Döblin’s Wallenstein and History
The way all incidents, places, people implant such a compelling sense of reality: that is the signature of Döblin’s Wallenstein. But this reality-colouring is in no way imparted by sticking to historical facts, by whether what is represented can be verified. The question of historical facticity is, as it were, automatically closed off by the immediate reality of the world made poetically real by this novel, which never gives the reader cause to dip into a history book.
Waymarkers to Wallenstein
Embarking on a 900 page translated novel is always a challenge, so any waymarkers highlighting the merits and characteristics of the text are welcome.
David Midgley, whose review of Mountains and Manas appeared in the 15 August 2021 issue of the Times Literary Supplement under the heading “Döbliners: Outlandish Visions of Man and Society”, has kindly pointed me to an impressive and insightful essay on Döblin’s Wallenstein which appeared in the 1948 Festschrift for Döblin’s 7o th birthday. I managed to find a copy of the Festschrift on abebooks.de, and have translated the essay, below. I’ve also added it to the front matter of Volume 1 of my translation of Wallenstein. Rasch’s essay not only focuses usefully on Wallenstein, but relates it to Döblin’s other major novels to reveal the constancy of his imaginative powers across the decades.
DÖBLIN’S WALLENSTEIN AND HISTORY
Wolfdietrich Rasch
In the minds of readers, even those alert and receptive to the literature of the inter-war years, it seems that of all the works of Alfred Döblin the ones that have remained alive and potent are Berlin Alexanderplatz, his last great success before emigration, and the futuristic novel Mountains Oceans Giants, while the earlier two-volume novel Wallenstein remains overshadowed by those works. Explain it how you like, the significance and weight of the Wallenstein novel justify no such temporary over-shadowing. Wallenstein is the great historical novel of the post-Great War era. In it the entire breadth of Döblin’s narrative art first comes into view. The same epic power which in The Three Leaps of Wang Lun (1916) proved its stamina in the distant world of ancient China, in Wallenstein (1920) creatively embraces the historical past, in Mountains Oceans Giants (1924) the future, and finally in Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) the most immediate present. The distant, the past, the future, the nearest present: thus does the narrator pace out the world, master its dimensions. One must discern the inner connectedness, the equality of status of these four great novels, each appearing at almost the same interval of four years, each aiding the interpretation of the others, grown from the same root.
No greater error could be made than to understand the narrator Döblin one-sidedly from his Berlin novel – no doubt his greatest success – as if it were here that he discovered his true object. His object, in multiple reflections and refractions, is always the same: the puzzling existence of human beings as they tangle with the world, their encounter with the powers of Fate. Certain novelties in the form of the Berlin novel are more significant than any novelty of substance. Some may consider this work a foray into reality, capturing the trusted, immediately experienced milieu in which the Berlin doctor Döblin is at home. But the Berlin world in this novel is no more real than the world of the Thirty Years War or of ancient China. That Döblin had the environment of Franz Biberkopf within his purview every day says not much. As narrator he is equally at home in a bar on Alexanderplatz or a fishing village in Shandong or the old Hofburg in 17th century Vienna. He knows exactly where and how Franz Biberkopf will find a bolthole in Berlin when he has to evade the police. But he knows too exactly where the trickster Wang Lun must hide from the police in Jinanfu: in the rear of a wayside shrine for homeless ghosts, in the Music God’s temple. And he knows just as surely what the Prague Mint looks like when Wallenstein is having his bad coins made. Differing in no way from the manner in which these distant bygone worlds are presented with all the colours of reality, the Berlin atmosphere is not a report of an environment observed daily, but is constructed from an inward imagining. Döblin’s epic oeuvre stems from an extraordinary imaginative power of the highest precision and densest plenitude, of unassailable certainty.
Wallenstein is one of the strongest tests. The way all incidents, places, people implant such a compelling sense of reality: that is the signature of this historical novel. But this reality-colouring is in no way imparted by sticking to historical facts, by whether what is represented can be verified. The question of historical facticity is, as it were, automatically closed off by the immediate reality of the world made poetically real by this novel, which never gives the reader cause to dip into a history book. The separate plane of factual historical phenomena never enters as such into awareness within the novel; – and the reality of things thereby appears all the more immediate. There is nothing in the writing that smacks of history with literary flourishes, of embellishing or filling out facts conveyed by chronicles and sources. Without doubt an immense familiarity with historical materials, a broad and wide-branching knowledge, was a precondition for this book. But such knowledge never speaks as such, never smacks of source studies. The preconditions for the artistic work have become totally invisible, absorbed into the composition. Nothing would be more pointless than to tot up how much in this novel agrees with the findings of historical research, and how much deviates from them.
The historian, methodically checking the sources, can acknowledge that some recorded event “really happened”. This has nothing whatever to do with the character of reality in an artistic sense: for a fact that has more or less been confirmed as real can in its depiction seem abstract, colourless, unreal. It is irrelevant to the reality content of Berlin Alexanderplatz whether Franz Biberkopf ever lived. That the same applies to historical material is demonstrated by Wallenstein. With this we can begin to delineate its special status within the genre of the historical novel.
But is Wallenstein actually a historical novel? Hardly in the sense of the romanticists Scott or Hugo, and certainly not in the sense of the historising German followers of Scott. Döblin broke with that German tradition. But his oeuvre stands in a different European heritage. Sixty years earlier, Flaubert had brought about this turn; if you need a formula call it the realistic turn in the historical novel, when in Salammbo (1862) he transferred to a historical topic the same principle of composition he had used in Madame Bovary, the realistic depiction of a woman’s fate in the provincial France of his own time. In Wallenstein, where Döblin completes this turn in his own fashion, the German historical novel achieves European status.
This turn does not at all indicate that Döblin denigrates historical reality, or plays with it more capriciously than earlier writers. On the contrary: as far as the character of Field-marshal Wallenstein is concerned, Döblin comes closer to the historical Wallenstein than does, for example, Schiller. Döblin is happy to use what tradition has handed down, but also, when appropriate, to deconstruct legends, so that a historical figure is no longer heroised, dramatised, romanticised. But uncovering “the real” is not the actual intention of his novel. History is the material. A grandiose material such as the Thirty Years War (representing which in its decisive phases is the task here, Wallenstein is merely one figure in the totality of events) provokes, through a many-branched wealth of excitements, world-building and plenitude of characters, a literary representation with the same validity as a comely model for Raphael, a fascinatingly shaped head for Velasquez. But the literary shaping, by an indissoluble melding of factual and invented ingredients, ceaselessly transforms the material into one seamless whole. This consists in itself, and cannot be measured by any state of affairs outside it. For example, the Prince-elector Frederick of the Palatinate was defeated in Bohemia, lost his country and his Electoral status, married the daughter of the English King James, and sought restoration – these are all indisputable facts, but inside the novel they have fundamentally no more weight and no higher degree of reality than say the elemental gluttony that Emperor Ferdinand II indulges in sumptuous banquets, which may be less well “attested”; or than the invented fact that while out hunting at Hoheneich the Emperor races over grass, flicks meadow flowers into his companions’ faces, falls asleep in his chair, the next day falls from his horse, etc. Everything made present in the narrative has the same claim to truth, and has the same impact as truth.
But if the character of reality does not rest on truth as measured by historical facts, does it perhaps lie in costume-authenticity, in recreating the authentic atmosphere of the relevant era? – With Döblin, atmosphere and costume for sure appear as very specific, very emphatic. Connoisseurs of the era on all sides attest to the atmosphere of this 17th century, in the attire ever and again described most succinctly, in the rooms, adornments, tools, weapons, in the demeanour of people, in titles and forms of speech, ceremonies and customs – in short, in countless details. This looks like a hallmark of the 19th century’s “sense of history”. But in fact Döblin’s way of seeing deviates sharply from it, for the “sense of history” gives to the atmosphere of the time an autonomous value, it is in love with the details, strives to do them justice by applying historical knowledge. With Döblin, on the other hand, it appears ingenuous, naïve, one reality among other realities. It never comes across as lovingly restored, but is set down afresh, with immediacy, pulsating with the life of the era, one indissoluble component of the totality of existence. Not a single sentence analyses the mentality or the forms of the time, or gives voice to a historian’s training. The narrator seems unconcerned to do justice to the atmosphere of the time – and thus all the more surely does it justice.
But this is only one among many moments of an individualising, reality-conveying mode of representation. The sureness of the unemphatic, undecorative placing of the atmosphere of the time is so unquestionable that even the piling up of such details poses no risk, never smacks of a study of cultural history or costume history. Not even when an entire page is taken up with a depiction of three musicians in Wallenstein’s camp at Pilsen. Here’s another example:
Confidential delegates of the Electoral princes convened in Mühlhausen. … Hoisted from their chancelleries chambers gaming-tables tennis courts, the elegant soft company sat side by side on cushioned benches among flowers, gushing fountains, smooth unsteady floorboards beneath exquisitely shod feet, behind them, around them white statues of Theseus, Apollo with his lyre, little gods shooting arrows, females exposed and clutching at falling garments; sat turned to one another in heated air beneath tall powdered wigs, slim rapier between the knees, like colourful glittering pheasants in a pleasure garden; bent an ear to one another. As they spoke they sipped from silver beakers and placed them down on little tables at the elbow, filled with abhorrence for the Duke of Friedland and his doings. … Johann Georg, half-lying in a cushioned chair on account of swollen legs, his skull bare, beard flowing down his breast, a stout big-bellied mass, limp cheeks, gazed about him from swelling lively brown eyes … In a coat of black atlas-silk ornamented with silver, shirt cuffs blooming bushily from both sleeves, grave and haughty beneath a bright painted knight, his highborn Serenity Johannes, hereditary prince and Count of Hohenzollern, representative of the Duke in Munich, with arms crossed over his long chain of pearls.
The difference from the older manner of depicting historical costumes is not only a question of temperament or a mere nuance, but points to what is decisively and fundamentally new in Döblin’s historical novel. It is a historical novel beyond historicism. The historical novel, brought to full flower by the Romantics, in Wallenstein finally shrugs off the Romantic influence (to which, for example, Ricarda Huch’s depiction of the same subject matter remains far more in thrall). A new epic realism drives the Romantic back to its proper location, the region of the historical past, the world of the old Empire romanticised so yearningly. It is precisely here that literature lets go of the 19th century, which lasted until 1914 and then fell apart and expired in the World War. In the writing of those years we find many ways in which outmoded forms of existence and seeing are driven back as new realities are grappled with, and in Wallenstein we have at once a new encounter with the historical world that the previous century had claimed as its own. Döblin enters the fray not with polemic, satire, aggression, but directly in a closed representation in which the new way of experiencing is manifested, a representation of the highest objectivity. Over the almost nine hundred pages of the novel we find not a single sentence of commentary. Only the facts speak, the events, harshly lit, pitilessly floodlit. But there is no interpretation, no statement of opinion or partisanship, no bias, even indirectly via accentuation. There is no complaining, no accusing, no glorifying or defending, no pathos; the tone is coloured by no mourning for vanished greatness, for roads not taken, by no sentiment, no romanticism. The story of the ever-flaring war appears as an epic visualisation of an incalculable complex happening, with a surging back and forth of intersecting interests, combatant powers, stirred-up religious and secular conflicts, with weaknesses and strengths revealed in the exposed humanness of the protagonists. The colourfully surging confusing events are made comprehensible by the author’s structuring power, gaining in the urgent welter of individual scenes an intense and thrilling presence through the passion of the vibrant depictions. Yet it remains as ambiguous as reality itself. The chunk of imperial history singled out here appears as one reality like any other, unencumbered by internal connections to the past, not distorted by the perspectives of someone fleeing the present, or using history to interpret one’s own time and future.
The novel begins after the defeat of the Winter King in Bohemia, and ends with the murder of Wallenstein and the death of Emperor Ferdinand. In between are the growing strength of Catholicism and of Habsburg, threatened by the growing power of Maximilian of Bavaria; the restoration of the Emperor’s hold on power by Wallenstein, who as an unscrupulous nouveau riche speculator builds an army for the impecunious Emperor and defeats the enemies of the Empire, driving the Danes back across the Baltic; the dismissal of the dangerously autonomous general, a new threat from Sweden’s entry into the war, which extensively negates the gains of the Counter-reformation; and the reinstatement of Wallenstein, who defeats the Swedes too. Because he, trusted by no one, wants peace and a balance of power with the Protestant princes, the Jesuits at the court in Vienna force his dismissal again, and when he finally turns openly against the Emperor, he is murdered. That is the ground plan, into which the impact of other powers – France, Spain – is woven, the fate of numerous individuals, of the rebel Mansfeld, of Tilly, Maximilian, Frederick of the Palatinate, Gustavus Adolphus, the fate of Bohemia, and an entire world of courtiers and soldiers, peasants and migrants.
But the whole thrilling game is presented not from the standpoint of Wallenstein, nor from the standpoint of the Emperor, even if the depiction of Ferdinand himself is much more accurate, rich and intimate than that of Wallenstein, who seems always enclosed in a hard shell, his motives and intentions obscure. So where does the narrator choose his standpoint? Many perspectives are possible, even without any tendentious distortion of the facts. The history of that time can be presented from a Catholic or a Protestant or even an ecumenical perspective; from a monarchical standpoint, from one of imperial unity or of local sovereignty, of nationalism or cosmopolitanism, of the great individual or of the common people. But Döblin adopts none of these possible standpoints. He offers an epic depicti0n of the interwoven whole. Events, not their meaning; reality, not its interpretation.
This means that with Wallenstein, Döblin frees himself not only from the 19th century’s way of seeing, but from its very historicism – the extreme historicism of that century. His standpoint lies beyond history. He attained it even earlier, as became evident in Wang Lun, a work that is as little a Chinoiserie as Wallenstein is a Romantic history. In the wisdom and mentality of the Orient Döblin locates and symbolises the afterworld of history. For the spirit of ancient China is alien to the spirit of European historicism. In it there lives, in opposition to history, “the profound basic feeling” described by Wang Lun: “Who tries to conquer the world by action will fail. The world is of the spirit; it should not be disturbed. Who acts, loses it; who clings, loses it.” Döblin should not be held dogmatically to such Oriental passivity. But here, at the moment of the highest historical, progress-obsessed expansion of power in the Wilhelmine imperial state, he encounters the countervailing idea of this age and brings it to fruition in his Chinese novel. It was published in the midst of war, but was written in 1912. During the previous forty years a “conquête méthodique (as Paul Valéry termed it) had been carried through: the systematic buildup of economic and military power in Germany, which absorbed all energies, forcing them into the service of that work of progress, the tasks of a strained historicism, ignoring warnings and opposing voices. In 1912, at the climax of this foolhardy attempt to “conquer the world by action”, shortly before the catastrophe, Döblin, only a little younger than the Bismarckian Reich in whose rise he passes his youth, presents his countervailing idea, his protest. “Who tries to conquer the world by action will fail.” The Dedication to the novel asks: who is meant to be served by all this “progress” visible in modern technologising? “We go, and know not whither. We stay, and know not where. … Who can here speak of winning, possessing?” What a protest, this whole novel of Wang Lun, the fisherman’s son from Shandong, vagrant beggar and occasional thief, no model of rectitude – but wrenched up to become a warrior for justice when in the great city of Jinanfu he sees how the state exercises brutal injustice on an honest innocent man. He helps him but cannot prevent the police from cutting him down, and this transforms the vagabond Wang Lun. He avenges the man, flees into the mountains, lives among robbers, and founds the “League of the Truly Powerless”. “Do not resist” is their slogan, “Do not act”. Offer no resistance to Fate. The brethren of the League live according to these precepts, drawing in outcasts, the poor, the weary, the persecuted, the despairing. They traverse the land, working, begging, committing no wrongs. But the State, the intolerant rule of the Manchu Dynasty, cannot leave them in peace but persecutes them, kills thousands. Finally their leader Wang Lun is driven to active defence of the League, to rebellion against the dynasty and a campaign to reinstate the rule of the Ming. “It was not given to us to be truly powerless,” he claims. But during the struggle, which at first is successful but then brings the League into difficulties, Wang sees this activity as a decline from Wu-wei, from the ancient doctrine of stoicism, of the inevitability of Fate. “I have no desire to found a kingdom; I could kick and beat myself for forgetting this. The Wu-wei was initiated for them and for me, and I shall let us be destroyed.” He rejects any rescue attempt, and joins his brethren in their annihilation, in joy and inner freedom.
Thus does Döblin bring the counter-idea to fruition. The profound dubiousness of the strained actions that produce history, as perceived in the world of the ahistorical Orient, from then on determined his world view. It lies behind even his futuristic novel Mountains Oceans Giants, which shows whither uninhibited progress will lead humanity, and behind the Berlin novel, in which the ordinary man Franz Biberkopf forever braces himself against Fate and in his blindness fails to recognise his enemies for what they are, until he gains his sight and submits. That experience makes possible the epic equanimity with which the fluctuating dice-game in the history of the horrendous Thirty Years War is viewed, and enables the narrator’s stance outwith historicity. “What use to the Emperor is his victory?” Wang Lun asks. “One who lives in fever conquers lands and loses them; it’s all a confusion, nothing else.”
The characters in Wallenstein live in just such a fever. “But see,” says an adherent of Wang Lun, “people want to ape the great and powerful, and whoever is a great lord wants to be a greater.” In the eyes of an Oriental sage, the horrendous war would be merely “a confusion, nothing more.” And so Döblin does not undertake to interpret it from this or that interest, from a particular historical motive. He simply shows what happens. Of all that historical action has planned, nothing survives. Hardly does a state of peace seem to appear than it is once again disturbed, and the constellation of power is abruptly rearranged. Everything is ambiguous. Bohemia defeated – but the Emperor sees his realm imperilled. Maximilian of Bavaria has grown strong – but his triumph is at once tinged with fear; and indeed, he is soon in the greatest difficulty. Habsburg is strengthened – but what it strengthens is menaced at once by Wallenstein and his army. Hardly has the Emperor freed himself from that pressure than this new freedom is ruined again by the intervention of the Swedes, which changes everything – but only momentarily. For the Swedes are quickly driven out again, the Emperor is again powerful: powerful and powerless all at once, for the victorious Wallenstein is again a danger. Always the same game; and just as the Chinese sage sees through it, so now does the hermit in his cave: “Nothing must remain. In a playhouse of deception are humans placed, amid grazing cattle…” The Baroque plaint of the vanity of earthly striving finds space to resonate in the world represented here. But people suffer under blind changes. No matter which powers of history win and rule, all bring about the same destruction, the ruin of harvests, of cities, of people. The moving depiction of the Trail of Tears of the Bohemians driven into exile for their faith is one of the strongest episodes in all Döblin’s works.
But the movers of history also suffer, the actors, thrown hither and thither by the to and fro of Fate. Power-craving Maximilian groans under the torment of lost power. Frederick of the Palatinate is a depressive melancholic. When reinstatement beckons, hard Wallenstein is eaten up with rage and chagrin at his defeats, defenceless against his ailments. And how often does swift Death triumph over the “great lords” – Döblin fashions the deaths of Tilly and Mansfeld, the funeral of the brutal conqueror Gustavus Adolphus, into such triumphs of Death. The deepest suffering belongs to Emperor Ferdinand, who now and then looks upon the “confusion” with the same dubious eye as the Chinese sage. And in the same way that in the Chinese novel the Emperor Qianlong in a moment of exhaustion seeks to evade responsibility by attempted suicide, at the beginning of Wallenstein the Emperor Ferdinand, his mind also oppressed and clouded, has thoughts of fleeing. At first he pulls himself together and contends for power. But under the growing pressure of the changing situation he becomes ever more dull, apathetic, evades decisions in ever more distracted ways, deadens his mind with banquets, until at last he succumbs to the pressure, abandons throne and court confused and tormented by fearsome dreams, tramps through his lands in the company of vagabonds and robbers, and finally dies. But he lacks not at all the dignity and personal weight of a ruler. The more distraught he grows, the more this is expressed in a curious gaiety, a stoicism that seems to parody the stoicism of a Chinese sage. In the most difficult circumstances he remains serene, unconcerned, withdrawn from everything. “I do not know myself what is. Nothing touches me. Everything blesses me.” When Wallenstein, the Duke of Friedland, stands before him to discuss the raising of an army against the Swedes, the Emperor is confused, seems not to know that his empire is at stake, as if it has nothing to do with him. “Ah, so now it’s the Swede’s turn. The Duke here predicted it. No doubt he’ll defeat him. It may also happen that the Swede will defeat this man; such matters are inscrutable. A strange business.” And when the counsellors later warn against Wallenstein’s growing power: “What is this? Defeat this one, then defeat this one. Now Friedland again. Everyone wants power.”
Wallenstein, made of the parvenu’s harder stuff, is not so hollowed out by the struggle for power, his nature never yields, even when his ailments wrack him to exhaustion. He is the most energetic of all the actors in the great game. He is pitiless in allowing pride to drive him on through betrayal, and the dirty dealings for which he abuses his office as Commandant of Prague. Döblin introduces him quite casually in the second part as an exploiter of the Bohemian chaos, and then depicts his sudden emergence “from the bubbling Bohemian swamp”. He gathers immense wealth, properties, titles, an army, and then takes part in the great game, spinning threads to every side, autocratic, dangerous, filled always with inscrutable plans. But at bottom without cohesion, a gambler – and therefore in his way a revealing representative of the great dubious game of the historical powers. “The Duke knew only the game, its seduction grew in line with the size of the stake; his concern was only with transacting, circulating, not possessing. He was merely the power that turns solids to liquid.” He is clever and tenacious, decisive, his reactions always right for the situation. But – and this is the decisive point – even his energies drive at last into emptiness, become entangled in the counter-moves of the Viennese court, trap him in the web he himself is weaving. The man of power succumbs to power. That it should be he who in the end stands for peace and reconciliation and holds back his army appears ironic. For sure he is clear-sighted: “the Empire was shoddily constructed and therefore shoddily governed.” But it is the clear-sightedness of disappointed ambition roused by opposition, spotting the opponent’s weak point. Many nobles and learned circles might hope that Wallenstein and his army will realise “The old Barbarossa dream – a great free German Empire” But “the situation revealed itself. Wallenstein showed his terrible face: a unitary German Empire, obeisance to one lord only.” Even this dream is but one motif in the colourful merry-go-round of the times. However clearly the “shoddy construction” of the empire is exposed, the reason (as Döblin depicts it) why everything is insoluble and hopeless lies not in the defects of a constitution, of a specific historical condition. The reason is historicity itself, to the extent that it is the realisation of a mania to solve everything, bring order to existence and conquer the world through incessant action, through unrestrained one-sided constantly changing activity in the service of Progress. “Who acts, loses it.”
And so with this novel Döblin turns his back on the history-obsessed 19th century that blew itself apart in the First World War (and of course soon experienced a terrifying artificial revival). The spiritual standpoint beyond History, which relieves the narrative even of its active forces and currents, allows a clear, incorruptible, illusion-free view of the reality of life in history. The novel presents such a reality. That it seems so real to us is due to the abundance of reality in the vision, the surging, inexhaustibly inventive wealth of detail and the vivid force of its representation in language. Every aspect of this reality, the large and the small, the delightful and the terrible, are grasped with equal intensity. Everything is placed in the same very hard light that makes the façade transparent, penetrates through the surface and illuminates every nook and cranny where Romanticism likes to lurk. The intensity of imagination is transformed into the dense busy rhythms of the language. But while the word-art and imagery of the Expressionism of those years exploded old forms by the vehemence of the will to express, tore reality apart, turned objectivity into the pathos of new ways of experiencing so that new symbolic patterns could be wrung from them, Döblin’s epic prose retains an objective force, enhanced by the high tension of the expressive resources working away behind it. Thus, with the expressive and always powerful realism of a visionary, does the apt form emerge for a German historical novel of European stature, which creatively anticipated the “farewell to all prior history” that has become received wisdom after the Second World War.
This essay was a contribution to the 70th birthday Festschrift (Alfred Döblin zum siebzigsten Geburtstag. Wiesbaden: Limes-Verlag) compiled by Paul E. H. Luth in 1948 in an edition of 1,000 copies, under licence from the American Military Government. Wolfdietrich Rasch (1903-86) was a professor of recent German literature and language. His career prospered under the Nazis, for which he was penalised after the War; but he is well regarded for his sympathetic, nuanced and accessible writings on writers and literary movements.
