Alfred Doblin’s Anthropocene

rces.” The consequences matter little.

Langstaff then usefully references an Austrian magazine called Der Orchideen-Garten (‘The Orchid Garden’), published in the early 1920s, where “translations of old Edgar Allan Poe tales rubbed shoulders with new creations from the Czech Čapek brothers.” He has done some research! I shall look out for this, should affordable reprints be available.

Langstaff concludes:

Mountains Oceans Giants represents a pioneering attempt to combine literary fiction with climate science long before there was a market. But the book is also a deeply personal exorcism of his generation’s war traumas… World War I introduced a new vocabulary for describing geography. Döblin’s novel is full of it: barriers, zones, frontlines, sulfuric fogs, blockades, “desolation belts,” and caverns of underground bunkers. This way of seeing space has also shaped how we describe environmental destruction in fiction and film today. The Zone is especially prominent: think of Andrei Tarkovsky and the Strugatsky brothers’ Stalker; W. G. Sebald’s description of Orford Ness in The Rings of Saturn; or Jeff VanderMeer’s brilliant Southern Reach trilogy…

With Mountains Oceans Giants, Döblin should also be added to a forgotten literary canon of writers who have sought to collapse human and natural histories into a new genre worthy of our changing environment. In peeling back the familiar stratum of the planet to reveal something unfamiliar and unsettling, their futuristic dystopias were really histories of the present.

I wonder what reviewer, and what publication, will be confident enough to comment on Manas?