Yolla and Alfred (Part 3)
For 20 years I knew him, since June 1937; we wrote one another a hundred letters, had hundreds of conversations. The relationship became especially close in November that year following the unexpected death of my wife. During the severe depression that ensued, AD proved an outstanding doctor, who knew how to treat now with injections, pills, baths, now with psychological means.
In this third and final part of the Yolla/Alfred story, Döblin’s friend and critic, the French historian of literature Robert Minder, links the relationship to a very detailed analysis of a story Döblin wrote more than a decade before meeting Yolla.
Excerpts from Robert Minder’s essay Alfred Döblin’s “Die Segelfahrt”, oder Struktur und Erlebnis (‘The Sailboat Ride’, or Structure and Experience
From Wozu Literatur? Reden und Essays (Whither Literature? Lectures and Essays), Suhrkamp, 1971 p.101ff
Translation (c) C D Godwin 2021
[…] Not without reason, Döblin felt periodically driven to autobiographical revelations: “Strange thing is, I’m often seized with an impulse to write an autobiography. I resist it.” In vain: “I must ponder, relieve the pressure in my breast, the restless unease…” Symptomatic for our purposes that even the 50-year-old went public with a consciously provocative confession. The Indian epic Manas had just appeared; Berlin Alexanderplatz was in progress, his love affair with Yolla Niclas was in full bloom, and the author almost at the height of his fame. A euphoric mood masks dark undertones. Suppressed euphoria also characterises the retrospective of the 70-year-old French cultural officer: Satan goes amongst us, the mark of Cain remains, and yet “there is God, eternal, good and just.”
Explicitly depressive, on the other hand, are the completely unknown confessions made by the 77-year-old in the spring of 1955, following almost fatal quarrels with his wife Erna, when he felt an urge to have me set them down expressly to be put to use later. Decisive facts and experiences were to be saved from suppressions and falsifications – in particular, his love for Yolla Niclas, whom he regarded from 1921 to exile in America as his soulmate, constant discussant of his works, incarnation of the new female figures therein (Venaska, Savitri): gentleness, goodness, pure light and artistic enthusiasm in contrast to the sober purposeful energy and more than four decades of love-hate of a spouse from whom he could never tear himself free.
Döblin’s extensive oral account concerning the turning point that his love for her represented in his life was confirmed to me in correspondence by Yolla with very detailed information and pointers.
This double life, determined by temperament, biological constitution and early childhood trauma, is a fundamental feature of Döblin’s life-pattern and the composition of his works. This is the reference point even for the transition from the earthly Beloved, separated from him since 1940 by war and exile, to the religious cult of the Virgin Mary. The contrastive pairing of spoiler Lilith / redeemer Mary appears already in the first novel; but always in the background: the Mother, loving and destroying.
Here I discuss only what relates to the story “A Sailboat Ride”, and firstly the exact date of its composition: Ostend, Summer 1910, at the time of the World Exposition in Brussels. But in the course of his conversations Döblin referred to 1910 as his “year of catastrophe”. The story is a composed expression of this crisis.
In conversation he corrected at once a false conception: that for him, born in Stettin, the sea had been a source of constant early experience. “One hardly ever went there; it was more than 30 km away, at that time a great distance.” And domesticated Nature in the context of a Sunday family outing he found excruciating. Not a “sundrenched past” as a famous Stettin medical colleague recalled, but “Stettin as a gloomy decaying provincial town in my memory, with a raucous funfair on the Paradeplatz, playgrounds on the landings of the steeply descending steps of the Town Hall … A ballad painted on a booth, garish linen, horrible murder scene.” It took him “years for that murder to fade from my mind.” Not a word about the sea – and when he spent a few months in Hamburg aged 12, he “saw the Elbe not at all, and the Alster only twice.” Döblin always felt himself to be a town dweller, a decided Berliner, having lived there since he was 10.
What was missing – despite holidays on the Baltic and North Sea coasts – was the experience necessary to write about the sea like Melville , Conrad or old Victor Hugo in exile on Guernsey. Astonishing paradox: “constant fascination for water”, the sea as a Leitmotif in his works. What he wrote about it is quantitatively very little, and the famous final chapter of Mountains Oceans Giants (1924) simply transposes for a big orchestra with Mahlerian gestures what the “Sailboat” sets down as chamber music.
The same goes for the forest, which as Günther Grass has rightly pointed out is a complementary phenomenon to the sea in Döblin’s writings. The townsman was 15 before he consciously noticed a tree and was entranced by it, a cherry tree in bloom. The stimulus was enough to make of trees and forest, along with the sea, the visionary, sexually laden and at the same time mystically enhanced expression of those hyperreal “energies” with which “the world is watered”, now the “enormous fist of the Anonymous” that crashes destructively down, now the protecting hand that lifts the isolated human again to the breast of the Primal Power. Döblin’s whole philosophy of life, even when coloured by Christianity in his later years, is based on this view, and remains his prayer – now fearful, now in redemptive yielding. A retrospective view is not enough. The third and last connection: Döblin, then in his 33rd year , and already father of an illegitimate child (1904-05) which soon died, was about to become so again. This time he was at a crossroads: he had to choose between two women as mother of his children. Outwardly small, sprightly, gracile and nimble, inwardly heavily burdened by guilt, rebelling with gloomy gravity against the mother-taboo, and finally in the winter of 1910-11 driven to commit to a particular direction for the rest of his life. This is what gives the “Sailboat” its experiential density, the hammering and oppressive tone in place of the juvenile, strongly auto-erotic sultriness of the repetitious actions of the lovers in the Schwarze Vorhang. The motifs, while constant in their details, have not developed autonomously from the earlier novel; life has worked its way into them.
Astonishing and significant: the seemingly cynical and sly author of Berlin Alexanderplatz, by his own admission – in 1918 and in 1955 – had had no dealings with girls before his 23rd year . The first woman he saw naked was a corpse in the anatomy hall.
The biographical key to the “Buttercup Murder” is, according to a remark of his in 1955, “the love affair that led him to a girl”. Döblin elided over the episode – leaping about just like grave Herr Michael Fischer in the story as he tries to buy his way free of the buttercup he has beheaded and buried at the forest edge, and for which he even establishes a trust fund, and sets out bowls of food. A grotesque and novel plane of language and a novel stage, much less engaged than the “Sailboat”, a kind of absurd clinically cold counterpart to it. An abyss of experience separates the ponderous Brazilian with the sallow bloated face, the eyes in grey sockets, from the fat helpless bank clerk “with the elderly child’s face and sweet little mouth”. True, an elemental force, the forest, swallows this man up in the end, but with brief shrill scorn. The major shocks for Döblin set in later.
They begin in 1909, when as Assistant Doctor in the municipal hospital Urban in Berlin he enters into a kind of secret engagement with the ten years younger Erna Reiss. “She was a medical student, cultivated, erotic, ambitious, socially on the same level, I took great care not to let it come prematurely to anything sexual.” Döblin suspected that waiting to pounce here were the reincarnated mother-type with the ambivalent protection and castration complexes. She went off temporarily to Jena for further studies, and “already there was the first proper, respectable relationship.” We are at the centre of the “Segelfahrt”, the turning point that technically makes a story a novella: the unsettling of the Brazilian.
The other woman, a nurse called Frieda (family name omitted here), was 18 years old, “uneducated, but a natural type. I never thought to marry her. She clung to me, demanded a declaration of what would become of us both. I committed a great injustice, in a hotel on Küstrinerplatz. She stood there naked, beautiful – at once I said: we’ll get engaged, we’ll make it official later.”
Though Frieda was not reduced to the status of a harlot, she suffered all the opprobrium that attached itself then to an unmarried mother. A life was destroyed; the son, born in October 1911, grew up in Holstein with his grandmother, Frieda died of TB in January 1918 – Döblin started his biographical sketch shortly thereafter. It breaks off – or is rendered mute – before Frieda and Erna make an appearance. But he is never free of the memory. Twenty years later he begins November 1918 with the self-accusation of a lieutenant who has raped a nurse: “I can never forgive myself.”
“I did not want to enter into marriage with a lie,” Döblin continued in 1955. He wrote to Erna Reiss: “Eight days after my confession came the reply … the letter of all letters.” It shattered Döblin: “a sense that something had died. Couldn’t keep it in my pocket. It was heavy as iron. I set fire to it at once in an umbrella stand, then took a hot bath, cleaned myself all over. Evening to the cinema with Kurt, was utterly distraught … Three days later my brother Ludwig came, asked about the engagement, he’d heard about a wealthy Miss Reiss, so, something will come of it.”
This brother Ludwig would become the main character in the 1934 novel Men without Mercy: brought up as the eldest son to be the perfect achiever, he finally rebels against the family, in spring 1930 flees from an unhappy wealthy marriage towards a girl friend, and when she turns him away shoots himself: a variation of the maternal tie and resistance to it with death as the way out, the experience shared by Döblin and shaped by him.
How it went on with Erna Reiss: what shattering revelations she made to him about her past; how he begged on his knees to be released, but in vain; a sense of annihilation. The engagement was settled on Erna’s birthday: 13 February 1911. “They asked me to play piano and sing; I suggested Brahms: ‘O death how sweet thou art’. It all went off peacefully. I went back drunk to the hospital, told myself I’ve cut my own throat.”
This is the “catastrophic time” when the “Sailboat” attained its final form.
Two excerpts from the Festschrift for the 100th anniversary of Robert Minder’s birth
(1). From the Foreword, by A. Betz, pp.10-11.
Shortly before his death, Minder found himself in the headlines of the literary pages of the West German press. One of AD’s heirs had blown out of all proportion some information Minder revealed to the West Berlin Academy of Arts about Eros in the writer’s biography, claiming “infringement of the individual rights” of his father, and in all seriousness had brought a legal action. Minder’s purpose had been to make visible the complications in AD’s private existence, the biographical background and the erotic entanglements that became the motor of AD’s works, in short: the use he made of neuroses without which many of his texts cannot be rightly understood.
As a longstanding friend of AD, a confidant in fact, both were in agreement that a record should be made even of intimate matters, to preserve AD’s image from the anticipated moralising falsifications: both united in an unconditional search for truth.
Despite the prominent legal firm in Berlin hired by Minder for his defence, the case never reached settlement. Minder quit the hearing in Berlin, outraged by the judge’s attitude in which he thought to discern a post-Nazi attitude. A few days later he was overtaken by a heart attack – a high price for an act of sublime friendship that had been maliciously misinterpreted.
(2). Manfred Voigts and Till Schicketanz: ‘Freund und Kritiker: Robert Minders Verhältnis zu AD‘ (Friend and critic: RM’s relationship to AD). pp.235-49:
Finally in the Freiburg clinic in 1957, a defeated man, devoured by illness, calls for the nurse and in her presence authorises once again to have him buried in France and not in Germany. Why? “They will desecrate our graves.” And when protests: “You don’t know the Germans.”
[…] the relationship between RM and AD was not at all the usual one between critic and author. … Both were committed to their friendship. … For RM, AD was in no way merely a writer:
For 20 years I knew him, since June 1937; we wrote one another a hundred letters, had hundreds of conversations. The relationship became especially close in November that year following the unexpected death of my wife, the victim of misdiagnosis and a botched operation. During the severe depression that ensued, AD proved an outstanding doctor, who knew how to treat now with injections, pills, baths, now with psychological means.
No doubt AD had access to RM’s personal, perhaps intimate, relationships. In return, RM became an important part of AD’s private life. In 1954, when his illness made it impossible to leave the house, AD decided to give RM his full trust and dictated to him reminiscences not so far published.[x]
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NOTES
SLW: Schiften zu Leben u. Werk (Writings on life and work), ed. Erich Kleinschmidt, Walter-Verlag 1986.
Kultur, Literatur und Wissenschaft in Deutschland und Frankreich: Zum 100. Geburtstag von Robert Minder. (Culture, Literature and Science in Germany and France. For the 100th Anniversary of Robert Minder’s Birth) A Betz and R Faber (eds), Königshausen und Neumann (2004).
Robert Minder: ‚Wie wird man Literaturhistoriker und wozu?’ (How does one become a literary historian, and to what purpose?): Speech on receiving the 1969 Hansischen Goethe-Preis. In Minder: Wozu Literatur? (Whither Literature?), Suhrkamp 1971, p.51.
Minder in Süddeutsche Zeitung 5/6 August 1978: “Contribution to authentic life history”. Quoted in the above Festschrift p. 243.
According to M Prangel: Alfred Döblin (2nd ed. 1987, p.111), RM took dictation in Paris, where Alfred and Erna lived between April 1953 and February 1954; September 1954-May 1955; and September 1955-March 1956. These dictated materials are separate from those dictated to AD’s nurse Helene Kienz, his wife Erna, and the American student Anne Liard Jennings, which formed the basis for a published article ‘Of Life and Death…’ in the magazine Sinn und Form.
“Doktor Döblin” (1917-18), in SLW pp.14-24. For translations of this and the following two references, see https://beyond-alexanderplatz.com/german-masquerade .
“Erster Rückblick” . In Döblin & Loerke (eds): Alfred Döblin – Im Buch – zu Haus – auf der Strasse (1928), pp.7-126. Reprinted in SLW pp.108-78.
‘The Sailboat Ride’ and ‘The Murder of a Buttercup’ can both be found in Bright Magic (NY Review Books 2016, ISBN 978-1-59017-973-4), translated by Damion Searls.
i.e. Frieda Kunke, mother of Döblin’s son Bodo, with whom Yolla corresponded after Döblin’s death. Döblin himself had kept in touch with Bodo over the years.
[x] The adjective in the song’s title is actually ‘bitter’.
