Wallenstein Introduction (2)
How Döblin burrows down beneath the historical facts to a deeper reality of life and meaning, and shapes his wild heap of material using a cinematic imagination.
DOWNLOADS:
Wallenstein-Volume-1
Wallenstein Volume 2
In death and ruin, in blood and tears: a look at literary war reportage – the new edition of Alfred Döblin’s Wallenstein novel.
Thomas Lehr, Süddeutsche Zeitung 23 Feb 2002
Translation © C D Godwin 2018
They distinguished ‘politicians’ from ‘extremists’. Adherence to one faith or another easily led to fatal consequences. Whole nations were sundered by a religious divide. Shady dealers and obscure financiers supported now this party, now that. A horde of unscrupulous warlords, demobbed mercenaries and bands of desperados murdered and plundered. Foreign powers steered internal political decisions. Multinational assault troops with unclear plans constantly caused more damage than they claimed to be repairing. War ate up tax revenues, destroyed the economy, decimated the population without mercy. And the longer it went on the harder it became to see an end.
This Afghanistan (which the above describes) once lay in the heart of Europe. For thirty years between 1618 and 1648 Germany, today’s Czech Republic and Austria were the scene of a war whose outcome – as more wars to come would show – required that one should learn more than one had already learned. But at least the religious settlement between Catholics and Protestants broadly excused the war and the murder, and the strengthening of the European nation state under the aspect of secularisation and the monopoly of violence was at first a victory. For Germany the consequences of the Peace of Westphalia were defining for centuries. The ghost of the Holy Roman Empire largely dissipated in the smoke from all the intolerable human sacrifices. The first clear separation from Austria was achieved, and with the breaking of Habsburg hegemony over Germany all forms of central power were sidelined, leading to political impotence which would evolve now into a dreadful arrogance and unholy small-statery, and now into an advantageous federalism.
How can wild masses be mobilised?
In the light of these deep historical processes, it is today still superfluous to ask the question that AD posed to himself during WW1 as a military doctor in Alsace and Lorraine, and repeated later as he looked back on the drafting of Wallenstein between 1916 and 1919: “People ask, who bothers with the Thirty Years War? I couldn’t agree more. Until now I’ve never bothered myself about it.” Today’s reader may well have other questions. Why, if he spends time on that war, does he spend it mainly on Wallenstein; and if on Wallenstein, why on AD’s Wallenstein; and if on AD, why then with the new not exactly cheap edition from Walter-Verlag, prepared by the Swiss Germanist Erwin Kobel?
The first answer: Albrecht Wenzeslaus Eusebius von Waldstein, known as Wallenstein, born in Prague in 1583 and murdered in Eger in 1634, has become in German literature more or less the key representative figure of the Thirty Years War. Scion of the minor Hussite Bohemian nobility, orphaned early, through his economic, administrative and military-strategic genius, through his intelligent unscrupulousness and egotistical rationality, through political far-sightedness, highly effective megalomania and intellectual brilliance, he became one of the richest and most powerful men of the empire. So powerful that the central imperial power and its advisers believed they could be rid of him only by murderous intrigue. Two highly advantageous marriages founded Wallenstein’s wealth, he was twice named commander in chief over imperial armies, twice he rescued the Catholic interest and the house of Habsburg from threatened defeat. One is almost surprised that he needed murdering only once. In the category of successful men of action and sovereign power brokers, Wallenstein in his time can be compared only with his contemporary Richelieu.
His unstoppable rise and his dealings could not but attract the interest of Bert Brecht. But Brecht – in the end with far greater public success – as far as the Thirty Years War goes plumped, like the tavern-keeper Grimmelshausen, for the perspective of the common folk. But he knew and valued highly AD’s Wallenstein novel and its author – at least up until AD’s notorious 65th birthday party in Californian exile, organised by Helene Weigel, where the birthday boy in the presence of the assembled literary exiles, who included matadors of the historical novel like Thomas Mann and Lion Feuchtwanger, outed himself as a Christian and a Catholic, having converted in 1941.
Brecht’s Mother Courage in its perspective resembles Simplicissimus, but formally, in the elegance of its assault on the enormous heap of material presented by the Thirty Years War, it approaches closer to the other dramatist, namely Friedrich Schiller, who some years before his Wallenstein plays wrote as an historian an extensive history of the war. In June 1797 he wrote in a letter to Körner: “but the material … is indeed daunting, and I must atone through sour toil for the frivolity with which I entered on this project. You would not believe what it costs a poor wretch of a poet, in his secluded position cut off from all the currents of the world, to mobilise such outlandish and wild masses.”
How can the epicist and the historian tame the wild masses that erupted from thirty years of war, plague, terror and madness? In his Afterword to the new edition Erwin Kobel quotes AD’s model Charles de Coster:
Through war and fire / Through lance and sword / Seek
In death and ruins / In blood and tears / Find.
Two books above all justify such a representation of the Thirty Years War: the work of a military doctor during WW1, and more than fifty years later, during the 1968 cultural revolt in West Germany, the magnum opus of a historian: AD’s novel, and the book by Golo Mann, son of the writer who so often took AD’s part but could not, in a sort of helpless superiority of success, help himself from being overcome with hatred for AD. Golo Mann never mentions AD in his book. Two thousand pages with the same title, the same obsessiveness, the same energy and curiosity, the same happy lack of scruples and the glee with which the reader is buried under an avalanche of historical facts. In their plenitude of detail and their massiveness, these two books resemble huge grey pachyderms. Facing AD’s rhinoceros, aggressive and monstrous, equipped with a big horn and armoured plates, stands Mann’s Nile crocodile, sleeker with its well turned phrases and more contemporary argumentation, but equally colossal.
Both writers reveal a more realistic Wallenstein than does Schiller. But they are at one with him in their intention not to write a hagiography, but to represent the emperor’s general as a child – an outstanding and especially fearsome child – and a particular element of his time. AD attempts it like Homer, and Mann like Thucydides; yet they approach one another quite closely because they clearly acknowledge the boundaries of their genre and purposefully overstep them. As Mann subtitles his work ‘His life narrated by Golo Mann’, acknowledging a novelistic narrative, so AD seeks to establish the novelist as ‘a particular kind of scientist’ who ‘based on his science has more access to reality and access to more reality than many others’.
But the two writers diverge in their view of Wallenstein. Like many historians, Golo Mann sees him as the only farsighted statesman in the German Empire and admires him as a premature European politician, no less; compared to the other big hyenas of the age he ‘was the most honourable… and in his later years the better’. AD however maintains a distance from him as a fearsome and bloody man of violence. To see how both writers feel their way into linguistic representation and the power of imagination, and yet to different effect, we can point to a clear conclusive detail, namely the sentences they devote to Wallenstein after Captain Deveroux has plunged a partizan into his ribs. Golo Mann writes:
‘…the giant jagged blade of death lacerating four or five organs where one would have sufficed. Fire, choking pain, whirling end of the world. Once again, in human terms measured in fragments of a second, consciousness is able to flicker into a light which none has ever described; then, as the body sinks back, comes night, redeeming night.’
And AD:
‘Let them do to him as they will. It was no longer Wallenstein. A gurgling stream of blood welled from the gaping hole in his breast, steaming. And with it he was gone. Slurped down by the powers of darkness. Set back on his feet, cleansed, dried, warmed. They held him murmuring, death-blinded eyes twitching, in their arms.’
Cracks in an extinct past
Egrae obit aegre: ‘In Eger he died in bitterness’. This is inscribed on the reverse of a painting of the murdered man in the Wallenstein Palace in Prague. If you stumble from AD’s version of Wallenstein’s death chamber you bump into the corpse of Wilhelm Slavata, that important man, survivor of the Defenestration of Prague, novelistically dead in 1634 though he died in his bed in 1652 as an eighty year old. It is not necessary to read Golo Mann, or – with less parallel pleasure – any other good historian of the Thirty Years War, in order to evaluate the idiosyncratic factuality of AD’s Wallenstein. Whoever grants himself the luxury of the new edition will stumble on a valuable annex of notes on words and facts, providing information on the most important deviations from historical reality, and alongside useful commentary and explication give cross-references to other works by AD.
It is fascinating to see how seldom and how purposefully AD deviates, in general and in particular, from established facts, and how fully he attends to the facts. For the period 1621 to 1634, the temporal focus of the Wallenstein novel, there is in Mann’s history scarcely a shady move, a tactical detail, a troop manoeuvre, an intrigue by Spanish or French envoys, that AD does not also describe – and describe in a historiographically solid way. The index of publications listed in the new edition reveals in detail what books AD drew on or at least consulted. They constitute an almost incredible quantity, given wartime conditions and the short three-year time span during which this monumental novel was composed.
To find out, as far as possible on a scientific level, to absorb details, to recover countless realia, the concrete, the gaps and differences, the cracks in extinct materials of the past – this is the working method that AD explicitly advocated for a new foundation of the historical novel. In his poetological pamphlet ‘To novelists and their critics (the Berlin programme)’ published in Der Sturm in 1913 he demanded ‘psychiatry’ in place of a vulgar psychology, action and reporting instead of a contrived explanatory framework and its associated fine phrases. The primal historical material should emerge through words, so that in the end the object of the novel is ‘inanimate reality’ and its façade consists of nothing else but ‘stone and steel, electrically flashing or dark’. AD even demands for this ‘stony style’ that ‘the hegemony of the author must be broken; the fanaticism of self-denial can never be taken far enough.’
Given the author’s methodological demands, it is almost otiose to mention the contents of the Wallenstein novel. AD has to relate everything important about Wallenstein and everything important about that war which the Generalissimo largely instigated. The novel begins in 1621, after imperial troops commanded by Tilly have struck down the insurrection of the Bohemian Estates. It deals with all the events seen by historians as relevant, and ends around 1635 after a remarkable scene – mentioned below – with a few magnificently dreadful laconic sentences making clear that thirteen more years of war will dominate these lands.
From a bird’s eye view, the narrative technique comprises in the first instance of a precisely researched coordination system of the main events in chronological order (the height of the grid is constituted by the perspectives of the various characters). The blank spaces then form a mosaic of screens onto which scenes captured by the numerous epic cameras can be projected. Hence episode after episode, with rapid changes of shot. The war is shown simultaneously on a great narrative split screen. How does AD fill the screens, given the strictures of his Berlin Programme? No psychology, no commentary, no narrator murmuring ‘deep into the wells of the past’? AD chooses the ‘film style’, with his camera he seeks out material, primal historical material that will overpower the reader, in many places just as he has learned from Flaubert’s great Carthage novel Salammbo.
Beneath the stony surface
What can one see, and film? First of all the actions of war, spectacular external shots, hence battles, manoeuvres, plunderings, murder, armies on the move, expulsions. In second place we have interiors, meetings of actors for conversations, conferences, intrigues, plans, negotiations. These should provide the objects and incidents to which the author entrusts the conveying of historical reality. But in the end he possesses no lens, only pen and paper. What language can be used for the necessary descriptions, how will they speak, the stones that form the surface of the novel?
Because things have no speech, AD seeks available forms of speech of a higher materiality. And so he forms collages, and in a superb manner makes strange the modes of representation of the newspaper report, the written style of historical sources, the jargon of historians, in which suddenly the hoary-headed Saxon hands over seven regiments and the Swede can box the Bavarian’s ears (or the ears of a cook, if one is at hand). AD approaches dialogue in a similar semi-naturalistic collage style. Of course he has no microphone to record the reference tones of the great German war, but must often use speech as the novel’s object, having abjured narrative commentary.
With the help of these methods AD builds the skeleton, organs and muscles of the novel, the subcutaneous anatomy of war. Considered just for itself, we would have here an extensive work of history in the narrative tradition, idiosyncratically narrated. One of chaotic brittleness, it must be said. It cannot be improved by eroticism, for the ‘erotic craze’ of ‘studio hackery’ leads to a narrated world ‘successively simplified to a sexual relationship’. So AD’s characters can never hear such lovely foreign phrases as valiant Simplicissimus: “Allez Mons. Beau Alman, gee schlaff mein Herz, gom, rick su mir!”
But AD knows already by 1917 how to implement in another way the ‘transition from an assumed reality, from a merely shadowy transmission, to a genuine reality, laden with purpose and affect,’ as he later demanded, in exile in Paris in 1936 in his lecture on ‘The historical novel and us’. Here belongs the enormous vigour of individual scenes, in which he time and again breaks through the stony surface, the metaphorical leitmotifs he draws along throughout the novel, the partly experimental linguistic touches at a molecular level. Last but not least we must mention the almost involuntary incursions into the inner spaces of the characters, achieved with an intuition and plasticity that is rarely at the disposal of the historian.
Finally the author is not concerned to let ‘every fact stand’, for he is not possessed by ‘a mad compulsion to objectivity’. The freedom that AD demands in 1936 was in Wallenstein only partially achieved, and not so well proportioned as in later works. The enfant terrible of his Wallenstein novel, forever breaking through the stone wall erected by poetological decree, is the ‘roi terrible’ emperor Ferdinand II, frightening above all in the intensity of his fickleness. With him a great deal of psychology, true psychopathology, enters the novel. His relationship to Wallenstein is that of a Hamlet who has found an unhoped-for Mephistopheles.
AD admitted that he should have called the novel Ferdinand the Other. In the historical figure of the Habsburg, whom Golo Mann calls a ‘puppet’, there creep into the novel psychology, madness, rapture, the subjectivism of the author who created him – and who got rid of him in a factually untrue way. After Wallenstein is murdered, the novel-Ferdinand slips away from his castle in order to creep unrecognised as a wretched old man in rags along the roads and wander through forests and jailhouses. At the end AD, instead of letting him die abed years later as history attests, has him stabbed by a crazed forest wild man in a cave. This perplexing unfactual end to a novel overstuffed with facts is irritating and oppressive. It almost serves as a Buddhist – or rather Taoist, in the sense of the Wang Lun novel – final verdict on the war.
A mighty mountain range
‘Suspense ruins the novel’, wrote AD in 1917 in an essay for Die Neue Rundschau. In this respect the Wallenstein novel is in no way a ruin. But the enormous reading effort it requires is worth it. What fascinates and entertains is the inner tension between AD’s rigid self-imposed strictures and the unintentional and intentional breaches. Most convincing is the conjunction of subject and architecture, the correspondences between the object and the methods of the work of art. The novel-colossus suits the Thirty years War like Dürer’s Rhinoceros, and Dürer’s Melancholy sitting there cowed amid massive symbols of the age. More than any other Wallenstein author, AD teaches us disgust and revulsion against war and those who wage it, not least because the horror of Verdun formed a backdrop to the writing of Wallenstein.
AD’s Wallenstein is a high point in the German historical novel, to be ranked – though not in its mode of creation – with Broch’s Death of Vergil and of course the Joseph novels of AD’s antithesis Thomas Mann. In terms of world literature it is not so much an isolated peak as rather a mighty mountain range, part of a massif adjoining Flaubert’s Salammbo and Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Authors of both postwar periods – WW1 and WW2 – have wandered through it, whether they know it or not.
We can only praise the enormous and exacting toil of the Swiss Germanist Erwin Kobel in comparing the present edition with the first edition of 1920. AD’s lack of interest in revisions, and the difficult conditions in which a work so dense with names and material was composed and published, led Walter Muschg, eight years after AD’s death, to make around 2000 emendations. Now, 36 years later, Kobel has made around 2000 more. We can recover from our shock, for neither Muschg nor Kobel were working with a garbled suppressed demolished text with rain pouring through the roof. The corrections are almost all micro-surgical, occurring in the capillaries of individual words and AD’s idiosyncratic punctuation and inconsistent spelling of personal and place names, now all standardised. The luxury of a well-commented list of names will bring joy not only to the serious researcher. Careful sifting through the handwritten MS, first edition, and comparison of sources and materials, has led to the correction of just 300 significant errors, a few of them fatal…. The Muschg edition already contains 99.85% correct AD; the Kobel offers a sand-blasted version, just as good and necessary a thing as for cathedrals and old town halls and human teeth, even if the fresh gleam looks a little strange.
Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen (c. 1622-1676): author of the baroque novel of the Thirty Years War, Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus Teutsch (Simplicius Simplicissimus).
For Brecht’s sardonic response to Döblin’s revelation, see the poem appended to the post at https://beyond-alexanderplatz.com/sebald-and-doblin .
De Coster (1827-1879): Belgian writer, author of Tyl Ulenspiegel, an epic of the war of liberation from Spanish occupation of the Low Countries.
Golo Mann’s massive biography of Wallenstein was acclaimed a masterpiece when it appeared in 1971.
‘wells of the past’: allusion to the opening sentence of Thomas Mann’s Joseph novels.
