, on a voyage to the New World.
*
Nine months had passed since Jean Giraudoux summoned us to his newly-formed Information Ministry, accommodated in the Hotel Continental opposite the Tuileries gardens. Counter-propaganda was entrusted to us five or six men – a veritable college of professors: Vermeil and Tonnelat from Paris, Albert Fuchs from Strasbourg, later a couple more turned up, including Pierre Bertaux. There were numerous freelancers too, from Kurt Wolff and Paul Landsberg to emigrant politicians and journalists. Aeroplanes were to throw out our products and enlighten the Germans, perhaps even incite revolt – absurd idea; even Giraudoux hardly believed in it. But it was hard to get a grip on him, he slipped through the hands like a born diplomat. One day, with solemn formality, Paul Claudel brought us a pamphlet radically unsuitable as propaganda, full of Biblical curses against Germany. We went to Giraudoux. His response: “I can’t return a manuscript from Claudel!” Döblin: “Tell him we’ve used it.” Giraudoux: “You don’t know him. Shifty and tenacious as a peasant from Champagne. He’ll demand proof.” The text was printed on glossy paper, and sent to Claudel’s friends abroad.
Gallows humour kept us upright. I managed to salvage a part of our productions: a fake “Pocket Calendar for Soldiers”, fliers and manifestos of every kind, as well as manuscripts for our satirical newspaper, called, of course, “Fliers”. It was illustrated by artists of the rank of Eduard Thöny and Frans Masereel. At the end of May we sat with Masereel in a little café on the Rue de Rivoli to reconcile his wonderful pictures with the text of Döblin’s Gothic ballad of the “Three Robbers” – Hitler, Göring, Goebbels. The Germans were in Paris before the printer could deliver the final product.
In the spring a bureau chief, a jittery reserve captain, had burst in on us: “Write me something about the Nation of Laws, gentlemen! I need definitions of the Nation of Laws! We wish to bring a democratic Nation of Laws to the German people!” Now Döblin had something to enthuse about: the educative, didactic quality in him had been spoken to; we scribbled away until steam came from our ears. In May a friend found our Nation of Laws together with others of our products in a hangar at Reims, neatly bundled, and unused. The Kafka atmosphere of our enterprise was complete.
We seldom came face to face with Giraudoux. He protected Annette Kolb and other German writers, but had no deep connection with Döblin, whose chaotic aspects offended his Appollonian mindset. It is instructive to compare texts that the French writer sent us two or three times as drafts for a speech, such as the one for Alsatian refugee children in December 1939, and texts that I gave Döblin to work on. Giraudoux lent the material the magic of his spirit-spraying adjectives, a luxuriant growth of weeds enveloped the whole. Döblin crossed out adjectives, toiled away for monumental effects, as in the fairytale “The Fisherman and his Wife”, with which I meant to lampoon Hitler.
Another idea popped up in the Bureaus. Loudspeakers should deliver our products directly to the trenches on the German front. Döblin felt he was back in the age of Homer, when the heroes on both sides would curse each other out before the battle. In a kind of collective process we gave the “Lorelei”, “Lippe-Detmold” and “Steh ich in finsterer Mitternacht” and other songs the proper satirical treatment. We phoned the opera diva Germaine Hoerner, and had her record the texts. It seems unlikely any copies survive. Our own now rest on the bed of the Allier river near Moulins, our second point of retreat, after Tours and before Cahors. Official documents were burned in the grounds of the requisitioned girls’ high school at Moulins; in impotent rage we threw the records into the waters.
In Cahors, deep in the south west, Döblin would not give up his fixed idea of taking the last over-full train on 20 June to follow the trail of his wife to Le Puy in central France, where she and the youngest son had found lodging with a friendly woman who was a secondary school teacher. Two other sons had been mobilised. The whole family had applied for French naturalisation in 1936, and been accepted except for the eldest son who was already in America. Erna had left Le Puy some days before, searching desperately in Bordeaux for her husband’s whereabouts, finally learning that he had been not arrested, but at least detained by security police in the ancient little provincial town of Mende. Three of the letters he wrote to me at my own temporary location are included in the compilation Verbannung: Briefe deutsche Emigranten (Exile: letters from German Émigrés; Hamburg 1964). His subsequent experiences were described in Destiny’s Journey.
Returning at the start of October from America, he stayed at first in Paris with my friend and teacher Tonnelat, and despite every warning would not be diverted from undertaking an experiment with the new French cultural authority; he would head for Baden-Baden, “capital” of the French occupation zone, as a “cultural officer” with the rank of colonel. The decision can be explained first of all by his inclination to didacticism, his Prussian faith in education and educability. The writer would contribute directly to the reshaping of the world. Another reason was the status-seeking of his wife, who always felt herself held back, and already in America had been to blame for Döblin’s fatal quarrels with a whole sequence of émigré writers. In Baden-Baden she paraded with the victors, appeared ostentatiously with Colonel Döblin at Sunday Mass. A third element was his delight in masquerade, gadding about in disguise: the civilian hostile to everything military in the splendour of a uniform, a surreal figure. But Döblin was the fifth wheel on the wagon, lacking any kind of power. His letters from Baden-Baden depict with satirical self-mockery the struggle of a shortsighted man to acquire a better lamp, a simple office lamp. Where every corporal drove his own vehicle, the re-educator Döblin travelled day in day out squeezed into over-full tramcars between his damp official lodging and his tiny office. A Prussian sense of duty lay in his very marrow. Of his recommendations for censorship, only one was rigorously followed through: a ban on the printing of his own novel Wallenstein, an Expressionist jewel; its warlike savagery seemed to him untimely. He later ridiculed and regretted this stupid act. The book has only recently been reprinted. The French cultural authority went a step further and forbade a new edition of Citizens and Soldiers, the first volume of the November 1918 trilogy. Only a few passages from it have been included in the current edition (A People Betrayed, 1948, Return of the Frontline Troops, 1949, and Karl and Rosa, 1950).
Döblin was happier in Mainz, where the cultural office transferred in spring 1950. There he helped set the Academy of Sciences and Literature on its feet. He would have stayed in Mainz, and the Academy would have produced the planned critical edition of his collected works. Why this never happened must be left for another time. It is part of the tragedy of his fractured life. One legend must be laid to rest: that in his last years of life Döblin was in dire financial straits. On his departure from the cultural office, the French authorities showed unusual generosity, granting the non-pensionable Döblin a substantial final gratuity via the High Commissioner Francois-Poncet. From his days as ambassador to Berlin, Poncet had admired Döblin and had then smoothed his path to France and eventual naturalisation.
*
Döblin, no less than Jean-Paul, cannot be conceived without the need for mystical redemption from an inner fissuring. Destiny’s Journey reveals the conditions in which his mysticism in the end took on a Catholic shape. The foundation for the conversion was laid in the ancient cathedral at Mende, in the heart of France, where the writer, in his total isolation and under the apocalyptic influence of the collapse, found a refuge. In 1939-40, at Erna’s urging, he had already attended Mass now and then in Paris. The Reise in Polen (Polish Journey) of 1925 already contains intense meditations on the “riddle of the crucified man”. Christian thinkers such as Tauler, Pascal and Kierkegaard occupied him during the Paris years. At the same time he took up his Hebrew studies again, tried to penetrate into the Talmud under the guidance of a rabbi, which left him unsatisfied. In order not to stand aside as his people fell prey to the brutes, he took a public stance with the party promoting a territorial solution to the Jewish problem: instead of emigrating to Palestine, the Jews were to be settled in some overseas land such as Madagascar. Here, as in politics, Döblin had the gift of falling between two stools – the rabid individualist could never be tied down for long by one party, his versatile spirit was always breaking out restlessly to new goals.
A decisive factor in his conversion were the highly educated Jesuit priests in America. They spoke German, and were dialecticians and fencers of the highest rank. The polemicist Döblin stood amazed, fenced with them, and laid down his arms the sooner because he was still consumed by grief over the death of his son Wolfgang, who had fought as a volunteer against the Nazi forces, been awarded a medal for bravery, and preferred suicide to capture – a blow from which the mother too never recovered. Three months after Alfred’s death, in September 1957 she followed him as a suicide. Wolfgang Döblin’s fame as a young mathematician of genius has not faded to this day. Japanese scholars asked me recently, during a visit to the College de France, if the father was really as significant as the son.
Döblin’s final novel, Hamlet, or Tales of a Long Night, draws its power, its dark metallic gleam, from the same convulsion caused by this fate. The novel, begun in America, was completed in 1946 in Baden-Baden. It lay for years in the bottom drawer. West German publishers, whom I approached at Döblin’s request, sent it back. Döblin was considered finished, it was as if he didn’t exist. This was revenge against the earlier “cultural officer” and uncomfortable editor of the magazine Das goldene Tor (1946-50).
The appearance of the novel in the Eastern Zone, where it enjoyed great success, caused a sensation. I had read the proofs, and could confirm what had also emerged from correspondence with Döblin: nothing of the wording had been changed apart from the ending, and this ending had been made by the author himself in February 1956 in Paris. Instead of “The son entered a monastery” it now read “A new life began.”
“You have to admit, it boils down to the same thing,” Döblin insisted to me many times. I conceded, and Wilhelm Hausenstein also admitted it: the then ambassador of the Federal Republic was one of the few great admirers and visitors to Döblin in his final Paris years. The writer’s sense of abandonment is shown in a letter he wrote to me on 5 February 1954:
“For your sake I sincerely hope you will soon be back in your feet – and for my sake I hope you will soon stroll over to see me. For I am living here in Paris dans la plus grande solitude et la plus stricte isolation. Here at home no one speaks to me, or hardly ever, and I sit by my tall bookcase that I can no longer reach, and only paper …”
In Paris the 77-year-old discovered Jean Paul, on whom I was lecturing at the time at the Sorbonne. “How can it be,” he asked in outraged amazement, “that a German writer at the end of his life in a foreign country discovers one of his great predecessors?”
His Christianity remained to the last of a very free, rambling kind, which ever and again led him back to Asia. In New York in 1940 he had published a selection from Confucius. I often saw him reach for the sermons of Buddha. One of his last utterances was: “I keep having serious struggles, not just because of Jesus and Mary, but because of the One God.” But the crucifix was always on his desk. Another saying was: “What might my works have been if I had stood earlier beneath this icon!”
As we said goodbye he still asked: “But are there not many gods?” Among his last printed words are: “In a certain sense all my works are prayers.” That word leads to the core of the fissured, multi-layered gigantic oeuvre which is yet borne on a consistent impulse.
NOTES
“Blunckery” etc.: Hans Friedrich Blunck (1888-1961) was an anti-modernist völkisch writer. In 1933 he became the first president of the Reich Literature Chamber. Jörn Uhl was a 1901 novel by the völkisch and later very popular Nazi writer Gustav Frenssen (1865-1945). Hanns Johst (1890-1978) was a popular right-wing dramatist in the 1920s, and a Nazi cultural functionary from 1933.
The idiosyncratic writings of Jean Paul (1763-1825):, somewhat in Tristram Shandy mode, full of digressions, irony, satire, and philosophical reflections, met with sharply divided reactions. It seems rather curious that Döblin had not discovered Jean Paul earlier, given his admiration for Hölderlin, Kleist and other contemporaries.
Edmond Vermeil (1878-1964): liberal Protestant scholar of the German conservative revolution. Ernest Tonnelat (1877-1948): historian of German literature; his daughter was a friend of Wolfgang Döblin. Pierre Bertaux (1907-86): wrote his thesis on Hölderlin.
Paul Landsberg (1901-44): German conservative philosopher, exiled in Paris, joined the French resistance, died in Sachsenhausen.
Eduard Thöny (1866-1950): Austrian caricaturist, who prospered under the Nazis. Frans Masereel (1889-1972): Belgian artist, survived the War in southern France.
“Lippe-Detmold, eine wunderschöne Stadt”: a tragi-comical soldier song from before the First World War, parodying the military pretensions of a micro-principality. “Steh ich in finsterer Mitternacht” (When I stand in darkest midnight): a maudlin piece by Wilhelm Hauff (1802-27) about a soldier thinking of his distant beloved.
Wilhelm Hausenstein (1882-1957): historian, critic, diplomat, leading voice for Franco-German rapprochement after 1945.
