Contemporary reviews of Wallenstein
Few readers will embark on a 900 page novel without first knowing something about it. The two reviews below, by well-known contemporaries of Doeblin in the Weimar literary world, provide helpful hints. What should readers watch for? What demands should readers expect on their attention and time?
CONTEMPORARY REVIEWS OF WALLENSTEIN
(1) Moritz Goldstein, in the Vossiche Zeitung 13 November 1921
Translation © C. D. Godwin 2019
Dear Döblin,
Your Wallenstein appeared about a year ago, and you’re quite right to wonder why the Vossische Zeitung has left it so long undiscussed. Before I pronounce my verdict I’ll tell you quite openly how it happened, for therein lies already a little bit of a verdict.
The first reviewer, one of those who assign the highest literary honours, read the first of the two volumes, was full of praise, but explained that he would not read the second volume. Another renowned critic was sought and found, who after reading the first three parts expressed his great appreciation but refused absolutely to take note of the final three parts. And so the task finally fell to me.
I’ll be frank: I went about this with great reluctance. For you and I – this is nothing new to you – are old classmates. We sat year after year in the same classroom, from the Tertia (fourth form), where I came to you by staying in my seat, to the Prima (sixth form), where you parted from me by staying in your seat. We wrote the same essays, exchanged the same gossip, and had many, very many, discussions among ourselves. I was no longer a boy, but you were somewhat older in years and a great deal older in knowledge. Not school knowledge, admittedly – you weren’t a shining light in any subject – but in general. Maybe you don’t remember, but I still picture quite clearly how you, perhaps in the Untersekunda (fifth form), were the only one who knew Gottfried Keller’s tale A Village Romeo and Juliet. Professor Weldig was astonished, almost shocked, but at once added venomously that it was quite unnecessary for you to have read such things. And surely you no longer think of how at our debates under the horizontal bars, while Ehte was making the others do gymnastics, you explained to me that the style of a piece of writing must be so full of art that it appears natural. I didn’t understand, but clearly you must have thought a bit about it. We showed one another our first literary efforts, and found them mutually weak. But during breaks you liked to go around the yard head down, with quick steps. Whether you were really pondering or only pretending was not quite clear to me. And all in all you seemed to your chums a little wonderful, and to the teachers a bit of a rebel.
Then at university you embarked on the study of medicine, and when I saw you again years later you were a doctor, a psychiatric and nerve doctor. Meanwhile you had thrust yourself into the circle around Herwarth Walden with a grotesque drama. People who can’t shape a story always write grotesques. Then we saw a novel of yours in that crazy magazine Sturm. That too fit my picture of you. Then when at last you had great literary success with The Three Leaps of Wang Lun, I dared not approach it. I didn’t believe you could do it. The Expressionists tried to claim you: so many bells tinkling on that carousel!
And thus prepared – or jaundiced – I set dutifully about Wallenstein.
“When the Bohemians were defeated, no one was better pleased than the Emperor.” This first sentence on the first of your almost 900 pages would have been struck out in our German essay class. But from this first sentence and first page there grows a first chapter, and from that the first Part, and before I had read that far I knew I had to apologise. What an achievement!
A very shortsighted person, who has to bring objects right up to the eyes, has created a colossal painting for shortsighted people. Even the observer must step very near and absorb it scene by scene, if he wants to master it all. On this enormous canvas – six Parts, two volumes, 876 big closely printed pages – hardly an empty space, everything brightly coloured, malleable, seething, surging, billowing, bristling. You don’t even miss the tracks scored in the earth by the spurs of the Emperor fallen from his horse as they drag him clear. You don’t scorn to notice that the Nuncio, when he formally reads out the papal brief, has a throaty voice and that his hand is hairy: an insignificant character in an unimportant scene, but with these two sure strokes he stands rounded and juicy before us. Juicy – occasionally it’s the succulence of Rabelais, unabashed, outrageous, as for example the virtuoso depiction of a Jew-burning where now and then we see the doctor, who knows all physicalities through professional eyes and sets them down precisely, having long ago learned to forego horror and disgust. Where will this scandalous imposition on the nerves and eyes end? I can understand how people feel weary after just one volume.
So much for the visibility of your world. But it is merely the vehicle for representing something invisible, primarily the complicated web of diplomatic power plays during an intra-European war. Unique, how you turn so-called history on its head in the lived minutes and hours of little people – complaining, desiring, suffering. Example: the English envoy to the Viennese court is supposed to persuade Prince-elector Maximilian of Bavaria not to enforce the imperial ban on the defeated Palatine Frederick. In the sources, I think to myself, we would find that the prince draws the negotiations out until he has his army together and can set off for the Pfalz. You do it like this: The English envoy, he’s called Digby, grows bored with Munich, and takes his pleasure in the nearby countryside with peasant girls. One night in the cabbage-field behind his inn, armed with a fence post, he has to defend himself from a jealous lad. During the silent duel the sky lights up as if from a blaze, over towards Munich. The duellists shake hands, Digby mounts up. The road to Munich is blocked, diverting around he lands among the marching Bavarian army and is carried with it into the city. At court he finally ferrets out that it’s war with the Oberpfalz. No clarification to the reader that it was camp fires lighting up the sky.
In such a way, transposed into scenes and characters, made visible, tactile, audible, is Diplomatic History presented all through the six Parts. Not, as in other novels, as hastily sketched background, but as the actual theme. You expend on this, and expect of the reader, not only a constant alert attention, but also an intelligent political sympathy. And although you are not sparing of words as you fill your colossal canvas with your miniatures, you are actually quite reticent, and would rather leave us guessing than explain to us. So no wonder if some people retreat from the fanatical dispassion of this book, after the first volume.
You titled your book Wallenstein, but you didn’t really want to make him your theme. The Duke of Friedland is not your hero, to be illuminated from within and made believable. We are not to think either of Schiller’s idealised character, nor the unmasked weakling of Ricarda Huch. Your Wallenstein, rather, is a monster, full of contradictions, never transparent, beginning as a racketeer on a gigantic scale, to approach towards the end an almost kingly bearing; but this spirit is imprisoned in a grotesque physicality: gaunt, lanky, tormented more and more by ailments. How above all you relish unveiling this creature, the troubled bearer of power and splendour, and permit yourself to this end some exaggerations and improbabilities. I think for example of the scene where Emperor Ferdinand romps drunkenly with his dwarf in the filth of the wine-cellar floor.
The novel might as well have been called Emperor Ferdinand, and with more justice. This weak man, who wants to do no evil and who cannot prevent so much evil, clearly enjoys your love above all the other characters. His flight from baseness, his transfigured end among outcasts, seems to me the most poetic of your writings.
History? In the whole book there’s not a single date. The period of the Thirty Years War is there, but at the same time much more and something quite different. “You cannot contain violence”, someone says towards the end. Maybe this sentence reveals best your true theme.
The Moderns are avid to claim you noisily for themselves. But what does that mean? One is reminded of Grimmelshausen, also of Jean Paul, also of Flaubert, also of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. Expressionism? But the few peculiarities of word order and punctuation surely aren’t decisive? It’s always the inadequate who reveal the ugly faces of artistic fashion. Today’s achievement looks remarkably like the achievements of the day before yesterday.
(2) Leon Feuchtwanger, in Die Weltbühne 17/1, 1921, pp. 573-76.
Translation © C. D. Godwin 2019
These two volumes are no novel, and certainly not a historical one. As little as Wang Lun was an ethnographic novel. It’s a bit grotesque to hear that this book ‘is one of the most valuable historical novels of recent times’ or the like. Döblin’s Wallenstein is something completely new, different, odd. Maybe this work will remain unique, maybe it’s tomorrow’s fashion. It’s not easy to come to grips with. These nine hundred closely printed pages can’t be pulled together, they aren’t impressionist, aren’t expressionist, they have no tendency, and are certainly not New Art, they’re incisively objective and harshly fantastical, they’re immensely hard to read and you can’t tear yourself away from them, they’re a ponderous great Spectre of the Brocken, tough and juicy, you must chew a long time on them, and still you can’t get them out of your teeth.
Alfred Döblin leaps into the Thirty Years War as he once did into 17th century China, with the fanatical drive to expunge the present from himself. He lives the world of that time, the people, their beliefs. All reflection, all (present-day) critique is excluded. Amid the colourful messy hard reality of politics, church, war we find sorcerers and demons, no less real. In this huget book there is not a word of pretence, disguise, masquerade. Someone swims in the big wide rapid river of those times, experiences them with the same reality as Grimmelshausen, for example; but he sees more, his gaze is harder, crueller, more nuanced, more medical. There’s no moralising in this book, and no lamenting, no philosophy of history, no social tendency bubbles up, nothing is evaluated, nothing seen in prospect or retrospect: it is simply seen and experienced. The book is like a giant medical atlas brought to life, muscles, nerves, guts are laid bare, from every side, very objective and enormously colourful, white, blue, red, black, and everything lifts itself up, sinks back down, seethes, breathes, is alive.
The whole world of the time is there, church, politics, war, an immense threshing confusion of events, people, images. This profusion is both the greatness of this work, and its danger. In its composition it reminds one of certain old pictures, huge ones, depicting battles or processions, and endless confusion of people and scenes. Immense. Only in retrospect, only on a second reading does it fall into shape, this work on a scale beyond anything in the modern novel. It’s so uncommonly vivid in its detail that the reader, like those alive at the time, can only slowly make sense of the stream of people and things. This is what’s loveliest and most profound about the book: how at the same time the minuscule is made essential and the essential sinks back into the confusion. The randomness of every event could not be made more palpable. The book is like an ancient Indian epic: a man emerges, sinks back, another heaves himself up, sinks away, the river rolls on, endless.
Döblin tackles History at the point where it becomes Epic. For all its minutely detailed vividness the book shows not a trace of historicism. But in it there’s a big eternal epic flood, and as the sea can be heard in a shell, so in every page the noise of the world rings out.
Protestants and Catholics strike each other dead, make alliances, a Roiman Emperor stands between them, a strangely driven figure, a glutton, prayerful, apathetic, losing himself remarkably in bizarre slippery sentiments; and when reality intrudes, politics, suddenly he disappears into space, beyond anyone’s grasp. A Bavarian prince, hard, fanatical, always on the lookout for loot, powerful, but also melancholic, ill-fated, obsessed. Wallenstein, man of money, man of power, dark, husky, is raised up, recedes again into darkness, waits, his life buried, swallowed, is again raised high, struck dead. The king of Sweden, noisy, boorish, full of savage life, sets the world whirling, wins, glows, goes out. Politics carries on. Ministers, showmen, burghers, generals, Jews, the empress, soldiers, Jesuits, no end. Politics, war, the machinery taken apart, seen from inside, set once more in motion. And so this is the Thirty Years War? This chaotic up, down, across, athwart, for, against? This random senseless tragic-comic turmoil? But where are the big lines, the goals, the development?
No, there really are no big lines, no goals, no ideas; merely: life. There are no dates, not one, and no historical reference points. You read for a while, and only then do you realise: ah, that’s the Edict of Restitution! And the destruction of Magdeburg seems to this author of no more significance than a (possibly not even historical) Jew-burning or the definitely invented grotesque tussle of a court dwarf with a stork. And that Emperor Ferdinand dies in such a fantastical way: it’s highly implausible, and after he has been shown with such reality at table or in conference with his ministers it deeply lacks style, and is certainly not historical. No, from this book you can learn nothing factual, and after you’ve endured fourteen days with it you are no more educated, at the most you’ve learned a few details of cultural history, and the title Wallenstein is actually a misdirection, and it’s not exciting.
It’s merely the first epic of the Germans since – well, since when? One might, if it did not have such painful associations, assert: nothing like it has been dared since Messias. It’s just that Döblin’s epic is to Klopstock’s songs as a big steamer is to a sailing ship. A mechanism complex beyond all measure, thousands of little parts placed with fanatically precise practicality, in an eternal up and down and intermeshing.
This Homer of the Thirty Years War eschews the means of earlier epics. Here are no repetitions, no leisurely expansiveness, no cosy uniformity. Every authorial reflection, every judgement is avoided to a degree never seen in German literature. His only resources are vividness, colour – colours, not tints! These people are conceived in colour, not shaded in as an afterthought – and then an extravagant, bubbling, bristling, excessive fullness. Every new event splits in two, branches out, every branch generates a new forest, over-fecund, tropical. Somewhere Döblin has written: a book should be like a worm – what you cut from it must live for itself. Here we have such an uncanny, seething, scrabbling vitality. Let it not be concealed that here and there in the great flow there is dead water, cut off, swampy: but all in all so frightfully much life swills out from the nine hundred pages that in later ages people who know little of Döblin will hypothesise that a whole tribe laboured on this Iliad.
There are many unforgettable moments of truly great epic in this Wallenstein. The Bavarian Maximilian over his booty, the Oberpfalz; the bridge gate at Prague with the heads of the rebels; the martyrdom and expulsion of heretics from Bohemia – sympathetic and amused we think of the film Glaube und Heimat – Wallenstein on the coast, the court dwarf wrestling with the stork, the Jew-burning, the departure of the Electors after the Regensburg convocation, the Swedish fleet on the grey-green Baltic, Tilly’s death, the vagabond Emperor following the wailing procession in which Wallenstein’s body is being taken away by his widow.
Yes, God knows, that reviewer was right: ‘Wallenstein is one of the most valuable historical novels of recent years.’ In the entire two volumes there is not one anaemic abstract word. The poet’s eye forces even the resisting reader to see the forcefulness, the full-bloodedness of his words. Criticasters may raise their eyebrows at the baroque piles into which Döblin heaps his words. This piling up, this urge not to be satisfied with a single word be it ever so colourful, is not poverty, not stuttering, but overflowing fullness. Döblin’s images work on the reader with the fanatical vehemence of Biblical faces.
And the question remains: who in these empty bare times has nerves, leisure, commitment, faith enough for this book, which demands as much as it offers?
