Land Without Death – Introduction
My translation of Doeblin’s South American epic (its original title now restored) is scheduled by Galileo for book publication in October 2022, in a format to match the two Doeblin titles published in 2021. Here, to whet your appetite, is my Introduction.
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INTRODUCTION
© C D Godwin 2022
From the first page the reader is plunged directly into a world of The Other – vivid, real, three-dimensional, peopled by human beings who behave … not quite like us. What are they up to, the women creeping at dawn down to the river? Their menfolk on the warpath … sympathetic magic … ghosts in the night … Before any clue as to where or when this is happening, we are already deep in the cultural world of Amazonian indigenes.
In his earliest epic novels, written before and during the first Great War, Döblin revealed a rare capacity to conjure up other worlds in convincing colourful detail: 18th century China with no trace of chinoiserie, 17th century Europe with no trace of antiquarianism. In The Land without Death (a.k.a. The Amazonas Trilogy), his imagination fired first by colourful atlases of South America and its ‘river-ocean’ the Amazon, then by reports of explorers, anthropologists, historians, and not least by his own lifelong quest for answers to the riddle of existence, he weaves a vigorous, multi-layered, thought-provoking fictional tapestry from the mid-16th century Conquest to the late 18th century end of the Jesuit Republic on the Paraná River, where Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil meet. (Note that Döblin provides not a single date: his epic is no dry chronicle, but an imaginative excursion into “deep history” of cultures and mentalities.) His overarching concern – drawn into sharp focus when the narrative returns to Europe in Volume 3 – is to question the trajectory of ‘Progress’ from the Renaissance to the Nazis.
This, the first English translation of The Land without Death, comes unheralded by prior reviews or analyses in English that might help the reader navigate its rich complexity. The Introduction must therefore shoulder several tasks:
- Summarise the themes that form the warp of the novel, as the weft of events is woven in;
- Outline the shaping of the narrative;
- Sketch the biographical and political background;
- Trace the novel’s fractured publication history;
- Examine its critical reception, noting misreadings and misconceptions that current scholarship is decisively correcting.
Thematic summary
Nature as an autonomous power
In 1948, looking back on his writing career, Döblin recalled the genesis of his South American epic:
Maps of South America with its mighty Amazon river: what a joy. … I immersed myself in its character, this marvellous river, river-ocean, age-old thing. Its banks, its animals and people belonged to it.
His depiction of exuberant Nature runs as a static counterpoint to the course of the plot – a hymnic celebration, joyfully unfolding Nature’s boundless power. Immense fecundity is one constitutive element: decay and death are also ever-present. Amid numerous depictions of delight, tones of suffering emerge, e.g. a dawn chorus of monkeys changes at once to a lament. Images of suffering and death pile up: a spider sucks a beetle to an empty shell; dead crocodiles float downstream. Nature’s essence lies in the interchange between becoming and decay. At the centre is the mighty Amazon, primal river, descending from the mountains as a ‘monster with billowing mane’ to claim the plains that are its estate. It is the source of proliferating life; but its floods bring dissolution and death.
Humans within Amazonian Nature
The minds and actions of Amazonian Indians are shaped by the overwhelming power of this life-giving, death-dealing Nature – it is by no means an Indian paradise. A connection among all beings – humans included – is of central significance. Numerous myths of human origin centre on the bond to earthly spirits of Nature. ‘This murichi palm is the ancestor of mankind,’ a chieftain explains to the conquistador Federmann in Part Two. ‘Animals and humans are of one blood, else how could the tapir be our ancestor?’ an Indian tells Bishop Las Casas in Part Three. Such bonds encompass every layer – rocks, plants, animals; they cross time (ancestors are reborn in new children) and space (women refrain from shivering so their absent menfolk won’t show fear).
The Indians exercise caution in every enterprise, and seek constantly to propitiate the dominant power. Naming overcomes the anonymity of a perilous environment: in the first few pages we have a rock called ‘grass’, a village called Toadhole, a watercourse named Yari-yari. (Later on, Spanish horses present a dire threat: not knowing the beast’s name, the Indians have no way to engage safely with it.) But the culture is no mere instrumental technique; the Indians are not antagonists of Nature; they dwell in and with her, in the many phenomena that have relevance to them, that they must try to interpret. Only from a European perspective, where Nature is an object to be known and acted upon, does the Indian stance seem superstitious.
Two myths: the Land without Death, and the Blue Jaguar
The jungle drums that announce the arrival of Europeans bestow on death a new and extraordinary quality: ‘Take care! Great danger… We shall all die… mountains shake. Wild beasts fall upon people… The Dog Star has moved closer to the Moon, and will eat it.’ Now there is no polar balance between life and death: instead, death is inevitable. Hence the imperative need for a Land without Death, a paradise free of ageing, sickness and toil. This entails not just freedom from death’s power, but the dissolution of the Indian life-world. Their one world splits into a Beyond of absolute life, and a Here-and-Now of absolute death. Repeated failures to find this land only bind the Indians more tightly to a hostile world of death.
The motif appears four times in the narrative: in the Conquest era of Volume 1 (Parts One and Three), and in the present day at the end of Volume 3. It is cited by the wretched soldier Puerto, who recognises that the European invaders suffer from the same hopeless yearning – in their case, for the gold they mistakenly believe will remedy their alienation and despair. And the Indians who confront Las Casas’ arguments discover that Heaven is not the fabled Land without Death – for one must die to get there.
Jaguars appear in the narrative with great frequency as (literal) wild animals; as (by analogy) the ravening invaders; as the ancestors of certain tribes; and as a quasi-magical beast (Walyarina). The Blue Jaguar, given prominence in the title of Volume 2 and two chapter headings in Volume 3, is the mythical symbol of total destruction, employed by Döblin as a warning that baleful tendencies in modern civilisation can turn the Indian myth of destruction into a reality.
The Women People
The story of the Women People that frames Volume 1 skilfully foreshadows the central motifs, and provides an interpretive framework for the whole trilogy.
The grim news transmitted by the drums has caused the menfolk of many tribes to abandon their villages and their women. The tribal community, in which the individual is subordinate, is dissolved; the women, who were not even told why the men had to leave, repudiate their inferior status, and in the process become conscious of individuality. This before any direct contact: the culture-destroying myth precedes the Europeans like a curse.
So the women’s uprising is no autonomous development of feminism; it is infected by European masculine structures. The women no longer accept suffering as a given, but grow disgusted with men, and treat them as bargaining chips. The ensuing slaughter of men is inevitable.
At first the women seek an identity fundamentally different from that shaped by a (masculine) culture: they themselves will become one with Nature, even to the extent of taking an animal lover. They self-consciously identify with the great river: ‘Amazonas! It was their river.’ But the Amazon means both life and death; hence the women understand that since ‘all living things come from the woman, then we must kill as well.’ Descending into a murderous cruelty (thrown into relief by the tale of a girl and boy discovering their humanity), they forfeit the protection of nature-spirits.
The native empires
The first direct contact with Europeans, depicted in a brief, offhand, ghostly manner, indicates the structure of European action. The three Spaniards with their fixed prejudices are incapable of understanding the Other. The Indians are cautiously helpful, but the strangers, who expect only violence and cannibalism, react with deadly violence and disappear as eerily as they arrived. Their lack of relationship to their surroundings reveals a nihilism that is elaborated in Part Two.
The tale told by the refugee Inca prince Cuzumarra at first presents the Inca realm as the innocent victim of sheer murderous plunder. Penetrating enquiry by the women uncovers a new aspect of the novel’s central theme: the Incas claim to have evolved a Land without Death, where, unlike the jungle Indians, Nature was subdued to their service. But did they subdue death as well? The Inca realm is revealed as a totalitarian welfare state, its people reduced to ‘monkeys and parrots’, the anonymous dominion of death is replaced by totalitarian overlords. The realm was rotten even before the Europeans arrived.
The lesser-known realm of Cundinamarca, the focus of Part Two, has also freed itself of Nature’s dominion. The Muisca people are prosperous, their culture highly developed, with no sign of totalitarianism. But even they can offer no resistance to European objectification. Why?
The Muisca built their culture on consciousness of the overwhelming power of death. Their ruler’s pilgrimage ‘through the web’ is a balancing act over the menacing abyss of death: the Zipa’s hopeless self-sacrifice shows that Muisca culture, like the Inca, was simply not equipped to save itself from destruction.
The modern world
Scattered through the first two volumes are snippets and extended scenes from a rapidly changing Europe. Before returning to the South American jungle in Part Ten, Volume 3 homes in on the Europe of the 1920s and 30s, where four centuries of scientific and technological progress have brought not only wonders, but wars and despair too. As the glory of the Middle Ages faded, a blooming culture grew rotten. The reciprocal vassal-lord relationship dissolved; now vassals suffer from the anonymous whims of bureaucracies and bankers. The urbanised individual is adrift from both nature and society; millions of disorderly colliding wills lead to unrest and war. Religion, once the centre of the mediaeval world, gains a life of its own outside any social context in a secularising world. The only consolation for the isolated individual is the promised Afterlife. Instrumental action provides a perverted sense of meaning, in public life and in the private life of the emotions: Weber’s ‘soulless professional, heartless hedonist’.
Shaping the narrative
Döblin’s epic fictions are symphonic constructions. The content (descriptions, events, conversations) is modulated by form (tempo, tone, mood, recapitulation) through the medium of a language of extraordinary deftness and precision. Meaning lies not – as a cursory or shallow reading might suggest – in a motley collection of individual scenes, but in the interplay of motifs and signifiers across different – sometimes widely separated – locations in the text.
Volume 1: On the Amazon
The three ‘movements’ of Volume 1 are tautly structured; the momentum never slackens. Cinematic shifts take us from wide-angle scenes to close-ups, from everyday life to epic action to vast landscapes. Realism and ‘magical realism’ are blended.
Part One
Two interlocking strands depict the rise and fall of the Women People, and the fate of refugees from the shattered Inca realm. South American landscapes are hymned. Mythical spirits, personified, insert themselves. The first depiction of Europeans – desperados in an unfamiliar climate and landscape – presages what will come in Part Two. Why do they suffer so horribly? ‘The Whites wore their rags and felt powerful.’ They pray: ‘Armed with my virtue I find rest in battle …’ Why inflict such calamities on the native cultures? To note that ‘they grow drunk and unruly, and look for gold’ is no explanation. At the very end we see Orellana, the first European to travel to the mouths of the Amazon: ‘All trace of was lost somewhere along the river … forests and plains closed behind the Whites … The mighty river … called out to the ocean: you strangers were never here!’
Part Two
The unflattering view of European landscapes and people that opens Part Two digs deeper into the ‘why’ motif: ‘Here people … grew strong, savage, immoderate. They were born of the struggle against death. They roamed around in great armies. They broke out of their twilight lands.’ A great ruler retires exhausted from the struggle against unmanageable change: ‘The people were in constant ferment, concerning nations and imaginary things in the sky.’ The king had to raise armies; for this he needed money; the Welsers (financiers from Augsburg) advanced loans, and were given the right to enrich themselves in the New World (saving one-fifth for the king) by conquest, pillage and slavery.
The narrative follows four Welser-financed mercenary bands, three of which converge on the highland capital of Cundanimarca (today’s Bogotá): a name unknown to most readers, who will therefore bring fewer preconceptions gleaned from familiar accounts of Mexico and Peru.
Cruel Alfinger is so alienated from his humanity that he can sear poisoned flesh from his own leg, and wonder if his head might be transplanted onto a horse. He dies an accidental death; his lieutenants plot to steal the king’s fifth.
With Quesada’s band we come again to the ‘why?’ ‘They did not know how to explain it. They said: we must conquer a new empire for the Spanish crown, we must find gold, we must spread the word of our ghostly god.’ But they were driven to ‘find oblivion and lose themselves’. And who was Quesada? ‘A White man, church and king his backbone, fame and glory his heart and blood. He was no better or worse than anyone else. What it was that drove him, he knew as little as the others.’ We follow the enthralling narrative of the expedition until it reaches ‘a land of dreams … a land of gold … truly a heavenly land. Mine, all mine!’ They bellow out the rancour they feel for the Spain they left behind: ‘Hey dear Mother! … Hey dear Father! … Hey dear Sister … Hey dear Bride …!’ Quesada tries to hold them back: ‘The Crown appointed me governor of a province, not a wasteland.’ But intent on slaughter and rape, his men ravage the place.
Urbane Belalcazar has already helped to conquer Peru; his arrival threatens to dilute the spoils of Quesada’s band. Armed standoff ensues. Meanwhile traumatised natives wonder how to survive when all has been polluted by the strangers, and the Zipa, their ruler, is bewildered and incapable.
The band of Nicolaus Federmann from Ulm has made its way across the savannah, where grass ‘closes over the head of a man on horseback’. They are enchanted by tales of a South Sea. Gradually, to the displeasure of its priests, the band begins to go native: ‘no more thought of the King of Spain and home and being a wealthy man … On, on, on to the South Sea.’ Now they view landscape, vegetation and creatures through native eyes. But when the band turns to the mountains ‘the trek … degenerates to a savage hunt.’ Hearing of Cundanimarca they give up on ‘natives, turtles, jaguars, lakes … they scrambled for gold … gold and pillage! Women and war!’
The three commanders agree to head back to Spain to report on their achievements (but first the invading rabble inflicts total devastation on the town). Before they part, they envisage longer term conquest and colonial settlement, and formally found the town of Santa Fé (today’s Bogotá): ‘We need terrain such as this. Maybe they’ll even send food over to Spain sometimes.’
On it goes, as the invaders ‘fulfill their frothing, puling destiny’: a ghastly Dürer-like procession of Belligerence, Misanthropy, Avarice. All three commanders eventually meet ignominious deaths.
Meanwhile the bewildered Zipa makes a forlorn pilgrimage to a sacred lake; but descent to the Underworld brings no hopeful auguries. The Zipa sacrifices himself.
Part Two ends back in the Amazonian jungle, where another group of Inca exiles looks for aid from the god Viracocha, who has failed their land. ‘Far to the east … the remnants of the destroyed empires lodged … The ground, the fiery sky, the gushing waters were stronger than anything.’
Part Three
The figure of Father Las Casas, whose complaints of atrocities for decades annoyed the Spanish Court and Church, provides the focus for a provocative querying of religion in Europe and the Americas. The repellent soldier del Puerto, who kills a dozen heathen every day to give thanks to God for deliverance in battle, explains conquistador motives: ‘Not to save souls, certainly … Over there they have no use for us. Whoever doesn’t go for a monk is lost … The Crown can’t provide all the offices we need, and I am no peasant.’ The natives are sub-human Others: ‘Just because someone guzzles and makes babies doesn’t make him human … We should exterminate the heathen.’
Theological debates between Las Casas and fugitive baptised Indians again question the ‘why’ of the Conquest: spreading the Word of God cannot be a motive, for the invaders’ actions run squarely counter to the Bible. The Indian flock try to help their shepherd, who dreams ecstatically of sailing back to bring the true Gospel to godless Spain. Sensing he has lost the argument, Las Casas blames Satan, ‘the satanic forest … Which is stronger, Christ or the forest?’ – a motif reprised at the beginning of Volume 2.
The (fictional) death of Las Casas – in a paragraph amended by Döblin between the first and second editions – occurs during a tussle with the river spirit Sukuruja. The original wording suggested that Las Casas surrendered to the river spirit. Having converted to Catholicism in the meantime, Döblin has the priest cling to his crucifix.
Volume 2: The Blue Jaguar
The narrative of the longer and more expansive Volume 2 covers almost two and a half centuries, from the founding of the Jesuit Order to its suppression (roughly 1540–1767). The location shifts southward to Sao Paolo, the Paraná, and the River Plate; the theme is the rise and destruction of the Jesuit Republic and its protected Indian population. Meanwhile momentous changes in Europe also come to the fore.
Parts Four to Six track the first Jesuits as they encounter the raw slaver culture in Brazil, and form their plan to set up protective ‘reductions’. The first attempt ends with destruction at the hands of an army from Sao Paolo.
In Parts Seven and Eight, the Jesuit Republic on the Paraná develops a distinctive culture and an adapted form of Christianity, against a backdrop of constant hostility from colonial settlers and royal functionaries. Eventually high politics in Spain and Portugal, and growing hostility to Jesuit influence from the Church and monarchies, dissolves the experiment and almost destroys the Order.
Part Four
Sailing for the New World, the young priest Mariana wonders if a European religion can thrive in the heat of a different land. His superior Emanuel rebuffs the thought: the Church is universal. On landing they at once encounter comically passive-aggressive defiance from the founders of the settlement that will become Sao Paolo, and struggle to understand the interplay between colonisers and natives. Their discovery of a ghastly concentration camp arouses horror in the younger priests, but Emanuel, stern commissar, forbids them to prejudice the mission by making trouble, and even sends some to accompany a slaving expedition. Finally the Jesuits realise they are in mortal danger if they remain.
Part Five
As the Jesuits trek into the wilderness, natives cautiously track them; some join the train. Mariana becomes ever more attached to Indian ways, and ends as an apparent sacrifice to Sukuruja, the river-spirit. Slavers from Sao Paolo form fake Jesuit trains to trap more victims. We learn the backgrounds of the men who have become Jesuits.
Part Six
Dour King Philipp of Spain (the current ‘I the King’) sees the Jesuits as ‘a ray of hope’ amid all the discouraging reports from his colonial officials; he relishes their plan to settle on the Paraná. Two itinerant Jesuits arrive at the camp, bearing an order from the provincial governor permitting the Jesuits to create protective settlements for Indians. The governor’s mismanagement provokes a native rebellion; refugees flock to the Jesuits, a town arises, and the idea is formed of a ‘Christian republic’. But they are still too close to Sao Paolo. When a swashbuckler takes power there and sends out an invasion force, the Jesuits and their Indian protégés suffer devastating slaughter.
Part Seven
In a burlesque narrative, the victorious swashbuckler in Sao Paolo is defeated by rivals from Sacramento, rival colony on the River Plate. The surviving Jesuits and their flock float down the Paraná; Indians select a site, and new reductions arise – this time not in joy, but in grim determination. The Indians develop a new mode of life and religion, supervised by just two priests per reduction. A delegation heads for Rome, where neither Jesuit leaders nor the Pope know anything of events on the Paraná. But the Pope is flattered to be asked his advice on defence, and writes to nuncios and bishops in support of the Jesuit enterprise. Montoya, the new Superior, sees the enterprise as a crucial bulwark against rotten Europe. When the Spanish king acknowledges the Indians as ‘most loyal vassals’, Montoya is spurred to create armed defences; and obtains royal consent for this after marauders from Sao Paolo seize royal gold mines in Peru.
The reductions blossom, to the annoyance of other colonists. Bishop Felix appears – humanist with his books and Greek statues and mistress and daughter – on a ‘state visit’ to the reductions with a royal Visitor: a marvellously evocative chapter. Back in Asuncion, Whites angered by royal interference in matters of forced labour offer fake evidence of Indian love for their servitude. Eventually Felix sails back to Rome; but his household falls victim to riots in Asuncion, leaving him bereft. In Rome there is suspicion of Jesuit power.
Part Eight
Heightened prose depicting the accelerating changes in Enlightenment Europe presages the change of focus in Volume 3. The reductions have grown prosperous, with sumptuous churches, productive farms – and well-drilled militias. Yet the Jesuits patronise their flocks as childlike innocents. Broad-brush prose depicts the transformation of South American landscapes into commercial plantations and farms. ‘I the King’ is faced with Portuguese rivalry in trade; the old aristocracy loses ground to parvenu merchants. The great kings of previous centuries are succeeded by nincompoops. The Portuguese and Spanish courts plot to divide up Jesuit territory. War erupts; the reductions are doomed. A reforming Spanish king cracks down on the bloated clergy – and sets eyes on the Jesuits next. All Jesuits on the Paraná are rounded up for deportation to Europe. In Portugal, ruthless Marquis Pombal eliminates all Jesuit influence.
Volume 3: The New Jungle
The narrative comes full circle, ending in Part Ten back in the jungles of South America in the present day (i.e. the 1930s). But it begins (after a brief Preamble) with the Polish Faust-figure Twardowski summoning from their graves the Enlightenment luminaries Copernicus, Galileo, and Giordano Bruno, to account for the ills attendant on the scientific and technical revolutions they helped to unleash. Between the powerful beginning and the powerful (and moving) end, Döblin depicts the alienation and despair of some exemplary mid-European characters, in whom exploitation and manipulation have replaced love and humanity.
Part Nine
When Bruno fails to recant his views, Twardowski presents three examples to show the evil side of modernity: the pretty but alienated Extra, hoping to attract a sugar-daddy but ending with a baby and a hopeless marriage; Jagna, the heartless Don Juan with his cold delight in seduction; and the two young Germans with their thoroughly instrumentalist view of human action. (One of them settles in nicely with the new German regime; the other hopes to survive by keeping mum.) The snake-like seductress Theresa, as heartless as Jagna, at last can’t bear to live. Bruno agrees that these scenes are not nice; but asks for more time to allow humanity to adapt to their post-Renaissance mental world.
Part Ten
Jagna, having fled in self-disgust from his nihilistic hedonism, is found in Paris about to head for South America, where a friend, a murderer, has been condemned to Devil’s Island. His friend escapes; and Jagna leads a small group of fugitives upriver into the jungle. Their conversations with native Indians develop into a stark reckoning between European and ‘primitive’ modes of life, in which Europe cannot prevail.
With all the fugitives dead, the last chapters revert to the Amazon, where spirits summon the souls of all the fallen since the time of the Conquest. Sukuruja appears. New bands of pilgrims seek the Land without Death.
Biographical and political background
Döblin was in his third year of exile when he began to formulate ideas for his new novel. He had been deprived of his medical practice, most of his target audience, his German citizenship, and his daily immersion in the language of Berlin. Yet since fleeing Nazi Germany in February 1933 he had already written one large epic and one realistic novel, as well as numerous contributions to journals, and to debates about possible futures for the Jews.
The Land without Death is one of several historical novels produced by German émigrés in the 1930s. Indignant voices asked why Germany’s intellectuals could not focus on the current crisis: were they escapists? Döblin vigorously defended the historical novel as an apt medium for exploring a “deep history” of personal and social life and relationships, of a kind not found in the “shallow history” of academic works and the daily press. He insisted that “the historical novel is firstly a novel, and secondly no history”. In fact, this novel holds a mirror to the destructive forces (social, economic, political, psychological) that characterise Europe’s rise to global dominance, culminating, at the time of writing, in the Nazi menace. Döblin’s stance was clear: “The nature of this celebrated civilisation has long been obvious: its cold imperialism, churches squeezed to the sidelines, warmongering nations… Countless people bewail the emptiness of their existence.”
Publication history
Döblin began composing the seventh of his great epic fictions in the Paris Bibliothèque nationale in 1935, and completed it by September 1937. The first edition from the émigré publishing house Querido in Amsterdam comprised two books in non-uniform bindings appearing just over a year apart, Journey to the Land without Death. A novel in April 1937; and The Blue Jaguar. A novel in May 1938.[x] The latter included the two Parts later separated as a third volume, and belatedly identified both titles as components of a single work under the covering title The Land without Death.
Banned already in the Reich, the novel lost other potential readers with the Austrian Anschluss in March 1938, leaving only German-Swiss and émigré Germans as potential readers. The few reviews were generally positive, but shallow.
When Döblin returned to Germany in late 1945, attached to the French Occupation Authority as a cultural officer, he explored opportunities to publish his several works written in exile, as well as new material. The second edition comprised three titles from the Keppler-Verlag in non-uniform bindings appearing over a nine-month period: The Land without Death in October 1947; The Blue Jaguar a month later; and The New Jungle in July 1948. It is not known who decided to separate the final two Parts of The Blue Jaguar into a separate title; possibly paper shortages made it necessary. This edition also attracted few reviews, mostly of single volumes rather than the entire work.
Neither of the first two editions included introductory material. Neither achieved significant sales.
Some years after Döblin’s death, the Swiss publisher Walter-Verlag launched a Selected Works series, edited by Swiss literature professor Walter Muschg in association with Döblin’s surviving sons (who had vetoed Döblin’s close friend and confidant, the French Germanist scholar Robert Minder, for the task.[xi]) The third edition of 1963 was a single book titled Amazonas; it included an editorial Afterword. Muschg, however, decided to omit the third volume (The New Jungle) entirely as “artistically not up to standard”, and made other questionable interventions in the text. He claimed Döblin as the source for his choice of overall title, although evidence has not been forthcoming. His editorial overreach stimulated controversy, which both perpetuated and challenged the prevailing misjudgements.
The fourth edition in 1973 from the East German firm Rütten & Loening was a single-volume reissue of the second edition, now titled Amazonas: a Trilogy of Novels and for the first time provided a scholarly introduction.
In 1988, at last, a reliable fifth edition appeared based on careful archival work on Döblin’s manuscripts, an investigation of his sources, and a judicious appraisal of the work. It was published by the Walter-Verlag, who thereby repudiated their third edition. The editor, Werner Stauffacher, retained the overall title Amazonas. Trilogy of novels which he thought had become generally accepted since the third edition, even while noting that much of the narrative is located outside the Amazon region: “So the theme … is not simply ‘South America’ but at least just as much ‘Europe’, the Europe of the great expansion between the 16th and 20th centuries.”[xii]
In 1991 the Büchergilde Gutenberg, in its series of works by exiled writers, published the sixth edition which followed the Stauffacher text but reverted to the two-volume format (with the two final Parts re-incorporated into The Blue Jaguar), and restored the overall title The Land without Death. It included a valuable book-length study of Döblin’s use of sources, as well as his essay ‘Prometheus and the Primitive’[xiii] written at the same time as The Blue Jaguar.
Subsequent editions have followed the fifth edition text, with new Afterwords capturing some of the scholarship that has proliferated in recent decades.
Misreadings and faulty interpretations
Some examples of faulty judgements can help illuminate the strengths of the novel.[xiv]
Döblin’s depiction of South American Indians was misread[xv] as an idealised image of childlike innocence in harmony with Nature: a view hard to reconcile with his far from dewy-eyed narrative of the Women People and the totalitarian Inca state.
One critic, claiming anachronisms, inaccuracies, and an absence of dates, was apparently unaware of Döblin’s stance in the debate about historical novels outlined above. The same critic castigated Döblin’s “unsound, trivial, sloppy, tangled, scandalising” prose. In fact, Döblin’s vivid narrative is presented in a language of exemplary precision, clarity and nuanced impact. The very first sentence provides a case in point. It depicts the Amazonian village woman waking wie (like; in the same way as) a bird that is calling in the jungle, instead of the expected als (as, at the same time as). The act of waking and the bird’s call may well be linked by more than simultaneity: many later passages show Indians constantly alert to uncertain signals from the fecund death-dealing Nature that surrounds them.
Döblin was said to be “running at an open door”[xvi] in depicting evil Whites and innocent Natives. Yet the author’s aim is not to cast blame, but rather to pin down the fundamental causes of European rapacity, greed and belligerence, as well as the inability of Native cultures to mount effective resistance. Condemning the perpetrators is not enough: what has made them so? What drives them? Döblin identifies humanity’s ambiguous position both in and above Nature; the problem of individuation vs. embedding in a social order; and weighty missteps of Western culture all the way from Genesis (“dominion over all the earth”) to the Promethean rationality that launched the modern world and cast humanity adrift from its favoured place in Creation.
W.G. Sebald’s 1973 doctoral dissertation[xvii] was founded on a dreadful misconception of Döblin’s attitude to violence. Far from glorying in the many depictions of horrors in his fiction, ever since his experiences in the Great War Döblin had used his writer’s art to work through an extended process of grieving about the human lust for destruction prevalent in the history of European civilisation even up to our own day.
The verdict of a Germanist scholar may help to counterbalance these shallow misreadings:
Döblin’s epic oeuvre stems from an extraordinary imaginative power of the highest precision and densest plenitude, of unassailable certainty… That 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 … [xviii]
Other Germanist scholars have produced an ever-growing body of analyses and critiques since the 1980s, which reveal this Trilogy to be an accomplished, multi-layered work in which virtually every sentence and paragraph contributes to a significant whole, composed and structured by a consciousness intent on confronting issues of existential concern to modern Europeans.[xix]
Describing the creative process that worked in him, Döblin spoke of a “surging psychic process”;[xx] a “soul-condition of peculiar brightness … of an abnormal spiritual clarity in which all riddles are solved” and “letting oneself go, playing, for example having the courage to undergo inward bewitching.”[xxi] A later passage explores the process more fully:
I see myself placed in front of a picture, shoved into landscapes and situations that emerged in me – I can’t say I thought them up or invented them. I could neither summon these phantasies nor protect myself from them. … I was always surrounded by a great company: by words, by language. Words … served for constructing, playing, shaping. They wore a kind of spirit-clothing. … I never started until the ideas had reached a certain ripeness, and that occurred when they began to clothe themselves in language. Once I had this image, I dared to set out with it, in my pilot boat, out of the harbour, and soon I spotted a ship, a huge ocean steamer, and I stepped aboard and off I went. I was in my element, I voyaged, made discoveries, and only months later came home from such a great journey, sated, and could tread dry land again. My voyages behind the closed door took me to China, India, Greenland, to other ages, and out beyond Time. What a life.[xxii]
*
In the eight years between embarking on this translation and submitting the faired manuscript for publication, I have benefited greatly from the advice and support of Professor David Midgley of St John’s College, Cambridge. In 2017 David invited me to give readings at a symposium he organised on ‘Legacies of Conquest’, where some of the assembled Latin American scholars became aware of The Land without Death for the first time.
C.D. Godwin, Stroud, UK June 2022
The main sources in French and German available to Döblin in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris were:
Koch-Grünberg, Theodor: Zwei Jahre unter den Indianern Nordwestbrasiliens 1903/1905. 2 vols, Berlin 1909; and Indianermärchen aus Südamerika , Jena 1927.
Krause, Fritz: In den Wildnissen Brasiliens. Bericht und Ergebnisse der Leipziger Araguaya-Expedition 1908 . Leipzig 1911.
Métraux, Alfred: La religion des Tupinamba et ses rapports avec celles des autres tribus Tupi-Guarani . Paris 1928.
de Charlevoix, R P P, SJ: Histoire du Paraguay . 3 vols, Paris 1756.
von Murr, Christoph Gottlieb: Geschichte der Jesuiten in Portugal unter der Staatsverwaltung des Marquis von Pombal . Nuremberg 1788.
Anon. Histoire de Nicolas 1er Roi du Paraguai et Empereur des Mamelus. . Sao Paolo 1756.
Despite a growing stream of research and commentary in German, almost nothing has been published on this novel in English. The one easily accessible essay is Helmut Pfanner’s chapter in the Companion to the Works of Alfred Döblin, Dollinger, Koepke & Tewarson (eds), Camden House 2003. Even the English Wikipedia page on Döblin, which has greatly expanded in recent years, merely mentions the title in one brief sentence.
This section draws heavily on a valuable monograph by Hubert Brüggen: Land ohne Tod: Eine Untersuchung zur inneren Struktur der ‘Amazonas-Trilogie’ Alfred Döblins (Land without death: an investigation of the inner structure of the trilogy). Peter Lang 1987.
‘Epilogue’, translated in German Masquerade: writings on politics, life and literature in chaotic times, p.258, at https://beyond-alexanderplatz.com/german-masquerade .
Döblin outlined this in a public lecture in 1928: ‘The Construction of the Epic Work’, translated in German Masquerade, p. 206 (see note iii above).
The Babylonian Exile (1934), tr. C D Godwin at https://beyond-alexanderplatz.com ; Men without Mercy (1935), tr. T & P Blewitt, Gollancz 1937.
‘The historical novel and us’ (1936), translated in German Masquerade, p. 224 (see note iii above).
Flucht und Sammlung des Judenvolkes (Flight and Gathering of the Jewish people), November 1935.
Döblin’s nine great epic fictions are:
* The Three Leaps of Wang Lun (written 1912, pub. 1916, in English 2015 at ISBN 9789629965648);
* Wallenstein (written 1917-19, pub. 1920; in English 2021 at https://beyond-alexanderplatz.com);
* Mountains Oceans Giants (1924; in English 2021 at ISBN 9781912916245);
* Manas (1927; in English 2021 at ISBN 9781912916214):
* Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929; in English 2018 at ISBN 9780141191614);
* The Babylonian Exile (1934; in English 2021 at https://beyond-alexanderplatz.com );
* Amazonas/Land without Death (1937-38);
* November 1918 (1938-1949; in English, incomplete, at ISBN 0880640081 and 0880640111; the missing Vol. 1 and deleted passages can be found at https://beyond-alexanderplatz.com );
* Tales of a Long Night (written 1944-46, first pub. 1956 in E. Germany. In English at ISBN 0880640170).
[x] Fahrt ins Land ohne Tod. Roman; and Der blaue Tiger. Roman.
[xi] The sons probably resented Minder’s detailed knowledge of Döblin’s decades-long affair with his muse/lover Yolla Niclas. See https://beyond-alexanderplatz.com/yolla-and-alfred-part-2 .
[xii] Stauffacher: ‘Afterword’, p.221.
[xiii] In English at https://intranslation.brooklynrail.org/german/prometheus-and-the-primitive .
[xiv] The reviews cited are included in Schuster & Bode (eds): Alfred Döblin im Spiegel der zeitgenössischen Kritik (AD as reflected in contemporary criticism), Bern/Munich 1973.
[xv] Ferdinand Lion (1937), reprinted in Schuster/Bode p. 345.
[xvi] Kurt Kersten (1938), reprinted in Schuster/Bode p. 349. Notably, in 1920 Döblin had criticised Gerhart Hauptmann’s play The White Saviour by praising (with apparent perversity) the ‘reality’ of the Spaniards against ‘the dream’ of Montezuma, castigating the impotence of idealistic dreams in the face of brute reality. He had also, around the same time, denounced the ‘incapacity’ of leaders of the 1919 working class rebellion in Berlin, violently suppressed by the nominally Republican government at the cost of many lives, including that of Döblin’s own sister.
[xvii] W G Sebald: The Revival of Myth: a study of Alfred Döblin’s novels. University of East Anglia, 1973. (Published in German as Der Mythus der Zerstörung (The Myth of Destruction), Stuttgart 1980.
[xviii] Professor W. Rasch: ‘Döblin’s Wallenstein and History’, in a 1948 Festschrift for Döblin’s 70th birthday. His verdict on the earlier novel can apply equally well to The Land without Death.
[xix] Significant works include:
Kiesel: Literarsiche Trauerarbeit (Grieving through Literature), 1986;
Brüggen: see Note iii above;
Stauffacher: Afterword to the 1988 edition;
Pohle: Döblins Kolumbusfahrt in der Pariser Nationalbibliothek: Versuch einer Annäherung (AD’s Columbus voyage in the Parisian library: a tentative approach), annexed to the 1991 edition;
Hildenbrandt: Europa in Alfred Döblins Amazonas-Trilogie: Diagnose eines kranken Kontinents. (Europe in the Amazonas Trilogy: diagnosis of a sick continent), 2011.
[xx] ‘The epicist, his material and the critics’ (1921).
[xxi] ‘Construction of the Epic Work’ (1929).
[xxii] Schicksalsreise (Destiny’s Journey) (1948), p.113.
