UPDATES: Yolla, Holz, Gurk, Müller, Amazonas, Anders
As work proceeds with the main task of bringing neglected 20th Century German authors to a wider public, some ancillary issues arise. Here are some short updates.
1. Yolla Niclas memoirs
The original typescript of Yolla’s memoir of her intense relationship with Alfred Döblin has found a permanent home at the German Exile Archive.
My posts on the decades-long affair between Döblin and his muse/lover Yolla Niclas, which the German literary establishment would rather brush under the carpet (a dissertation on the changes Yolla brought to Döblin’s approach to love, eroticism and human relationships before and after 1922 would be interesting!) put me in contact with Yolla’s closest surviving relative – her great-nephew Jack Mautner in New York. Jack had some of Yolla’s possessions in store for several decades, and wondered on the off chance if a certain item might be of interest. Since he does not read German, he couldn’t judge its worth.
When it reached me, the document (my translation can be downloaded here as a PDF ) turned out to be Yolla’s own typescript copy of the memoir she wrote shortly before her death! Only one other copy is known for sure to exist – the one in the Marbach Döblin Archive. (A further copy was likely handed to Döblin’s friend and confidant Professor Robert Minder, but I have no information on its whereabouts.)
My approach to the Deutsches Exilarchiv 1933-1945 at the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek in Frankfurt was welcomed, and the document has now found a permanent home there.
*
This is the third time that original documents have come my way since the website started. The copy of the gigantic 1916 Phantasus by Arno Holz acquired through Abebooks.de included a packet of handwritten notes by a Holz fan in the 1950s, together with correspondence with a publisher and a library desperately seeking more information about a work that all but a few ardent fans had already forgotten. The State Library of Berlin-Brandenburg was happy to take the materials. (I’ve translated the fan’s correspondence at the Appendix below.)
The copy of Louis Huguet’s mammoth dissertation on Döblin’s works up till 1918 that I found on Abebooks.fr contained a 1977 exchange of letters between Professor Anthony Riley, the Döblin family’s choice of editor following Walter Musch’s death, and a pastor in East Germany. The Marbach archive was happy to accept these.
(2) Paul Gurk’s astonishing dystopia ToZoB-37
A draft of my translation of the early chapters has already been posted. A few weeks ago I submitted the full translation to a publisher for consideration. A further excerpt – chapters K and L can be downloaded now.
(3) Robert Müller’s TROPICS – The Myth of Travel
I submitted my translation of this highly significant work – comparable only to Döblin’s Three Leaps of Wang Lun as a rare example of a full-length fiction in an inventive quasi-Expressionist mode – to a (different) publisher a few months ago. No chasing is allowed for at least 12 months, so fingers remain crossed until August.
I’ve copied the introduction I sent to the publisher in the Appendix below.
(4) The Land Without Death (The Amazonas Trilogy)
My publisher, Galileo, who is keen to revive interest in Döblin in the Anglophone world, is negotiating with Fischer for the English language rights. Maybe The Babylonian Exile and Wallenstein will one day have a chance, as well as Citizens & Soldiers (the missing first volume of November 1918).
(5) The Molussian Catacombs, by Günther Anders
This intriguing novel, written in the 1930s but not published until 1992, is my current project. I’ve already posted my draft translation of Part One . Anders has featured on this website before: see here and here .
APPENDIX
(I) CORRESPONDENCE FOUND IN BACK OF THE INSEL-“PHANTASUS”
(a) From Dr Büchler, Pforzheim, to Heidelberg University Library, Lending Dept, 8 November 1955
Via the Pforzheim Municipal Library I ordered Arno Holz, Phantasus 1925 and 1929, which were shown as available from the Heidelberg University Library. To my surprise I received only a small brochure which proudly called itself “Phantasus” but comprised only a small meagre selection. This worthless little item was sent to me “Registered”, so that I incurred a charge of more than 2 DM. In making this request I was led astray solely by the misleading description “Phantasus 1929”. The year was clearly added in pencil by the cataloguing librarian, who naturally can have had no knowledge of the actual contents. For few people these days know of this severely neglected poet. There is a dissertation on “Phantasus” from 1940, which provides further information. I hope you have a copy. I managed with some trouble to borrow a copy from the Berlin City Library. The printer/publisher Konrad Triltsch in Würzburg-Anmühle was bombed out and can no longer supply this item. From this publication you can learn that the description “Phantasus 1929” is valid for the final edition of Phantasus, which sits unprinted as a typescript in the “Arno Holz Archive” in Berlin. Since it was nevertheless possible that a printed edition appeared after 1940, and in the chaotic post-war years was known only to a narrow circle, I requested your “Phantasus 1929”. This, however, as I quickly ascertained, is only an excerpt from the edition of 1924-25. I would therefore request you to amend your catalogue entry to avoid misleading other enquirers. I would also like to know why I have not received the three-volume edition of 1924-25 which I ordered, or what obstacles stand in the way of this. I needed these urgently for a reading with a private reading circle. Would it not be possible, without any great formalities, to enter into direct communication with an old Heidelberg student and Doctoral candidate (1901 to 1909), who is also a retired civil servant. As guarantor you may contact the Director of the Hotel School, Dr Büchler, Weberstr. 16.
(b) From Dr Büchler, Pforzheim, to Insel Verlag, Wiesbaden, 27 February 1956
Dear Publications Director,
During my study of the PHANTASUS of ARNO HOLZ, a few thoughts occurred to me which I would like to share with the Insel-Verlag, as at one time an interested party. More by accident or a misunderstanding by a Berlin second-hand book dealer, who was supposed to obtain for me the final edition of Phantasus, I received not the 1924 edition of the Works but the previous 1916 edition published by your company and now generally known as the Insel-Phantasus. And rightly so, for the then owner of the company took a great gamble in a time of war; one suspects the poet showed inadequate gratitude, and few customers were found among the public. I surely do not need to sing the praises of this edition; that was certainly attended to at the time from the appropriate quarters. It has only one defect: the lack of waymarkers through the poetical maze – in the form of poem headings and an Index. Possibly the poet’s wilfulness is to blame. In the 1929 posthumous edition, of which more later, the poet no longer continues to exclude headings, and wrote them in himself. Not only to orient myself, but for the purpose of giving readings to a small circle, I too have prepared my own written overview.
My deeper exploration of this unique poetical work was assisted by a dissertation from 1940, knowledge of which in those less distant wartime conditions may have eluded you, by the Volksdeutsch scholar FRANZ KLEITSCH. The publisher, Konrad TRILTSCH, Würzburg-Anmühle, was unfortunately bombed out and cannot supply any more copies; I managed to obtain one on loan from a state library in Berlin. This work describes the entire development of PHANTASUS, from the beginnings to the unprinted posthumous edition of 1929, which was simply lodged as a typescript with the ARNO-HOLZ-ARCHIVE in Berlin. I have no idea if this survived the destruction of 1945 and so may still be available. Its loss would be all the more regrettable in that we would no longer have the poem headings as waymarkers; these were referred to by Kleitsch only in passing.
Now comes my heresy, which is the reason for my writing to you. Alfred DÖBLIN, who delivered the graveside eulogy to the poet in 1929, has made a preliminary attempt to rescue his memory, in vol. 2 of the collection “The Lost and Forgotten”; and the Piper-Verlag in Munich brought out a volume of letters in 1948. I cannot judge whether this signals a renaissance, because I am a long way from the literary-history enterprise. But I can imagine that with a resurgence of East Prussia, the name of Arno Holz could be hoisted high in the nation’s consciousness. The works of this poet are scattered across so many publishers that one cannot even begin to gain sight of the complete oeuvre. He has remained a stepchild of fate, and has little prospect, in the current fashionable religious wave, of being perceived as a seeker after God. Perhaps he will be rediscovered once people start to look for a more manly tone in poetry.
If the Insel-Verlag should ever consider such a new edition, I take the liberty of pointing out that with the 1916 edition it is in possession of a treasure whose value has perhaps not been sufficiently recognised. Of the three versions of Phantasus, the first is the most valuable as poetry. Like Kleitsch I have attempted to place the three versions side by side, and have found a positive reception in my audiences. Please compare the samples in the 1944 memorial edition by the Hesperon-Verlag in Nuremberg: Arno Holz: Mein Staub verstob! The insight there, that with his stylisations Holz landed up in a tangled weedpatch, was already arrived at by Kleitsch; but for practical reasons a doctoral candidate cannot allow himself such heresies. How the examining professors (see Holz: Die Blechschmiede) would have raised an outcry! But really, in order not to let what is valuable in Holz’s work turn yellow and faded, someone needs to find the courage to “salvage” something from the maze.
Alas I am too old for such work; but I am sure that the Insel-Verlag has competent staff who might perhaps be capable of it. I understand nothing of publication rights: does the publisher still retain the rights it obtained back then to make copies? If so, it could retrospectively bring out a waymarker to “our edition of 1916”, for “aficionados” of the original edition, on similar paper, in the same format, including the poet’s headings; maybe also indicating the thought processes of the unstructured Parts. How many copies of first edition may still be in existence, and in whose hands? In the period of subscription-editions, this would be easier to ascertain. Just as for many aficionados the Ur-Faust has found its own place, so too could the Ur-Phantasus assert itself against the rampant growth of the later reworkings. Even Goethe’s Faust Part Two had to wait a long time before finding a wide public. Something like this must happen with Holz’s Phantasus, to make it accessible to the Germans. Ever since 1929, when the radio broadcast a memorial programme making a comparison with the starving Phantasus from the “Book of Time”, I have never let any of my matriculation classes go without devoting a little memorial lesson to Arno Holz. If all teachers of German in the higher schools had not stuck rigidly to the officially prescribed canon, we would not have observed such passivity towards poetry in general and Holz in particular. That in Arno Holz’s Phantasus we have a world-class piece of literature must be made apparent even to the German Philistine. It is because I believe the Insel-Verlag may still have legal rights, and should anyway have a moral right as publisher of the lovely 1916 edition, that I have penned this outspoken epistle. In this spirit I ask that you keep my proposal in mind for later.
With deepest respects,
(c) From Insel-Verlag (Wiesbaden branch) to Dr Karl Büchler, Pforzheim, 3 March 1956
Dear Doctor Büchler,
Many thanks for your letter of 27 February. The INSEL-PHANTASUS of 1916 was a singular edition on which Insel Verlag probably decided having published DIE BLECHSCHMIEDE in 1902 and LIEDER AUF EINER ALTEN LAUTE in 1903.No consideration was ever given to a new PHANTASUS edition, and I would first have to consult our headquarters in Leipzig on whether – which I seriously doubt – we still retain any copyrights in the work, which was later taken up by the Dietz Verlag, Berlin, in their Complete Edition of Arno Holz.
Quite separately from this, one cannot envisage a new edition today, since this work would hardly find enough readers. It may be that later people will rediscover it. I too own a copy of the large-format edition, and also knew Arno Holz personally. If occasional aficionados of his poetry such as yourself, dear Doctor Büchler, seek to draw the attention of younger people to this poet, that is certainly very fine, but as a publisher one hardly sees an opportunity today to revive the work of this poet.
Thank you again for your letter.
Yours sincerely,
Dr Friedrich MICHAEL
Volksdeutsch: German nationalist; a term promoted by the Nazis.
Three versions: the 1898-99 Sassenbach albums; the 1916 Insel-Phantasus; and the 1924-26 Complete Works.
Blechschmiede (Tinsmiths): a huge satirical drama by Holz, mostly in doggerel-verse, first published as a sketch by the Insel-Verlag in 1902, issued in a much enlarged private subscription edition in 1917, and enlarged again for its 1921 publication by the Sybillen-Verlag in Leipzig. The Deutsches Tageblatt was “astonished at the poet’s inexhaustible imagination, which playfully fashions a comprehensive knowledge into a poetical-satirical being that personifies contemporary artistic and cultural phenomena in ever new and striking characters.” The Münchener Neueste Nachrichten saw “a genius, laughing: a poet who has tasted every bitterness of existence, of creativity and hope. Beneath the fool’s cap beats a warm heart.”
Lieder… (Songs on an old lute): later expanded as Dafnis: : lyrisches Porträt aus dem 17. Jahrhundert (Dafnis: lyrical portrait from the 17th century) 1904. These Baroque-styled volumes were Holz’s biggest commercial successes.
(II) Introducing TROPICS – The Myth of Travel
Dear ,
I present for your consideration my complete translation of a 1915 Expressionist novel admirably suited to your list. It was written by an Austrian, Robert Mueller, who for the last few decades has been the subject of lively interest in the German literary world after having been forgotten for half a century following his untimely death:
TROPICS – THE MYTH OF TRAVEL, by Robert Mueller (1887-1924). Complete translation from the German by C. D. Godwin
What is the novel TROPICS about?
The surface plot of TROPICS is simply summarised:
- Three White men (Brandlberger, a young German engineer, who is the narrator; van den Dusen, a Dutch former colonial officer; and Slim, an enigmatic figure of Arab-German-Peruvian descent who impresses the courts of Europe with his grandiose schemes) go into the jungle in search of lost Conquistador gold.
- They paddle for weeks upriver; stay for more weeks in an Indian village, whose inhabitants treat them, not as Great White Masters, but with disdainful scorn;
- When they locate the supposed hiding place of the lost gold, it isn’t there;
- The party falls into aimless lethargy; mutual suspicion grows, Slim and van den Dusen both die, by accident or murder: the narrator is clearly undependable here.
But the surface –adventure novel, exotic travelogue, murder mystery – is overlain with a fantastical, subversive, genre-bending exploration of almost every trope of early 20th C. European world views: civilisation and its discontents, colonialism, sexuality, relativity theory, evolution, and ultimately objective vs. subjective reality.
All done in a prose of extraordinary vigour that challenges and subverts the reader’s expectations, while delighting with extravagant hypotheses (e.g. a giant butterfly is clearly the degenerate descendant of a dragon.)
Who wrote TROPICS?
Robert Mueller (1887-1924) was a Viennese writer, journalist, and cultural activist (before World War 1 he organised Karl May’s last public appearance, after the War he set up Austria’s biggest distribution business for printed matter). Following his suicide in 1924 (his business having collapsed in the post-War economic turmoil) his writings lay forgotten until the 1970s. His collected works in German now comprise 14 volumes.
How has TROPICS been received?
TROPICS, Mueller’s most ambitious work, appeared in 1915 when he was just 28. Major literary figures of the time were favourably impressed:
- Robert Musil: “…a remarkable blend of the Utopian and that which merely passes for Utopian.” He praises “the animal power of the fantastical river journey in the jungle, augmented with a spiritual power in flickering emanations suited to the situation, which makes this book one of the best of the new literature.”
- Hermann Hesse: “…the boldness and sinuosity of the mental action … the plenitude of connections, points of view, associations is deeply impressive.”
- Alfred Doeblin: “On one page as much happens as previously in a whole book. Mueller is a dazzling wordsmith.”
- Kurt Hiller: “…the unprecedented crossing of a Gauguin and a super-Freud, with a dash of cocky sport-boy. Or of Nietzsche and Karl May.”
The new edition in 1990 brought numerous enthusiastic articles and book-length studies. A 2015 academic article begins:
One hundred years after its first publication in 1915 TROPEN, one of the most striking examples of the emphatic Expressionism of the early decades of the 20th C. and now rightly regarded as the author’s masterpiece, continues to fascinate and intrigue. As an Expressionist novel, TROPEN vigorously addresses the most elemental issues of human existence, indeed the foundations and determinants of human existence itself, and does so in the most driven, complex, hypertrophic way imaginable.
According to the New German Biography
The novel recounts, in several interwoven layers, a journey by the first-person narrator “into the Tropics of humanity, into the primal condition of forces.” The “Tropics” are a cypher for the simultaneity of various levels of consciousness dependent on the current standpoint of the observer, which Mueller paraphrases in the concept of “Phantoplasm”. The soberly objective and rationally described fictional journey becomes an exploration of relativity, multiple dimensions, and the contradictoriness of individual and collective memory.
TROPICS in English
I completed my translation of TROPICS in 1920. Chapter XVI – the climax of the three adventurers’ stay in the Indian village – was published on The Brooklyn Rail’s InTranslation website in March 2020. It describes an evening of dance in which the woman Zana (an object of fascination to Slim and Brandlberger) appears to become successively a puma, a gnat, and a cricket, and the wooden totem-figure Moki grows wings and flies away.
The novel ends thus:
Nevertheless … death and life are no contradiction, any more than love and life. It’s possible that I, like Slim, shall meet with the most ridiculous death. Then the poet can leap in, then it’s time for the poet, the tragicomedy is laid out cut and dried all ready for him. But if you were to ask the future human if he was ever in the tropics, – Ah, what tropics! he says, the tropics, that’s me!
C.D. Godwin, August 2021
Florian Krobb: Travel writing, Utopianism and Karl May: Robert Mueller’s TROPEN. The Modern Language Review, Vol. 110, No. 4 (October 2015), pp. 1067-1085.
https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/gnd118585193.html#ndbcontent
https://intranslation.brooklynrail.org/german/excerpt-from-tropics-the-myth-of-travel
