Encounters with Doblin

I’m working up a short series of translations in which significant figures tell of their encounters with Döblin. I’ve used two criteria for inclusion on the series: a) face to face encounters, usually over several years; and b) useful perspectives on Döblin the man and his works.

Who was Günther Anders?

The first episode is from the “philosophical anthropologist of the atomic age”, Günther Anders (1902-1992). Following the first use of the atom bomb in 1945, Anders (a cousin of Walter Benjamin; he was married to Hannah Arendt 1929-1937) devoted his energies to understanding the implications of this epoch-changing event in the context of an advanced technological culture experiencing “Promethean shame”: the products we make are now so far beyond what we ourselves are capable of that we no longer experience Promethean hubris of the kind Döblin depicted in Mountains Oceans Giants; instead we feel shame at our insignificance in the face of these technological “marvels”.

In the decades since his perceptions were enclosed in the book covers of his two-volume Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (“The Obsolescence of the Human”, C H Beck 1956/1980) the world has proceeded drastically farther down that road. It is scandalous that his work is almost unavailable in English: a few chapters can be found online, translated in 2014 from a Spanish translation (!) of Anders’ original German. (See: ‘On Promethean Shame’, in Christopher Müller, Prometheanism: Technology, Digital Culture and Human Obsolescence (Rowman and Litlefield, 2016), pp. 29-95.

The text below (written, I presume, in the early 1980s) is taken from the Introduction to a collection of Anders’ literary criticism Mensch ohne Welt: Schriften zur Kunst und Literatur (“Human without a world: writings on art and literature” C H Beck 1984) which includes three pieces on Döblin as well as critiques of Kafka, Brecht, Broch, Heartfield and Georg Gross.

Chris Godwin

Introduction (II): Döblin

by Gunther Anders

My interpretation of Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz played a major role in my writer’s CV. I had never made a literary text the starting point of a philosophical reflection; I despised writing about writing. I still recall how I devoured the novel very soon after it appeared. What excited me was not just the Dos Passos-like film and montage construction – then quite original in German fiction – but above all the representation of human beings, who, in contradiction to Heidegger’s Being-in-the-world were, as unemployed and criminal persons condemned to be social drop-outs, not in any world. What I sought to do was to take their mode of existence, specifically their disintegrating speech that reflected the disintegration of their relationship to the world – to my own astonishment I was taking notes before I had actually begun the task – and translate it into philosophy.

After dashing off a draft I phoned Dr Alfred Döblin, whom I didn’t know at all. He agreed to meet, began at once to read the draft, at first shook his head (for as a doctor he was used only to the philosophy of the natural sciences), slowly the headshaking abated, and he now and then said, in his Berlin vernacular,  that I seemed to him to be ein janz Schlauer (“a right clever sort”). And when he was through with it after more than an hour he judged it “amusing, but spot-on.” I would never again be called “amusing”.

Unforgettable how, when we were not entirely in agreement over one of my assertions, to my no little astonishment (rather: terror) he began to look up the number for Franz Biberkopf in the telephone book: he was to settle the argument, and the search was only abandoned (even at that time Döblin’s spectacle lenses were thick as a finger) when I pointed out a) that Franz B was by Döblin’s own dictum already dead (which took him aback); b) even if he were still alive, Franz would certainly not be able to afford a telephone connection; and c) he was alas merely one of those puppets invented by Döblin – which in the end, scratching his chin, he “couldn’t rightly dispute”. So prankish, or so crazy, was this genius of a tailor’s son from Stettin.

Regardless of the merits of the argument in question, after this phone-book scene he suddenly seized my hand, dragged me downstairs, we walked – nay, raced – down Tauentzian Strasse, then (he holding my manuscript like a trophy out before him, possibly afraid of bumping into a closed door) we stormed into the editorial offices of Die neue Rundschau where he at once tried to hand it to the editor Rudolf Kayser. But he (being not very bright) was incapable of recognising Döblin’s masterpiece for what it was, and asked me – this shortly before Hitler, every night bodies were found lying in entries – if instead I could write him an essay on “the struggle of German youth”, an offer which to me, the totally unknown, was fabulous, to be sure, but which I turned down with a laugh (to Döblin’s delight) because of the pathos-vocable “struggle” – in short, the two of us were given the brush-off by a nobody. In consequence, my acceptance by the elite Neue Rundschau was not celebrated until 1946 (in April) and my Döblin-text appeared in print more than thirty years after that refusal (in the Festschrift for the 80^th birthday of Georg Lukács, Luchterhand 1965).

And then came the emigration year 1933, and we met again in Paris, 6ème, in the back room of some bistro; both of us, to be sure, in a state of fearful dismay, shame, misery, and concern for the world, but yet with no possibility of a meeting of minds. For slightly disoriented as he was, every day he adopted a new view of the world and a different political stance. It happened that he roared at me one day, when in response to one of his momentary bees-in-the-bonnet picked up from somewhere by chance – that the European Jews now in such mortal danger could be saved only by moving to Madagascar – I showed it up for what it was, and roared back. We never saw one another again in Paris. Even we persecuted refugees made life harder for ourselves than it already was. Sadder – but one can understand why.

Then for years I heard nothing more from him or about him. Until – it must have been seven years later, in California – I learned that one of his sons, a mathematical genius, had fallen as a French soldier in one of the last days of the war against Hitler. And then, after France was occupied, he too suddenly, and of course with no resources at all, popped up in Los Angeles with wife and son, and what’s more (he, who in better days had philosophised in a rather vulgar naturalistic way) in gratitude for his salvation was now a fresh-baked Catholic; he went, not to Madagascar, but to Mass, and had begun to confess (but what sins?) in his most Berlinish French to a father confessor who understood neither French nor Berlinish. I admit I had an inkling of this first from him personally, when on his 60^th birthday I presented him with a Bible of the World containing the sacred texts of all the world religions, inscribing it with a rhyme to the effect that anyone who embraces all religions can never go astray, which mischievously – no, with a happy smile – he dismissed with the words: “Merci beaucoup, mon vieux, mais vous venez un peu trop tard.” His faith was as little credible as his French.

Sensible political discussion with him was already then very difficult – so far had his judgement on the world situation and the future separated him from the positions represented by all the other émigrés. And yet: he still wrote, or was again writing, and in an unconstrained magnificent manner, by which I mean two things:

1. that he found production in no way difficult; on the contrary (exactly as before) he was incapable of fully turning off the spigot of production;
2. that (just as before) he as a writer outstripped himself, that he created characters whose fullness of experience, powers of thought, sceptical acumen were endlessly bigger than his “own”; in philosophical terms: that his creations outshone the creator; in psychological terms: that in a post-hypnotic amnesia he betrayed no sign of his actual depths, and to some extent had no notion of those depths, had no understanding of them at all. A schizo-condition, as must be the rule with musicians who converse in trivialities but compose profoundly; but I have never encountered it among writers. And that he (this is closely connected to the above) wrote about historical conditions and events – and did so magnificently and competently – while having only a vague knowledge of them (in the sense of historical research), and that he was therefore to a large degree – and this is the highest imaginable praise – empirically independent, constructing vistas to the accuracy of which petty archive-snufflers were able to attest only after the event.

First page of MS of Berlin Alexanderplatz

So he was writing again. Just like old times. Day after day his crazily long handwriting filled the pages like root fibrils; without constraint, without a goal he delivered himself up to associations that had nothing at all to do with him, the old man Döblin sitting in Hollywood as a neo-Catholic “Frenchman”. For he, or it, wrote wise political saws about “Karl and Rosa”, meaning Liebknecht and Luxemburg, who were no longer his concern, if they ever had been. This happened in a small hot south-facing room on Citrus Avenue in Hollywood, in which at the same time his youngest son, who was already two heads taller than him, practised Telemann on the flute without a pause, which must have driven the very musical father, from whom nothing was farther than such monodic stuff, around the bend.

But he remained, perhaps helped by his religion, gentle and patient.

So the “chronic cheeky chappy”, as he described himself in Berlin, had now become a very patient, very modest, helpful old man – though he was at that time twenty years younger than I am now. When in the height of summer I lay in bed with an angina, he hotfooted through the searing streets of Hollywood as if it were the most natural thing in the world (of course he was one of that tiny negative elite the Non-Car-Owner) in order to paint my tonsils. And when we both lived in Herbert Marcuse’s vacant house in Santa Monica, he behaved towards his wife, who was dreadfully aged by the loss of her son, as a newlywed might behave towards his freshly blooming bride. He tiptoed around caring for her, he who once had Mountains, Oceans and Giants at his disposal, slipping into the kitchen to surprise her with breakfast in bed – which was not only a memorable achievement for his eyes (for although almost blind he never messed up when breaking an egg) but for his heart too. All honour to his memory!

NOTES

Heidegger: Anders studied with Husserl and Heidegger. (The latter was Hannah Arendt’s lover before she married Anders.)

Vernacular: the loss of daily contact with Berlin speech was a seriously aggravating aspect of Döblin’s exile.

Wolfgang/Vincent Döblin: see https://beyond-alexanderplatz.com/anniversary-of-doblins-death

Son: Stephan/Etienne, the youngest of four. Peter was a print designer in New Jersey; Klaus/Claude spent the war years evading capture in southern France and Switzerland; Wolfgang died on military service in June 1940.

Cf. Döblin’s own account of the writing of Wang Lun: “I went through so many books on China at that time, but if anyone had asked me an hour after reading what was in the book, I could not have answered. I had more to do then than busy myself with Chinese porcelain, with the role of Lamaism, with the woman question in China. When I’ve finished my novel, I used to tell myself, I’ll go into such and such a subject that seems really interesting; didn’t get around to it.”(Aufsätze zur Literatur (“Essays on Literature”) p 338.

Herbert Marcuse’s grandson Harold Marcuse has an informative blog about Anders: http://marcuse.faculty.history.ucsb.edu/anders.htm#hmnote .

This poignant scene speaks volumes for the strength of Döblin’s resolve not to replicate his irresponsible father’s actions in absconding from the family, which had led to the young Alfred’s loss of “a little Paradise”.