Yolla and Alfred Part 2

After both Alfred and Yolla had passed away, powerful interests tried to prevent public knowledge of the decades-long relationship between them. The friend to whom Döblin, shortly before his death, revealed the story in order to forestall false narratives faced a lawsuit when he upheld his commitment to Döblin. The story is well told by Eckhardt Köhn.

From Yolla Niclas und Alfred Döblin. Fotofalle 3 (ISBN 978-3-00-057707-9), p.123 ff. Compiled and edited by Eckhardt Köhn (2017)

Translation © C D Godwin 2021

Translator’s Introduction

The volume from which this excerpt is taken lovingly compiled contains –

• the full text of Yolla’s memoir, of which three copies are known: the original that she deposited in the German Literature Archive in Marburg shortly before her death, to be embargoed until 2005; a copy apparently given to Prof. Robert Minder; and her own copy, which passed to her great-nephew Mr Jack Mautner. Mr Mautner passed this copy on to me in November 2021; I am seeking a permanent archival home for it;
• A selection of Yolla’s charming photos of Döblin’s children;
• An extensively illustrated biographical essay on Yolla;
• Excerpts from Yolla’s well-regarded photo essays published in the 1950s and 60s;
• The account, below, of developments following Yolla’s death.

I am indebted to Herr Köhn for his kind permission to publish this excerpt.

 “A little white cloud”

Contact with “an angel”, as it once seemed to her, became decisive in her life, and the question arises as to what happened to her relationship with AD, who was also in American exile from May 1939. Her recollections provide an answer. When she learned that he was living in California, she tried several times to write to him, but most of her letters were intercepted by Erna. However, as Yolla has emphasised, AD included one of the declarations of love in her letters word for word in a privately printed text ‘Nocturno’, later incorporated into November 1918, which also picks up the intercepted-letters motif. Stéphane Döblin has reported on the family crisis during those years:

I learned the cause only afterwards, when Peter told the whole story. It was he who tried to pass Yolla’s letters on to Father. Yolla was in New York, and kept in contact, which is incredible. There was something here not quite right with Father, for he must have known that there are limits. Even later on, when we returned from emigration, he continued the affair with Yolla. … It was obvious we were not to know Yolla, you could see there was a problem between the two of them.

In fact there were occasional phone calls and letters, and a brief reunion in New York immediately before the voyage back to Europe . She received a last letter from him written from Paris on Christmas Eve 1948; the final sentences read: “Incomprehensible, a life; and life in general. Does one actually want it? I don’t know.” The resigned tone must have struck her, more so perhaps than the signoff, which left little doubt that this was a final farewell: “Sincere as ever, I a little white cloud in the sky.” AD’s favourite metaphor, now targeted at himself but hinting not at earthly visibility, rather at his distancing himself from her as he passes over into another sphere, perhaps owes something to a memory of Kierkegaard’s lovely text “Autumn is the time of clouds”. There a “Thinker” is asked what he would most like to be, so that the Philosopher can astonish him with the reply: “A cloud – late in the year. That’s what I’d like to be.” For in autumn, “the clouds scurry past one another, bump into each other, separate, yearn for one another, intermingle their colours (as friends their blood), become one, even while the individuality of each shines through.” Final poetic declaration of love and “signature of Fate”, moment of the awareness of death, which made it all the more urgent for AD to entrust to Robert Minder the hidden side of his life story:

Out of reminiscences of the past and in the first instance out of an urgent desire for Yolla Niclas, these disclosures were made between February and May 1955, always in the calculated absence of Erna Döblin. He insisted on knowing Yolla Niclas’s address in America, and swore to me that Erna, pathologically jealous, had for a long time stolen her away from him. Peter in New York knew all about it (he said), but how to ask him without the mother at once finding out? Only after both Alfred and Erna had passed away did I receive the address from Peter: at that time no mutual acquaintance could offer information, so strictly was the relationship kept secret.

As a true comrade, Minder has attested further that “Shortly before his death, Döblin repeated to me that his deepest wish, which he no longer believed could be fulfilled, was to see Yolla again.” The thoughts in the text from his last recorded reflections, “Of Life and Death, neither of which exist”, dictated on 21 May 1955, must be understood against this background. He first deals with notions that come to him with sleep in the evenings: “For I often pondered in my own way on death and life, and now I had crossed the celestial boundary of life and was flowing into the realm of life after death. How does life end? With death? But death is an empty word.” The consoling fantasies of Death are augmented by reflections on human life under the sign of Love, which serve as an echo of the conversations with Minder two months earlier: “Every love cries a da capo to this existence, lovers have learned all there is to know about what existence is able to permit, and suffered agonies as they did so. But the compulsion is irresistible. As Sophocles sings in Antigone: ‘O Love, all victorious in battle’.”

If one asks what the relationship with Yolla Niclas meant in the end for AD, the answer given by the Canadian writer Anne Michaels in her long poem “Sublimation” is worth reflecting on. There she allows AD to give voice in the role of the lyrical Ego, which turns to Yolla Niclas, his “shadow bride” in order to express what he was no longer able to say:

You have lived Brecht’s parable of the Chalk Circle.
When I was caught in the middle, you let go
So I wouldn’t be torn to pieces.
Your actions have taught me what it is to love –
That it’s holding back, as well as holding.

The last chapter of Yolla Niclas’ memoir begins with a word for word quote from AD’s last reflections, in which he describes in his incomparable way the life determined for him by his Parkinson’s disease: “Ever since this affliction took hold of me and carried me off like a tiger its prey into the shadows …” The quote confirms that she knew the still unpublished text probably conveyed to her by Robert Minder. She saw it as “AD’s legacy”, which became to her “a sacred object”, since both the passage about love and the concept of the inefficacy of death she understood as last messages to her. In this sense she wrote to Bodo Kunke: “The fact of death has been unable actually to summon up a rift or a separation.”

In the rough and tumble of Döblin research

Robert Minder, consciously carrying out his friend’s dying wish, turned to AD’s eldest son Peter, living in the USA as the only member of the family still in regular contact with Yolla. His mediation enabled Minder to make contact with her at the end of the 1950s, and convey to her AD’s final greeting. Letters as well as face to face meetings during her trips to Europe led to lively exchanges, which included putting Minder in contact with AD’s son Bodo Kunke, living at the time as a police officer in Wiesbaden. From 1962 a thoroughly friendly and sympathetic correspondence developed.

Acquaintance with the French Germanist brought other consequences. After her lover’s death, Yolla unexpectedly saw herself thrust onto another stage: that of Döblin scholarship. For Minder had not only been AD’s friend, but as a literary scholar was equally an interpreter of his works, so that her information opened up a privileged field of interpretation authorised by AD himself. He provided the research community with a glimpse of this in his exemplary analysis of AD’s short story “The Sailboat Ride”. After a detailed interpretation and pointers to numerous connections with literary tradition, Minder plays his trump card: AD’s materials and his imaginary worlds can be understood only in dialectical association with the fact that he saw himself “now and then driven to autobiographical confessions”, the most important of which had been confided to him in spring 1955 by the 77 year old in a decidedly depressive mood. The claim was supported by a footnote: “On Yolla Niclas and the turning point that AD’s love for her represented in his life and work, extensive oral reports by AD to RM, confirmed by letters from YN with very precise details and clues.” Yolla was full of admiration for the French Germanist, and did all she could to support his research on AD: “Dr Minder is a wonderful man, and how comforting to know that despite all the hassles with Erna he was a friend – his good friend.”

Now there was someone not only well placed to understand her significance in AD’s life, but also to examine this complex in the writer’s work itself. After decades when this side of her life had remained totally unknown, Minder now revealed it to the German public in a respectful manner. To be sure, the new role of contemporary witness brought with it certain difficulties for her, which she expressed in letters to Bodo Kunke. While she admired unstintingly Minder’s Germanistic studies, the zeal with which his assistant Louis Huguet pursued his researches got on her nerves:

… a hopeless case. Everything that we – Dr Minder, you yourself, and I see as important bounces off him like a rubber ball off a wall. I almost find it unnatural, the way he goes about a biography. His queries are enough to drive one crazy. Running after the most insignificant details like a dog – I find it disrespectful. How can anyone with no sensitivity recognise subtle seeds, or even connections.”[x]

Apart from this, she became caught up in scholarly quarrels and publishers’ intrigues, which at first had to do with the Selected Works series from Walter-Verlag. Minder had originally been considered for the post of editor, but after objections from AD’s sons he was replaced by the Swiss Germanist Walter Muschg. While he was planning a volume of letters, Yolla was at first quite ready to place at his disposal the few letters from AD that she still had in her possession, but things worked out differently:

The offprint of the letters I sent to the Swiss publisher drew an intervention from Klaus. I withdrew all of them following a very transparent and for me very clarifying letter from the publisher. When my personal photography of AD was used on the cover of Alexanderplatz without my permission or my name, Klaus had not intervened.[xi]

When the first volume of Briefe (Letters) came out in 1970 and was reviewed in Der Spiegel, she tried to convey to Bodo, who had sent her the review, her reactions as a reader. She held out to him the prospect of one day being able to read the letters that had not been included in the volume:

This whole business of your father’s sarcasm always hurts me a little. I believe it stems from quite other sources than the critics assume. The caption to the photo with the tormented expression – ‘Thirst for bourgeois existence’ – was never his thirst.[xii] But he made it hard for the world really to know him – Dr D. You will perhaps (after I die) be able to read the withheld letters, together with my own notes, in some other place. … You must on this occasion know how to read more facts between these lines than I can actually express.[xiii]

When the lacunae in the Briefe volume was queried in 1971 by Uwe Schweikart in the Neue Rundschau, since so many important letters from Yolla and Minder were missing, the publisher felt entitled to respond with almost unparalleled insensitivity:

We were surprised by your remark that the selection of letters aimed to ‘harmonise’ the image of Alfred Döblin, all the more so as you find missing only three letters from Döblin to Yolla Niclas. … The letters would have done no more than document the existence of Frau Niclas – a fact not unknown to Döblin scholarship. Frau Niclas had in any case demanded cuts and a certain commentary, wishing in a way to influence the edition, which the editor Walter Muschg, still alive at the time, was unable to accept.[xiv]

To which Schweikert responded with appropriate clarity:

The fact that the three omitted letters from D. to Yolla Niclas could not be printed means not merely the absence of three necessary documents, but the total absence from the Briefe of this person so central to D.’s life and works. Quite independently of their content, these letters would have provided a clue to the relationship, required an explanatory commentary from the editor, and thereby acquired significance for the volume. Y. Niclas, like Frieda Kunke shamefully passed over in silence by orthodox scholarship, is never once mentioned in the entire Briefe, not even in the hastily cobbled-together Afterword summarising Döblin’s life – a most perplexing fact.[xv]

Yolla Niclas had soberly to accept that her attempt, both cautious and legitimate, to present her case in the now proliferating field of Döblin research was hopeless. Her only hope was for future sympathetic readers who would be able decades later to form their own view of her love for AD in the light of her memoire “Encounters with Alfred Döblin”. When Yolla died of heart failure in Hartford CT on 21 December 1977, a local newspaper recalled her impressive character and her contributions to photography:

Yolla Niclas Sachs, the shy German-born photographer whose works under the name Yolla Niclas have been displayed around the world, died as she lived – quietly and without complaint … ‘It is the greatest miracle that you can freeze a moment’, the thoughtful artist said recently. There is nothing more I want to do than take a good photograph.’[xvi]

 Epilogue

The scholarly skirmishes during Yolla’s lifetime were as nothing compared with what was still to come. In May 1978 Jürgen Serke, who engaged intensively with the fate of writers expelled from Germany, published in Zeit-Magazin an article provocatively titled “A Heretic Turns Catholic”, based on information from Minder. This presented the complicated history of Döblin’s love life to a wider public, thereby emphasising in particular the significance of Yolla Niclas, whom he visited on the eve of her death. A short while later, at the centenary of Döblin’s birth, Minder delivered a lecture at the Berlin Academy of Sciences which was printed in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on 5-6 August 1978. In it he went into the writer’s love life more extensively and trenchantly than in his earlier contributions. He mentioned a series of fleeting affairs, in order then to go into detail on the decisive love experience with Yolla. From 1921 to 1940 “no work of Döblin’s was written without her intimate participation”.[xvii] In view of this significance, says Minder not without pride, his later acquaintance with her was an incomparable hermeneutic advantage for an understanding of AD’s early works: “His longing for Yolla remained active within him and took on almost hallucinatory form during the removal to Paris in 1953. … For twenty years – until her death in December 1977 – I was in contact with Yolla Niclas by letter and in-person meetings.”

The article provoked a scandal. On 2 April 1979 AD’s son Claude lodged a complaint with the Berlin Court , whereby Minder was to desist, under penalty of DM100,000, from further references to AD’s extra-marital relationships, since assertions of this nature constituted an infringement of individual rights. During the hearing, which aimed to alienate the literary public from Minder, the advocates Otto Schily and Nicolas Becker undertook Minder’s defence. Well advised by him, they sought in their written submissions to defang the accusations by citing with scholarly meticulousness the many texts in which AD had noted his open and liberal conception of love and sexuality. Beyond this they drew, as a relevant resource, on Minder’s description of his conversations with AD in spring 1955, which had dealt with precisely these awkward matters. Yolla’s own memoirs were also called in evidence:

Attached memoir of Yolla Niclas in photocopy (Attachment 10), the original of which is in the Schiller Archive in Marbach. Frau Niclas has meanwhile passed away. While still alive she donated her memoir to the Schiller Archive and vouched for its authenticity to the Director of the Schiller Archive. For proof: Witness Prof. Dr. Zeller, to be served via the Schiller Archive, Marbach.[xviii]

Clearly as little conversant with scholarly as with technical matters, the other party expressed irritation:

The plaintiffs are quite unclear as to how the defendant could have gained access to the contents of Frau Niclas’ memoir. For while still alive she delivered the sealed typescript to Prof. Dr Keller of the Schiller Archive in Marbach with the express wish that it be treated in strict confidentiality. Until now it has not been viewed by anybody.

This assertion is not entirely wrong, for the original was indeed under embargo until 2005, but it should have been possible to realise that Minder, as a confidant of Yolla, would possess a copy of the first version. Minder prepared a further extensive written submission for his appearance in court on 16 October 1979, but it never came to a verdict. With his death on 10 September 1979, what was for all participants the saddest and most painful chapter in the reception of Döblin came to an end.

***

Notes by Eckhardt Köhn , supplemented by those marked

AD spent two weeks in New York in May 1939 for a PEN Congress. His exile in the USA dates from October 1940.

There is a section titled ‘Nocturne’ in the novella Stauffer and the Women, which was cut from the 1984 Fromm edition of November 1918. Translated at https://beyond-alexanderplatz.com/november-1918-omitted-passages-stauffer, pp.27-29. The relevant passage is no doubt this: “Then he sits pensively at the writing desk, his heart pounds, he pulls open the middle drawer, and – nothing surprises him now – sees letters, lots of letters in her handwriting! The big “Erwin” with an exclamation mark jumped out at him. His hand sinks into the drawer. There’s nothing for it, he must read them. The letters are like a novel. In the form of a diary, and it all revolves around him. Lucie complains. She tells of her travels, of other men, over several years. She talks of Stauffer’s plays. She attended many premieres. It’s as if secretly, without wanting to step forward, she has always been in the background of his life. She married. She keeps writing to him, but doesn’t post the letters. He occupies a constant place at her side, but not always the same place. In the end there’s no more complaining. The stormy assaults cease. It seems he has traversed every station in her inner being. Now, like a sailor to the wife left in port, he is the always absent one, the voyager, to whom she gives account and tells what is happening back home. Stauffer pursues the unfolding plot without arriving at any clear feelings. He feels moved. He is calmed, soothed, more than for years now. And so he is able to close the drawer and go back to bed. … And sleeps soundly.”

‘He always strove for improvement’: Conversation with Stéphane Döblin, Neue Rundschau 1/2009, pp.141-158. Marc Petit, in his biography of Wolfgang Döblin Die Verlorene Gleichung (The Lost Equation) writes on p.42: “Claude entrusted me with his deepest secret. Wolf and he always took the mother’s side. During the worst crisis, when Alfred had a prolonged poorly concealed liaison with the photographer Yolla Niclas, the two brothers openly took the mother’s part.”

Robert Minder: statement to the court on 16 October 1979.

Anne Michaels: Poems. New York 2013, p.68. This could be her collection Correspondences: A Poem and Portraits, which I have not seen.

YN’s letter is undated. Bodo was AD’s illegitimate son by the young nurse Friede Kunke (who died in 1918). He was born in October 1911, nine months after AD’s (reluctant) engagement to Erna Reiß. Alfred kept in touch with him over the years.

The story was written in 1910, first published in Der Sturm in July 1911. Minder’s essay „‘Die Segelfahrt’ von AD: Struktur und Erlebnis. Mit unbekannten biographischen material“ (‘The Sailboat Ride’: structure and experience. With new biographical material) was published in 1969.

YN letter to Bodo Kunke, 15 December 1962.

Huguet completed his massive doctoral thesis under Minder, on AD’s early works. He went on to produce a most thorough Döblin bibliography in 1972, published in East Germany.

[x] YN, undated letter to Bodo Kunke.

[xi] YN to Bodo Kunke, 4 January 1969.

[xii] Likely this photo from 1943, lent by Klaus to the Marbach Archive (Döblin-Kataloge, 1998, p. 293) :

[xiii] YN to Bodo Kunke, 12 December 1970.

[xiv] Letter from Walter Verlag, in Neue Rundschau, vol 3, 1971, p.173.

[xv] Op. cit., p. 174. The letters from Yolla are still omitted from the expanded second edition Briefe II in 2002. Yolla is mentioned in only one line, barely doing more than note her existence: “Yolla (Charlotte) Niclas (1900-1977), a longtime friend of Döblin’s”.

[xvi] The Hour, 22 December 1977. After Rudolf Sachs died in Amsterdam on 21 December 1978, Yolla’s niece Jean Mautner made efforts to have her legacy archived. Some personal documents found a home at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York, and the few remaining photographs were taken by the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson.

[xvii] ‘Contribution to an authentic love story, from conversations with Alfred Döblin’, Süddeutsche Zeitung Weekend, 5-6 August 1978. Minder reacted with irritation to Serke’s contribution, accusing him of “making journalistic capital and claiming to have discovered what had already been in print since 1971.” Serke felt that Minder “regarded Yolla Niclas as his private property” (phone conversation with EK on 1 August 2016). Minder also made clear that “Only in a book can other details, notably Döblin’s political, philosophical and religious development, establish the close connection between life and works.” No doubt Minder saw himself as the authorised compiler of such a study.

[xviii] File B Rep 039 Nr 91, Berlin State Archive, p.68.