Döblin’s Babylons
From an actual city of walls and temples and imperial power, by the time of the New Testament Babylon had grown to symbolise everything evil and contrary to the Christian idea of God. Döblin drew on this mythopoetic symbol throughout his writing career, from an early piece for Der Sturm, to the last of his epic fictions.
Tracking Babylon through Döblin’s works
Der Sturm (1910): Döblin published a short piece in the second issue of this new avant-garde journal edited by his friend Herwarth Walden. It was titled Nineveh of the Mark – Nineveh of course being the great Assyrian capital which under Sennacherib conquered Babylon. But the symbolism is equivalent. That piece, which as far as I know has not been translated before, is included at the end of this post.
Mountains Oceans Giants (written between late 1921 and September 1923): In this dystopian epic Döblin devotes large sections of Parts 3 and 4 to a dictator of the Berlin townzone he names Marduk, after the patron deity of Babylon.
Berlin Alexanderplatz (written 1928-29): We find on page 225 of the new Michael Hofmann translation this paragraph, quoted direct from Revelations 17:3-5:
…The harlot Babylon, the great harlot that sitteth upon many waters. I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet-coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication. And upon her forehead was a name written: Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth.
And on page 428:
There is drumming and drumming. The Whore of Babylon has lost, Death has won and drums her away.
The Whore spits and carries on and drools and screams: ‘What’s so good about him, what do you see in him, Franz Biberkopf.’…
Death beats his drumroll…: ‘I chopped him into little pieces. But because he’s good and strong, he is to put on a new life.’…
…Triumph and tumult around death. Triumph and tumult. The beast under the woman shies away, lashes out.
Tales of a Long Night (written 1945-46, first published in 1956 in East Berlin): The monstrous father-figure novelist Gordon Allison was identified by Walter Muschg, editor of the first West German edition, with the decayed deity of Döblin’s first work produced mostly in exile. Which brings us to:
Babylonian Exile, or, Pride goes before a Fall (written 1932-1933): an entire epic road novel whose “hero” is the ancient Babylonian god cursed by Jeremiah, condemned to come down to Earth and atone for his sins, i.e. the iniquities of several millennia of ‘civilised’ history. In my next post I shall introduce this novel at greater length.
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NINEVEH OF THE MARK
Alfred Döblin
Der Sturm 2 (10 March 1910)
It rises out of the unavoidable much-invoked sands of this landscape, laid down not near a southern sea from which emerged the Foam-risen Goddess, plunging not into the deep azure of a gracious heaven that has room enough for countless gods, nestling against no groves of pine, of olives, indeed of palm trees, but watered entirely by the Spree and Panke – Berlin, a strange city of pleasures and sins, undermined by railways, seething with beasts of toil whipped on and allowed no little hands for prayer, wheezing from lungs filled with toxic factory fumes, and instead of innumerable gods innumerable diseases crawl around and mingle compassionately with the poor folk. This strip of heaven knows not the historical treats of ancient baths, nor Near Eastern ecstasies, the joyous dances of Corinth and Tanagra. Here everything was spoiled from the start. Impious religions do their business, souls are possessed by every kind of quarrel, earnings-envy. Thirst and thirst, and hunger, hunger – only the deity Time is worshipped; incapable of exhausting Time, people wriggle their way towards immortality.
But in this sand the wolf is peering with malachite-green eyes, the lean beast of pleasures, whips the long legs with its tail, the jaws grind, it spits and scatters husks on the ground. While the city flames in the night, the wolf howls through the sleeping streets and is heard wailing through the provinces.
Berlin itself has no, almost no demand for pleasures, neither eye nor ear for them. This caustic, sinew-straining, thought-filled town could produce the most abnormal and audacious delights, were it to direct its ingenuity to that end. But here one almost drowns in the din from funfairs, in the garish colours of villagers. Here pleasure has no real sources of production; people from Munich, Rixdorf, Prenzlau feel quite at home. Thoroughgoing North Germans, Berliners develop no social sense, they have no folk festivals; they keep to their homes, take care of the family, dress up for and against one another; their sense of community is satisfied by reading the newspaper, private parties, attending a play or a parade. And so Berlin has not acquired any pleasure-town. Strangers wade hopelessly in the sand, the sand is there, but Berlin does not see it. It sees gigantic dimensions, but only of banality, sees originality only in the huge scale of businesses, instead of spirit, calculation; instead of order, sobriety and thirty-fold sobriety; throwing things together with no style, instead of an imagination. Here and there a light, a little torch, a candle.
First I want to speak of the avant-garde of pleasure, of the patrolling priestesses of Venus. Let me catch my breath.
Included as an Annex to Alfred Döblin’s Babylonische Wandrung: a study by Patrick O’Neill. Herbert Lang 1974.
Rixdorf, renamed Neukölln when it achieved the status of town in 1912. This southern suburb of Berlin was a byword for frivolous entertainment; see for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wKGzaCmazA .
