Anniversary of Doblin’s death
The tiny Vosges village of Housseras boasts a poignant claim to fame: buried there are three members of the Döblin family: son Wolfgang, wife Erna, and Alfred himself.
In 2017 the writer and “Berlinologist” Michael Bienert produced a thoroughly researched and profusely illustrated volume titled Döblins Berlin (VBB: Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, ISBN 978-3-945256-95-4). It begins with a little excursion to a tiny village in eastern France, 800 km from Berlin. Herr Bienert and the publishers have kindly given permission for the translation that follows, and the photograph of the Döblin graves.
“WHERE SHALL THE WEARY TRAVELLER FIND AT LAST A RESTING PLACE?”
Our tour of Döblin’s Berlin begins with a detour to the Vosges.
So quiet. Berlin is far away. Gravel crunches underfoot. The hum of an occasional car, the crowing of a cock, the excited gabbling of geese only make the rural silence even more audible. Now, in August, is school holiday time in France, otherwise children’s voices might be drifting from the schoolhouse behind the graveyard wall, over to the village church that sits like a brown mother hen among the rows of graves.
Below on the village street, from which stone steps lead up to the churchyard, a red marble plaque with letters of gold points the way:
ALFRED DÖBLIN
Médecin et Homme de Lettres
1878-1957
repose ici avec son Epouse auprès de
leur Fils VINCENT
mort pour la France
The grey granite slabs lie ponderous and alien in a rear corner near the churchyard wall. A trimmed hedge separates them from the graves of the locals. No sign even here that this place has any connection with Berlin. The central part of the assemblage looms like the massive sarcophagus of some high-ranking personage. On the very top is a flat weathered nameplate of a dead soldier. It names the 291st Infantry Regiment, to which Vincent Doeblin belonged, and emphasises: MORT POUR LA FRANCE.
A hero’s grave for a refugee! Vincent Döblin was born on 7 March 1915 in Berlin; his parents named him Wolfgang. After the Nazi seizure of power the Jewish family had to leave Berlin. They found refuge in Paris. Wolfgang, the second eldest of four brothers, studied Mathematics and, with his parents, in 1936 acquired French citizenship.
During his national service as a radio operator in the French army, the German Wehrmacht marched into France. On 21 June 1940 Vincent and other scattered comrades in the village of Housseras were in danger of being captured by the Germans. He hid in a barn, burned his papers, sat back on a pile of straw. Then he shot a bullet through his head. Wrapped in a makeshift blanket-shroud he was buried in Housseras as an unknown soldier. Not until four years later was he identified in the course of reburial.
From cover of the DVD “Wolfgang Doeblin: a mathematician rediscovered”. |
First page of Wolfgang’s “pli cacheté no. 11668” unsealed in 2000. |
The parents manage to escape from occupied Europe to the USA. They learn only years later how their son Wolfgang lost his life. The trauma never fades. The father returns in 1945 to southern Germany in the uniform of a French officer, aiming to help with the spiritual regeneration of the ruined land. But he feels misunderstood, rejected and isolated. He emigrates a second time back to Paris with his wife. On 26 June 1957 Alfred Döblin dies at the public psychiatric clinic in Emmendingen, not far from Freiburg and the Franco-German border.
Erna Döblin is so embittered by the fate of her family and her husband that she refuses to tell friends and the German public about the death of the famous writer. Together with her youngest son Stephan she takes the body to Housseras and has it buried at Wolfgang’s side. No priest and no other relatives are present. A few weeks later the pious Catholic Erna Döblin turned on the gas taps in her Paris apartment, and killed herself.
FIAT VOLUNTAS TUA stands on the left side of the massive sarcophagus over the name Alfred Döblin. Thy will be done. DONA NOBIS PACEM stands on the right side over the name Erna Döblin. Grant us peace. The grave comes across as ponderous, sombre, uninviting, unreconciled. A little bouquet of wild flowers wilts on the polished grey granite above the writer’s remains. A grave like a tight-pressed mouth, dumbly complaining, accusing. Here lies one scattered part of a refugee family; other relatives were murdered at Auschwitz. Here lies the most significant writer brought forth by Berlin at the threshold of the 20th century. No one else has given such voice to the growth of the city to a metropolis, has known it so completely, and felt so intensively bound up with it. As Döblin declared on a Berlin radio programme three years before his exile:
“To say a bit about the character of my works: my thinking and my works of an intellectual nature belong, explicitly or implicitly, to Berlin. It is from here that it has received, and continues to receive, its decisive influences and direction; I grew up in this great sober stern Berlin, this is the mother-lode, this sea of stone is the mother-lode of all my thoughts. These tenement blocks and factories have for decades formed the material for my views and my thinking, and whether I was speaking of China, of India or of Greenland, I was always speaking of Berlin, of this great strong sober Berlin which can be loved only by someone fully human, which has a fabulously expressive vernacular treated by its own educated inhabitants, ridiculously, as an embarrassment.”
Hardly anyone has confessed himself so devoted to Berlin. In 1922 he had declared: “This excitement of streets, shops, vehicles is the heat that must throb within me when I work, which means: almost constantly. It’s the petrol that drives my motor.”
Even after being hounded from the city, in November 1918 Döblin wrote one of the most extensive and best of all Berlin novels. And when he returned to the ruins in 1947 he felt he was “at the grave of a person with whom I had lived together for many years and have now lost for ever.”
The village of Housseras consists of houses and farmyards, mostly of two storeys, scattered loosely along little lanes and interspersed with gardens and orchards, some unfenced, some enclosed by stone walls. Old folk weed the garden, otherwise almost no one can be seen. The search for a café or bakery proves fruitless. It’s two hours in the Citroën back to Emmendingen, where the Berlinologist’s family await. And a good eight hundred kilometres back home, back to Berlin.
NOTES (by M. Bienert, augmented by C. D. Godwin)
The heading: Heine’s poem Wo? was quoted by Döblin in a letter to Hermann Kesten on 6 July 1933. (Briefe I, p. 181.) The first verse reads: „Wo wird einst des Wandermüden / letzte Ruhstätte sein? / Unter Palmen in dem Süden, / Unter Linden an dem Rhein?“ (Where, when tired of wandering, shall / a final resting place be mine? / Under southern palms, or / Under lindens on the Rhine?)
Vincent Doeblin: the French forename and amended spelling of the surname allowed Wolfgang to pass as a (French) native of Alsace-Lorraine, which from 1871 to 1918 was under German occupation
Wolfgang’s last days, and the remarkable story of the notebook he sent several weeks before his death to the Académie des Sciences in Paris to be placed under seal, is related by Marc Petit: L’équation de Kolmagoroff (in German as: Die verlorene Gleichung (“The lost equation”). The notebook, unsealed only in the year 2000, develops in ca. 100 pages of a school exercise book, scribbled in odd hours of leisure during military duties in the Ardennes, a mathematical proof (“Sur l’équation de Kolmogoroff”) which turns out to be a bridge between pre-war analytical mathematics and post-war probability theory. Had he lived, Wolfgang would probably have become one of the most eminent mathematicians of the 20th century. Between 1936 and 1940 he had already some 30 publications to his name
French citizenship: As a condition of the grant of citizenship, two of Döblin’s sons (Wolfgang/Vincent, and Klaus/Claude) were required to do national service. Wolfgang refused the chance to undertake officer training (to which his university degree entitled him), wishing to be shown no special favour.
Emmendingen: The grounds of the clinic are publicly accessible, but the building in which Döblin died has since been demolished. There’s a commemorative plaque with Döblin’s decision in 1957 to forego a more comfortable ending in a private sanatorium: “I began my career as a doctor in a public clinic, and can end it the same way. I choose Emmendingen.”
Erna embittered: news of Wolfgang’s end came in March 1945 in a letter to the parents from Marie-Antoinette Tonnelat, who was his friend (though not “girlfriend”) as a student. Wolfgang was said by his brother Klaus/Claude to have sided with the mother in the eternal quarrels about Alfred’s liaison with the photographer Yolla Niclas; he certainly seems to have been her favourite. She never got over his death, returning almost annually to Housseras, always without Alfred. (See Petit, op. cit., Ch. 5)
Housseras burial: In an interview in 2008, Stephan Döblin recalls the funeral as “a dreadful business”. (The website hosting the interview unfortunately no longer exists. The URL goes to a “Sorry!” page hosted by the Fischer publishing company.)
Unreconciled: Yet Erna and Alfred stayed together to the end, despite the unending quarrels arising from their dreadfully incompatible personalities and outlooks on life. A topic for a separate post.
Radio broadcast on 21 April 1930 was part of a series “Autobiographies”. (Schriften zu Leben und Werk, pp. 181-184.)
The 1922 remarks were in response to a survey by the Vossische Zeitung on whether artists felt constrained or inspired by Berlin. (Schriften zu Leben und Werk, pp. 37-39.)
The 1947 remarks are from an interview in the Berlin Telegraf. (Schriften zu Leben und Werk, p. 667.)
As well as chapters detailing Döblin’s Berlin milieu, Bienert provides an A to Z guide to every Berlin location mentioned in Döblin’s works.
