Review of ‘Land without Death’ #2
Arnold Hoellriegel (=Richard A Bermann) : Review of Fahrt ins Land ohne Tod by Alfred Döblin, in Der Wiener Tag, 30/5/1937 p.17.
This review was reprinted in the book Richard. A. Bermann alias Arnold Höllriegel – Oesterreicher – Demokrat – Weltbürger (p.356), published to accompany an exhibition at the German National Library in 1995. The original was somehow missed by the editors of the large 1973 compendium of Döblin reviews Alfred Döblin im Spiegel der zeitgenössischen Kritik
The onslaught of white Conquistadors on the gold lands of tropical America is an episode in human history that never loses interest, an inexhaustible material for poets and storytellers. Anglo-Saxon literature has produced many excellent Conquistador novels; the last quite recently, when Julian Duguid published A Cloak of Monkey Fur.
Allow me to remark that I, who have visited the Amazon twice, wrote the novel Der Urwaldschiff, located partly in the time of the Conquista. This gives me the legitimacy to speak of AD’ new novel …
That the Berliner, the hyper-Berliner doctor and novelist AD, he who penned the genre-picture Berlin Alexanderplatz , must now go wandering from land to land, is a sad and grotesque chapter in itself. He has now projected his own experience poetically into a far distance, for in no other way can one describe his fine new novel. Let it be said ad gloriam that this book has nevertheless become an excellent documentary ‘historical’ novel, and that on top of this it reeks of all the damp tropical Amazonian jungle smells.
The Inca nobleman Cuzumarra, driven from his homeland along with a few companions by Pizarro’s cruel adventures, flees into the distant jungles on the great river, and there relates to brown forest tribes the dreadful tale of how in the midst of peace an invasion of incomprehensible barbarians all at once destroyed Peruvian civilisation. In the memory and the propaganda of this truculent Inca the political system whose representative he was seems wonderful enough: work available for all who wanted it, bread and clothing for all who worked, care for the old and infirm; there on his golden throne sat the great lord with the fivefold red headband and governed the well-functioning state in the name of the Sun.
How surprised Cuzumarra is when suddenly, in the midst of exile, right there in the middle of the jungle, his own companions suddenly turn angrily on him and scream at him: ‘It was not all good’ …
As presented by me here it sounds abstract and ideological, but not so in AD’s book, in which every line rings unaffected and alive. This writer can feel his way into the thinking processes of Amazonian savages as he did once before into the customs and uses of those other savages that he depicted so unforgettably in the criminal proletariat of Berlin’s Alexanderplatz. A naïve reader could enjoy these depictions of fates, customs, dances, magical rituals of Indian aborigines quite naively, and believe that behind this comparison there is sometimes no modern and up to date mind.
But it is there; and the writer understands well the hair-raising injustices and cruelties of these heroic white conquistadors; for was not their journey, which only seems to be about stupid gold, not fundamentally a yearning ‘journey into the land without death’ about which all us humans have dreamed so absurdly ever since humanity has existed? The urge for good fortune, youth and immortality has its evil perversions, like any human urge.
