AMAZONAS
One of the most focused and approachable of all Döblin’s epic fictions, this Trilogy offers not just a dramatic and enthralling journey through five centuries of history, but also a devastating critique of Eurocentrism and the Enlightenment surrender to autonomous Promethean forces (Technology, Money, Reason). Its central proposition is: The Nazis did not emerge from nowhere.
Introduction to the Amazonas Trilogy
Alfred Döblin (1878-1957) composed his epic trilogy of South America under difficult circumstances of exile. It was accessible on first publication in 1937-38 only outside Germany, and for only a couple of years before war broke out. The first postwar edition, like others of Döblin’s works apart from Berlin Alexanderplatz, was little noticed in a Germany traumatised by Nazism and defeat. Neither the pre-war not the first post-war edition explicitly linked the separate volumes as parts of a unitary work.
In the 1960s the separate novels were first brought together by Walter Muschg, editor of the first series of Döblin’s ‘selected works’, under the overall title Amazonas. Muschg, however, decided to cut Volume 3 entirely. Not until 1973 did the trilogy first appear in full, in East Germany. Another 15 years passed before the first complete edition in West Germany. So only in the past three or four decades has this work begun to receive the critical attention it richly deserves.
The epic is set mainly in South America, but its true focus is Europe. The urgent guiding proposition is: The Nazis did not emerge from nowhere.
Döblin first came to fame in the middle of the First World War with his ‘Chinese novel’ The Three Leaps of Wang Lun. He advocated the ‘epic’ as a new kind of fiction, rejecting the bourgeois novel with its invented individuals, cod-psychology, concocted plots, contrived suspense, in favour of fictions that deal with themes of universal, enduring human concern: life and death, power and subjection, hubris and fate, this life and the Afterlife, humans acting in and on the world – and often striving to conquer Nature. He published nine major works in the epic genre, only four of which are available in English.
In several thoughtful essays and lectures Döblin reflected on his imagination and how it was put to work to shape an epic. His creating mind absorbed huge amounts of stimuli from pictures, maps, encyclopedias, travelogues, ethnographies, which he transmuted into symphonic compositions that proceed, not so much as a linear ‘story’ (though the attentive reader, unlike some of Döblin’s critics, will surely perceive the underlying coherence of the narrative), but as motifs, scenes and moods filled with incident and images and voices, all contributing to the universal enduring themes. In the case of Amazonas, the theme is Europe’s worldwide expansion from the late 15th century, just as the Copernican revolution was overturning the timeless verities of Church dogma. As every schoolchild learns, this history (apart from a few unfortunate aspects best glossed over) has been pretty much a good thing for the world. How, Döblin seeks to know, has this smug Eurocentrism and Scientism been able to endure, despite the many documented horrors inflicted by every European empire on the ‘others’ of the world, and the existential threats posed to humanity and the globe by forces (technology, money, ideologies) grown beyond human control?
And beneath these questions the deeper problem: the European concept of God and an idealised Hereafter vs. life and meaning in this actual world. In his 1938 essay ‘Prometheus and the Primitive’, written while he was working on Amazonas, Döblin brings three thousand years of Western history into focus through the lens of two world views: the Promethean, which sees the world as a resource for humanity to exploit, and the Primitive, which sees the world as an endless source of wonder and meaning. The motifs ‘God’ and ‘Nature’ interplay constantly throughout the trilogy.
As in Wang Lun, Döblin here evokes non-European peoples and cultures in their own terms, with no hint of patronising or exploitation. The ‘Land without Death’ is an ironic link between the Amazonian tribes, who at the start and end of the novel embark on quests to find such a paradise, and the European invaders, avid to find Eldorado, since gold is the answer to all the torments of earthly existence.
Vol.1: Journey to the Land without Death
Volume 1, with a masterful economy of language, presents cinematically vivid scenes and encounters, each gripping in its own right, and each contributing undercurrents to the narrative stream and its thematic coherence.
In Part 1 the European invaders are only a rumour to tribes along the Amazon; but the report brought by the fugitive Inca prince Cuzumarra enables a nuanced perspective to emerge, in which questions of guilt and innocence are by no means clearcut. “Ah!” said the chief, “you became divided, and so evil spirits were able to meddle.”
Part 2 centres on the historically-attested convergence of three conquistador bands on the prosperous highlands of what is now Bogotá. Two of the bands are led by Germans: Venezuela-Colombia has been mortgaged by war-indebted Charles V to the German banking houses of Welser and Fugger. Here too Döblin’s narrative skill allows nuanced perspectives to emerge; for it is not enough just to recoil in horror from barbarities; rather the conditions (historical, social, cultural, economic) which nurture them need to be explored. “They were not bad men,” Döblin faux-disingenuously suggests; “they were what they were and could not be otherwise.”
Christianity of course marched proudly along with the arquebuses and hunting dogs. In Part 3 Döblin presents the countervailing efforts of the Dominican Las Casas, whose account of conquistador atrocities greatly irritated the new masters of the New World and those back in European halls of power. The Indians he seeks to help turn the tables on him: “But we have seen that you are powerless among them. They just take you along when they attack us. Father Las Casa, either you are playing a false game, or you are seeking help from us.”
Vol. 2: The Blue Jaguar
In a more expansive narrative covering more than two hundred years, Volume 2 recounts the Jesuit enterprise in the 17th and 18th centuries which rescued the natives of Paraguay from European slavery by establishing ‘Reductions’: safe havens under papal and royal protection. Here too the themes developed by Döblin (emerging within and on the margins of episodes that are by turn dramatic, comic, poignant, satirical) require the reader to set aside unreflective prejudices, and be open to nuances. Are the Reductions a tool for keeping the natives in childlike subjection, for the comfort of the Jesuits at the expense of other colonists? Perhaps; but how to explain the disciplined and determined Guaraní cavalry that so unsettles the royal Visitor in Part 4? Does Renaissance Humanism represent a progress out of the medieval night of Church dogma? Perhaps; but isn’t Bishop Felix with his Greek statues and classical allusions (and his clandestine wife) a smug selfish aesthete, rather than a standard-bearer of ‘progress’ and humanity? Such questions are of more than passing interest, for they project forward to the third volume, in which the thematic undercurrents of the first two volumes burst to the surface.
Vol. 3: A New Jungle
The end of Volume 2 already presaged a shift of focus to Europe. Volume 3 begins by returning to the Europe of the 1920s and 30s – a disorienting switch even for the reader who, immersed in the succession of vivid scenes in the first two volumes, has kept note of the thematic undercurrents: humanity’s relationship to nature and the world; the chasm between the Promethean will to dominate and a sense of Nature; the individual ego and the environment in which it acts.
In Part 1, The Polish Faust-figure Twardowski has summoned Copernicus, Galileo and Bruno from their graves to account for the world formed from their ideas over the past few hundred years. A sequence of novella-like episodes depicts the wretched material and spiritual conditions of prototypical early 20th century central Europeans: a poor young Berliner alienated from her self; a Polish Don Juan figure; a German intellectual for whom practicality is the only yardstick for philosophy; a middle-class seductress. As the personal dramas play out, the wider world exerts its ever more baleful influence: Weimar collapsing into tyranny.
Part 2, the final section of the trilogy, returns to South America. A group of desperate escaped convicts (among them the now conscience-stricken Don Juan figure) are rescued by indigenous Indians, whose interrogation of the Europeans echoes the meeting, four hundred years earlier between Cuzumarra and the Amazonian tribes. Here Döblin’s critique of the Europe-driven modern world is pointed and unambiguous: “Your ignorance is appalling,” declares the Indian chief. “You give your children any old name, you do not care for your dead, you have no ancestors. And then you claim to know what justice is.”
The epic ends almost where it began: back on the Amazon with those seekers after Paradise, the Land without Death, that we heard of at the beginning. Nature, human yearning, life and death, good and evil: these are the epic undercurrents on which the multitude of incidents and voices are carried along.
The reception of the South American novels
When first published, these novels were accessible only to those German readers beyond reach of Hitler. Two long and respectful notices appeared in the Zurich-based journal Maß und Wert, founded by Thomas Mann; and two others in Moscow-based journals (Das Wort, and Internationale Literatur). Ferdinand Lion, editor of Maß und Wert, wrote of Volume 1:
‘If Döblin were merely a Proteus, appearing now in Chinese garb, now in Baroque dress, or that of a modern worker, he would be a great artistic performer. But these self-transformations of his have a solid, albeit mysterious, fulcrum, or more exactly two focal points of experience: …the question is always: action or non-action. … On which side does the author’s heart lie? His art, in depicting both those given up to Nature and those dominating through action, is so great because in both cases he guides us to the central point of experience… such that from both species real events radiate out in the most colourful manner.’
And of Volume 2:
‘The Jesuits establish a Christian state in Paraguay. Perhaps never has Döblin succeeded so sweetly. This anti-Hellene (for whom the human is no longer the measure of all things) and this anti-Roman (who acknowledges no laws) here becomes almost Classical. And with what gentle and profound satire: that Christianity is far better suited to these brown primitives than to the peoples of Europe.’
The Moscow-based reviewers naturally took a more ideological stance. Kurt Kestern in Das Wort asserted that Döblin was telling us nothing new about the Conquest, but praised his
‘unprecedentedly memorable, clear and rhythmic prose, which has become more disciplined, almost completely avoiding his usual diversions and predilection for straying down garden-paths. This has proportion, in the best sense – it is a mature, confident work, an achievement.’
Julius Hay in Internationale Literatur focused on the novels’ anti-Fascist credentials, declaring:
‘ brings to us a dreadful truth and knowledge: a people can die. Peoples can be killed, they can commit suicide. But both novels also convey a great certainty: a people can be saved. … With Döblin we experience the death of an Indian people so directly, so tangibly, that we have to feel over our own bodies and ask: are we actually alive? … Thrilling, convincing, often magnificent, Döblin’s prose depicts the stages of development. He does not make it at all easy for his creations. Here every tiniest success must be hard won, every tiniest misstep paid for. This constant breathless struggle against a dangerous hostile environment is brought right before our eyes, and never is Döblin guilty of simplification. The struggle is for him the life process, which he perceives in all its multifariousness and complexity.’
The first postwar edition seems to have attracted very little critical attention: only two short and dismissive notices have come to light. One criticises anachronisms (e.g. references to ‘meter’ a century before the French Revolution), and incorrect forms of address at the Iberian royal courts, and labels Döblin’s prose ‘deeply unsound, trivial, careless, tangled’ – an astonishingly imperceptive view. The other compares Döblin with the best-selling writer Bernhard Kellermann, to neither’s advantage.
Only in the last decade or two have serious monograph-length studies begun to appear, revealing the depth and complexity of Döblin’s engagement with his material and the richness of the ore waiting to be mined by careful reading. Dare we hope that the English translation will stimulate Anglophone scholars to add their perspectives to this remarkable trilogy?
C D Godwin
Stroud, UK, June 2018
The Three Leaps of Wang Lun (1916), trans C D Godwin (2nd ed, NY Review Books 2015); Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), trans Michael Hofmann (NY Review Books and Penguin, 2018); November 1918: A German Revolution (1949-50), trans John E Woods in two volumes (Fromm International 1983); Tales of a Long Night (1955), trans R & R Kimber (Fromm International 1984). Of the five epics not available in English, C D Godwin has translated Mountains Oceans Giants (1924); Manas (1927); Amazonas (1937-38); and is working on Wallenstein (1920).
Some are translated at https://beyond-alexanderplatz.com .
Translated at https://beyond-alexanderplatz.com/prometheus-and-the-primitive-the-essay .
The notices are included in the invaluable collection Alfred Döblin im Spiegel der zeitgenissischen Kritik (Schuster & Bode, eds., Francke Verlag 1973).
The most thorough treatment so far is Vera Hildenbrandt: Europa in Alfred Döblin’s Amazonas-Trilogie: diagnose eines kranken Kontinents : V&R Unipress, Göttingen 2011.
