The Babylonian Exile
This satirical, ironic, often witty novel has no tendency, rather a hundred tendencies. It critiques modern life, but perhaps does not want it any different, for today is so wonderful in stupendous and manifold ways, so rich in diversions and blessed with hustle and bustle. It would much rather rhapsodise the world
Full house!
I have at long last completed my translation of Alfred Döblin’s 1934 novel The Babylonian Exile, or, Pride goes before a fall. It’s packaged as two volumes. Volume 1 includes my Introduction; Volume 2 includes an insightful essay on the novel by Günther Anders.
I’m posting my Introduction below, to whet your appetite for this extravagant novel, and signpost reader expectations so that what might seem irritating randomness can actually be a source of great enjoyment.
This post is significant in that all Döblin’s epic fictions have now been translated into English!
Four titles are currently available as recent publications:
The Three Leaps of Wang Lun, Tr. C D Godwin, 2nd ed. NY Review Books 2015, ISBN 9789629965648
Mountains Oceans Giants, Tr. C D Godwin, Galileo 2021, ISBN 9781912916245
Manas, Tr. C D Godwin, Galileo 2021, ISBN 9781912916214
Berlin Alexanderplatz, Tr. Michael Hofmann, NY Review Books/Penguin 2019, ISBN 9780141191621
Two titles (one severely abridged) are available on the secondhand market:
November 1918 A German Revolution: A People Betrayed, Tr. John E Woods, Fromm 1984
November 1918 A German Revolution: Karl & Rosa, Tr. John E Woods, Fromm 1984
Tales of a Long Night, Tr. R & R Kimber, Fromm 1987
Three titles are currently available only as private downloads from this website:
Wallenstein
Citizens and Soldiers (Vol I of November 1918 A German revolution). Other omissions from the John E Woods translation have also been posted on this website.
The Amazonas Trilogy
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
© C. D. Godwin 2021
Let’s start with some less favourable opinions:
This is a humorous performance, of which we are unable to convey any distinct idea to our readers. The whole is composed of digressions …
…a very insipid and tedious performance … a kind of novel … It makes one smile two or three times at the beginning , but then makes one yawn for two hours. … the humour is forever attempted and missed.
A feeble book … should be boiled down to 500 pp, as it contains weaker sections and only when shortened does it appear as something extraordinary.
I have been much diverted with some people here who have read it, they torture their brains to find out some hidden meaning in it …
At first glance it’s a joy. At the second, third, thousandth, ten-thousandth glance it becomes something else. … This comic novel caused me to laugh four times altogether, i.e. once per 170 pages.
… nothing more than a vehicle for satire on a great variety of subjects. Most of these satirical strokes are introduced with little regard to any connexion with the story or with each other. The author perpetually digresses, runs from object to object as they happen to strike a very lively and very irregular imagination. These digressions become at length tiresome. The book is a perpetual series of disappointments.
… insolent cranky whimsy. Insignificant; not thought through to the end, unreal, baroque.
Three of these opinions relate to Alfred Döblin’s 1934 novel The Babylonian Exile, offered here in English translation for the first time. The other four are responses to an earlier novel whose status as a masterpiece is now undisputed: Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759-67). (The reviewers are no unlettered ignoramuses: they include Edmund Burke and Hugh Walpole.) But all seven quotes, identified at the end of this Introduction, might equally well be (misjudged) reactions to Döblin.
Two novels separated by almost two centuries, alike in their flouting of narrative decorum, their delight in language, and often random-seeming digressions that actually build an entire world suffused with the perennial themes of existence: life, love, death, morality.
Yet each novel is the product of the most unlike circumstances. Sterne was a settled member of a comfortable middle class in a country enjoying a long period of political stability, with an educated readership in large part receptive to his playful wit. Whereas Döblin, for all his grudging acceptance by a conservative literary establishment (he was elected in 1928 to the new Literature Section of the Prussian Academy), was a Jewish outsider in a land that had passed in a mere two decades from militarised autocracy to war-weary revolutionary chaos to unstable democracy to totalitarian tyranny, with two serious economic crashes thrown in for good measure. And now he was in exile, his medical career abruptly over, his native-language milieu gone, and his writing career in grave doubt: Write? What for? For whom?
The circumstances of production go some way to highlight the main contrast between the two novels, notably the locatedness of Sterne’s characters (with pretty well every digression returning to the fireside or the garden at Shandy Hall), and the exiled homelessness of Döblin’s characters in a world where every moment is buffeted by possibilities, by choices taken and not taken.
How the novel was written
Döblin began work on The Babylonian Exile at the end of 1932, having despaired of any good outcome to the political turmoil of the moribund Weimar Republic: “Already for a long while things had grown unbearable in that country. The confusion, lack of a sense of direction, the torpor.” After a lecture tour of Switzerland in 1932 he wrote to a friend: “But I have a dark premonition that I shall come back this year once more to Switzerland.” Later that year Döblin had a vision of the kind that had previously provided the fertile seed of an epic work of fiction (Wallenstein: the Swedish fleet sailing across the Baltic to ignite a new phase of the Thirty Years War; Manas: Shiva’s realm of the dead). Now, in late 1932, he saw an ancient god come down to Earth to atone for his tyrannical sins by becoming human.
On 28 February 1933, one day after the Reichstag Fire, he was warned by friends to flee; his “decadent” Modernist writings and his Jewish ancestry made him doubly hateful to the Nazis. He packed the already bulky manuscript in his hand baggage, evaded the agent tailing him from his home in Berlin, and next day strolled across the Swiss border by Lake Constance. At this point he still half-believed he could sit out the Nazis, who had taken over only a month before. Looking back, Döblin wondered:
Was I really now outside, or simply waiting? I didn’t know. I wasn’t too bothered. My wife saw the actual situation, she knew she had taken leave of domesticity, the children had been torn away from everything, the mountain of cares, the clouds of uncertainty – she wept a great deal – on the other hand (what could I do against myself?) I was elated. Yes, elated. How so? In those months I had with me lines from Schiller’s ‘The Diver’: “It was his salvation, it dragged him to the surface.”
What was my salvation? Oh, in Germany it had all become unbearable, not just politically but also intellectually. It was as if the political confusion, the stagnation had seized hold of the intellect and crippled it. I struggled with it from my position. Finally, at the end of 1932, an image settled on me that would not let go: an ancient mouldering god, close to complete disintegration, leaves his abode in heaven and in order to renew himself and atone for his ancient sins flies down to Earth, to humanity, he once the god and ruler, now a human like anyone else. It was a foreboding and anticipation of exile. Yes, exile, this cutting loose, isolation, exit from the cul de sac, this downfall and sinking seemed to be my ‘salvation’… I had no defence against it. I was in a uniquely elevated mood (which also took hold of the book, on which I toiled the whole year.)
In Schicksalsreise, the memoir of his escape from France and his second exile in the USA, Döblin writes in similar terms:
… What was this? Only as I wrote Babylonische Wandrung did it become clear: it was a sense of my own lost situation. It was a sense of guilt, much guilt, great guilt. It had become unbearable, and the urge to run away never slackened. It was an order to break away. It emerged as the ghost of the mouldering Babylonian god. It was a premonition of exile, and much more.
But how did my mind receive this image? How did I manipulate it? Happily, in high spirits, proudly! My god Conrad had no desire to atone, held his ground to the end, remained in the mire and would not atone. … I was mocking the deeper experience already in me, and the image in which this deeper experience spoke I used for a long time only in play.
Yes, I was free when I left. I fled, I thought of it only as fleeing from a cage.
From March to September 1933, Döblin worked on the novel almost every day:
To find peace and quiet he sat with his MS in the reading room of the Central Library in Zurich, where all necessary aids lay close at hand. I can still see him, how all through that terrible summer, incognito among students and lecturers, he filled sheet after sheet at his desk piled high with books.
From the same source: “I am daily filled with admiration for Döblin, who has retreated from this unspeakable barbarism, like St Jerome in his study, into his zest for work.”
Exile cast Döblin adrift from his Berlin home ground, where his medical practice put him in daily contact with ordinary (mostly lower-class) Berliners with their distinctive accent and idiom. Two months into his Zurich exile he wrote to Ferdinand Lion, reader at his publisher Fischer:
On 10 May there is to be an auto da fe , I believe the Jew of my name will be there, happily only on paper. Thus do they honour me. But the affair has two sides: namely, what will come after, in a year, two years, when will the publishers be “coordinated”. Abroad I can no longer practice as a doctor, and as for writing, what for, for whom?
Döblin assured Lion that “My book is steaming ahead. A good half is completed” and made clear the close links between the narrative and the life situation of the narrator:
… depending where I land up (I mean for real) the book will end in Berlin, Zurich, Paris, London, Strasbourg. 75% says Paris. Yes, I, the old German, Pomeranian.
In September 1933 Döblin removed to Paris (where in 1936 the family would become naturalised French citizens). He returned to Zurich for a month in November to complete his novel in a German-speaking environment with access to a German-language library. The MS was finally ready for publication in December.
The title was at first to be Conrad, who will not atone. Döblin soon adopted the more expansive title under which it was published, a title harking back to the western world’s primal literary coupling of exile with grief in Psalm 137: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.” Yet, as we have seen, Döblin also coupled the grief with elation.
Döblin’s concept of the “epic”
Ever since Döblin wrote The Three Leaps of Wang Lun in 1912 – the first of what would become nine “epic” fictions – he had begun to formulate a critique of standard novel-writing, where “everything is simplified to a slick, narrow, onrushing plot”, and a plea to follow the path of Homer, Cervantes, Dante, even Dostoyevsky, who “show how one moment is justified by another moment, how every second of our life is a complete reality, round, fulfilled. Every page says: ‘Here I stand, here I die.’”
In December 1928 Döblin elaborated his view of the epic in a public lecture at Berlin University, attended by over a thousand people:
What lifts one or other invented action … out of the domain of the merely concocted and written-down and places it in a sphere of truth – the truth of the specifically epic report – is the exemplary nature of the action and the characters …. Here we have stark fundamental situations, elemental situations of human existence to be worked through … Yes, these characters, who are no Platonic ideals, this Odysseus, Don Quixote, Dante the wayfarer, and these primal human situations in their primal originality, truth and potency stand above the fragmented reality of the everyday. And so a whole range of characters, no great number, rise above reality; of them, new yarns may ever and again be spun.
The creative process in Döblin
As with all Döblin’s epic fictions since Wang Lun twenty years earlier, the composition of the new novel followed a familiar pattern. First, a seed plants itself in him, a hint of a topic and a theme triggered by something that captures his attention, or at least his subconscious. As the seed sprouts, he begins to search out materials to nourish it, his mind serving almost as a medium through which the theme can emerge into the world:
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. And there was one curious aspect to this. I never stepped into it alone, even if it seemed so to me at the time. I never sat alone at my desk. I was always surrounded by a great company: by words, by language. Words came along with me. But the words here were something other than words out there, which serve to communicate and signify. What entered into my study served for constructing, playing, shaping. They wore a kind of spirit-clothing. They weren’t allowed to bring in anything else. A strange business, writing. 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.[x]
Publication history
Exile publishing houses were set up quite rapidly after the Nazi takeover. In Amsterdam the German-language Querido Verlag, a collaboration between Fritz Landshoff of the German Kiepenhauer firm (a major target of Nazi malice) and the Dutchman Emanuel Querido, sought authors during the summer of 1933, including those from Döblin’s publisher Fischer, who to Döblin’s happy surprise quickly contracted with the new venture, apparently envisaging parallel German and foreign editions of new works. The Babylonian Exile was published in April 1934 in an edition of 6,000 copies, of which scarcely a thousand were sold. Döblin had written self-mockingly to Berthold Brecht in January 1935:
… as for my book, shook every available head and now has hopes (the vain dreamer) for my new little book Pardon wird nicht gegeben,[xi] which will surely (surely!) be a success. Nothing surpasses the religious conviction of those who put up the money (and we must preserve the religion of publishers).
The leading book designer Paul L Urban drew the charming whimsical sketches scattered through the novel, and designed the cover.
When the Selected Works series was launched some years after Döblin’s death, it seemed unlikely The Babylonian Exile would be included. The editor, Walter Muschg, had disparaged it in his 1956 survey Die Zerstörung der deutschen Literatur (The Destruction of German Literature): “a feeble book” that “seeks to confront the catastrophe once again with juggler’s tricks.” By a quirk of fate an outspoken defence of the novel by a radical young doctor, Paul Lüth (who in 1948 had edited both a selection of Döblin’s prose and a Festschrift for Döblin’s 70th birthday) led Muschg to revise his opinion. In a 1960 article Lüth called this novel Döblin’s “most significant work”, a judgement Muschg thought overblown but nevertheless led him to re-read the book and eventually include it in the Selected Works – its first appearance in German-speaking countries. Initially Muschg proposed an abridged edition, but the publisher, Walter Verlag, found itself in the unusual position of arguing for the longer complete text: an abridgement would “reduce authenticity”, and “patronise the reader”.[xii] Muschg acquiesced, but in his Afterword still listed passages which he thought the reader might well skip over, including the whole of Part Six.
Posthumous critical assessments
The first measured assessment of The Babylonian Exile appeared in 1974, seventeen years after Döblin’s death.[xiii] As Patrick O’Neill notes, the historical background painted by Döblin covers Western history from the ancient Near Eastern empires to the 1930s, through a succession of often gruesome episodes: “Five thousand years have passed … but our wars, undiminished in ferocity and frequency, have changed only in that their methods of destruction have become more refined and efficient.” The many mythological tales, often treated humorously, illustrate the treacherousness of life in a hostile world (as well as a somewhat jaundiced view of women); and while the recurrent theme of metamorphosis shows a desire to escape from hateful reality, Döblin rejects such an evasion: Conrad must press on regardless.
A vigorous and insightful essay by Günther Anders, written in 1935 but not published until 1984; is included as an Annex to this translation. Anders depicts the situation of the fallen god Conrad as emblematic of modern human life: “If your life is one life, so then this book, this prophetic reportage of your future, is one book, despite the talking dromedary and Louis the Sixteenth.” Conrad’s life “plays out nowhere; like yours. Is this your environment? No. …. Like an anthill: to the insects an environment, to you a piece of Nature. It’s not your home, so there’s nothing homely, nothing self-evident, hence: raw Nature.” Conrad “is always provisional, always passing through. And anyone who is only passing through can never be a grown-up.”
I have drawn here extensively on Moritz Wagner’s helpful Afterword to the 2017 Fischer Klassik edition of Babylonische Wandrung. Wagner notes the forebears in European literature of burlesque treatments of celestial characters, including an 1853 piece by Heine (himself an earlier exile) called Die Götter im Exil (The gods in exile), where for example Apollo finds work as a cowherd in Lower Austria. Wagner also draws attention to Döblin’s narrative technique:
Here an omnipresent and seemingly omnipotent narrator steps forth, whose purpose appears to be to ‘confuse’ and if possible unnerve the reader in the best Babel-like manner by means of innumerable associations, digressions, montages, quotations, encyclopaedic insertions, and fabulating renditions of mythological or historical events.[xiv]
Two of the (very sparse) initial reactions to the 1934 publication, like Günther Anders’ essay, have withstood the test of time, conveying with sympathetic admiration the programme behind the apparent chaos, and the enjoyment to be found by the discerning reader. The first, by Ludwig Marcuse (who would later join Döblin in Los Angeles) appeared in Das neue Tagebuch (an exile journal published in Paris and Amsterdam between 1933 and 1940):
But however often the reader is tempted to interrupt as with an old chatty aunt: “Come to the point, Mr Döblin!” – we suddenly find ourselves carried away by a narrative stream of a breadth and spate which in the age of the “art novel” is nothing short of epical. Döblin has the playful insouciance of an ancient teller of epic tales. He takes devilish delight, like the ancestors of every novelist, in telling everything he knows, what he’s heard, what he imagines; and so newspaper reports and Baedeker guides and specialised research and his moods and his thoughts and a hundred residual memories are melded by a huge, original, even atavistic passion for storytelling into a tale whose dimensions seem not of this climate. Döblin is a contemporary anachronism…
The confused hubbub of the Döblin world is matched by the confusion of feelings in the reader’s breast about this unusual novel. But slowly and surely, sympathy for this book grows. Open up the volume and read the very first section of the first chapter: how the Babylonian-Chaldean-Assyrian god Conrad, a little old monkey on his high throne of stone, wakes up. I know of no reality that for me is more real and unforgettable than this outgrowth of Döblin’s imagination. What a plethora of ghosts that will not depart! What power to bewitch the reader, who just now thought the author was delivering nothing more than somewhat decayed material from a post-mortem room of the spirit. During the reading – this cannot be denied – one is often enough filled with rage against the author. At the moment when the god Conrad is finally transported from his blessed dream into our death, one begins to flick slowly back through the volume, re-read, reconsider, reconsider, reconsider, re-read – and senses that once again a close friendship will be formed between us and this book.
The second review, by Döblin’s friend Hermann Kesten, appeared in the short-lived exile journal Die Sammlung, edited between 1933 and 1935 by Klaus Mann:
This exile is the mythical Fall of Man. One who was divine descends into quasi-divinity, into the wearisome and scarcely consoling frailty of humankind. Does Döblin want to depict the emptiness of life, as he piles up an almost endless heap of the human, mixes the fantastic with the scientistic, denounces the poorly concealed normality of business, love, religion, the many countries, cities, the history and histories, the observation, and finally, following the pretty schema, settlements and farming depicted with voluptuous rapture?
Does he strive for religion, improvement, beauty? He loves the plenitude of events, distrusts the way the world goes, and hates whatever is mean. He sees the world and looks in many books and narrates fabulously like the Homeric bards. He fabulates. He has the imagination of a born storyteller. He possesses the German language in such rich profusion that now and then he seems possessed by it. Everything interests him, and he evinces the pretty pretence of the epicist to know everything.
His new novel … is the fable of a Babylonian god, Conrad, who takes a trip to our Earth and falls victim to its laws and becomes humanised, travelling through the barbarism of our age, the ancient path of the gods, migrating from east to west from Babylon and Baghdad via Constantinople and Zurich to Paris. Conrad, who retains only the memory of being a god and only in this is indistinguishable from us mortals, freeloads his way through life, love, the sciences, peoples, the many strange fates, a passive hero, an adventurous traveller, a melancholy dilettante of life, like every hero of a great comic novel, indeed of all comedy …
This satirical, ironic, often witty novel has no tendency, rather a hundred tendencies. It critiques modern life, but perhaps does not want it any different, for today is so wonderful in stupendous and manifold ways, so rich in diversions and blessed with hustle and bustle. It would much rather rhapsodise the world … Döblin depicts everything, all the profusion of worlds past and present, now and then he forgets the material, sometimes loses the theme, but the narrative never stalls. This constitutes the secret of his language, which actually lies out in the open. He seems to credit the profusion of his luxuriant language to an “artistic error”. Döblin, wallowing in associations, obeying the idle dictates of imagination, seems to write down everything that occurs to him … Döblin scoffs at the law of the realists that depicting means “leaving out”, he declines the strict parsimony of the Classical style, he natters, relates, rhapsodises, recollects, remarks on everything, forgets to mention nothing, laments, philosophises, quotes, describes and invents a world of poetic wonder. He develops an entire poetics of omnipresent memory. He relishes (as we relish with him) the magic of the fairytale, of meaningful play with reality. He is a Romantic, he speaks with a thousand tongues, and narrates the in the end bitter, bittersweet, fairytales of our world ….
This ever pleasing, always exciting, uncommonly entertaining novel by the remarkable writer Döblin belongs with the very rare and extraordinary comic novels of our tragic epoch …
Conclusion
With this background the reader, has, I think, an inkling of what to expect when embarking on The Babylonian Exile. Döblin and Sterne are of one mind in urging the reader not to look for a mindlessly page-turning plot. Döblin: “If a novel can’t be cut like an earthworm into ten pieces and every piece moves by itself, then it’s worth nothing.”[xv] And Sterne’s hero Tristram Shandy criticises
a vicious taste which has crept into thousands… of reading straight forward, more in quest of adventures, than of any deep erudition and knowledge … – The mind should be accustomed to make wise reflections, and draw curious conclusions as it goes along …[xvi]
C D Godwin, Stroud, UK
August 2021
The review excerpts at the head of the Introduction are, in sequence, by:
Anon in the Critical Review (1760);
Hugh Walpole in a letter (1760);
Walter Muschg (1960);
Robert Brown (a clergyman) in a letter (1760);
Albert Vigoleis Thelen (author of the remarkable Island of Second Sight) (1935);
Edmund Burke in the Annual Register (1760);
Klaus Mann, diary entry (1935).
The reviews of Tristram Shandy can be found in the 2019 Norton Critical Edition of the novel.
Sources drawn on for the Introduction
by Alfred Döblin:
Schicksalsreise (Destiny’s Journey). 1948 (Serie Piper 1986)
Briefe (Letters), ed. Heinz Graber 1970
Schiften zu Leben und Werk (Writings on life and works) 1986
By others:
Günther Anders: Mensch ohne Welt (Man without a World), C H Beck 1984
Julia Genz: ‘Schelmenroman in Exil’ (Vagabond novel in exile) in Döblin-Handbuch, ed. Sabina Becker, 2016
Klaus Mann: Tagebücher 1934-35 (Diaries 1934-35), 1995
Patrick O’Neill: Alfred Döblin’s Babylonische Wandrung. A study. 1974
Wilfried Schoeller: Alfred Döblin: eine Biographie. 2011
I. Schuster & I. Bode: A. Döblin im Spiegel der zeitgenössischen Kritik (Contemporary reviews of AD) 1973
Moritz Wagner: Nachwort (Afterword) to the 2017 Fischer Klassik edition of Babylonische Wandrung.
NOTES
Schicksalsreise (Destiny’s Journey), 1948, p.267.
Letter to Hedwig Mauthner dated 24 March 1932.
‘Departure and Return’, Badische Zeitung 22 February 1946.
Walter Musch, Afterword to his 1962 edition of Babylonische Wandrung.
Walter Muschg to Hans Henny Jahnn, 22 May 1933.
Letter to Ferdinand Lion, 28 April 1933.
‘Remarks on the novel’. Die neue Rundschau, March 1917.
‘Construction of the epic work’. Die neue Rundschau, April 1929.
[x] Schicksalsreise, p. 113
[xi] Translated as Men without Mercy by T & P Blewitt 1937.
[xii] O. F. Walter to Muschg, 17 October 1961.
[xiii] Patrick O’Neill: Alfred Döblin’s Babylonische Wandrung: a study. Peter Lang 1974.
[xiv] Moritz Wagenr, ‘Afterword’ to Babylonische Wandrung, p. 721.
[xv] ‘Remarks on the novel’.
[xvi] Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy, vol I, ch. XX.
