Doblin in Hollywood (3)

Döblin was never credited for his work on the script of Mrs Miniver, so was not included in the team which won the 1943 Oscars for best screenwriting. But Georg Fröschel, head of the Oscar-winning team, in 1962 published a very positive appreciation of Döblin’s contribution. Here it is, for the first time in English.

Here is an appreciation of the never-used Döblin scene in Mrs Miniver  by Georg Fröschel, who headed the film’s Oscar-winning scriptwriting team. This piece, published in 1962 in the West German daily Die Zeit, is a valuable addition to Döblin’s own description, in letters to friends and family, of his year in Hollywood.

“Döblin in Hollywood” by Georg Fröschel,
Die Zeit, 15 June 1962, p.14.

I was employed by MGM as a script writer from 1939 to 1956. In 1940, Louis B Mayer, the head of this, the biggest US movie corporation, summoned me to his office and told me roughly as follows:

‘In a few days three Jewish writers will arrive here, having fled from Germany and been brought to America with the help of an aid committee. I don’t know these gentlemen and know next to nothing about them. They are said to be gifted people. They will work with us for a year, on probation. Do your best to acclimatise the gentlemen to the way things are done here, and keep an eye on what they do and get up to. Tell them nothing of this discussion.’

Thus did I become, without their knowledge, the supervisor of Walter Mehring, Alfred Polgar, and Alfred Döblin.

Almost at the same time as the arrival of these three writers, I was given the task of adapting Jan Struthers’ book Mrs Miniver as a film script. The book comprised a number of sketches dealing with little domestic events in the Miniver family. My boss, the film producer Sidney Franklin, had the idea of making the Mrs Miniver character the central point of a dramatic treatment, in which the courage and sufferings of the English people, currently in a state of war while America was still at peace, would be brought before the eyes of an American audience.

I presented all this to Alfred Döblin shortly after he joined MGM, and asked him to take a week thinking about how Mrs Miniver might be turned into a dramatic character.

Exactly a week later, Döblin turned up at my office and spent two hours telling me the content of the book’s various scenes. Too polite to interrupt the writer, I asked him once he’d finished: ‘So, doctor, what do you think? Can we make a start on Mrs Miniver?’

Döblin: ‘We could turn the material into an excellent film for Charlie Chaplin.’

In the circumstances of that time in the world and in films, this response was so absurd that I had no hope of Döblin ever offering anything usable for our script. He, Polgar and Mehring received a salary of a hundred dollars a week – miserably little in the context of the American film industry – but the modest Döblins did very well on the hundred dollars, lived in a little house in Hollywood, under palm trees admittedly, but not much differently than formerly in Berlin East, in the Frankfurter Allee. Every day I picked Döblin up in my car and brought him to Culver City. There the small, slightly unsteady man with the ruddy cheeks and flashing eyes behind thick lenses wrote his book about his escape from France. He showed not the slightest interest in the film, and the film industry at present had nothing to offer him.

After many weeks I managed to develop a storyline for the Mrs Miniver film. One episode was to show how the husband sets off in a little boat down the Thames and sails across the Channel to help bring the trapped English army back to England. I asked Döblin to write down how he imagined the experiences of Mr Miniver.

Just two days later he delivered a manuscript, written in German, of around forty pages. Brightening the tragic episode with flashes of humour, with a compelling verve and yet also proceeding by means of little details, Döblin depicted the story of the amateur sailor’s heroic voyage. It was a masterpiece.

I had the manuscript translated at once into English, and presented Döblin’s work to Mr Franklin, who summoned Döblin and thanked him heartily. In the film Mrs Miniver there is little of Döblin’s contribution to be seen. But it is certain that the Dunkirk episode is based mainly on his ideas. The film itself won eight Oscars in 1943, including one for me.

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Walter Mehring (1896-1981): Expressionist satirist, poet, cabaret writer. Alfred Polgar (1873-1955): Austrian dramatist, cabaret writer and critic.

Schicksalsreise: translated as Destiny’s Journey by Edna McCown, Fromm International 1992.