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The Epic Worlds of Alfred Döblin
Of the three great German word-artists of the first half of the 20th century, Alfred Döblin remains the least known. The other two are Thomas Mann, whose attitude towards Döblin ranged from cautious admiration to violent rage; and Berthold Brecht, who learned much from the ideas of his friend Döblin. Anglophone readers have almost no source of information about Döblin, or about the few works already translated into English (Berlin Alexanderplatz perhaps excepted). In Germany, reliable editions of Döblin trickled out between the 1980s (decades after his death in 1957!) and the 2010s. Academic lit. crit. scholars enjoy tackling aspects of his life and output in ways attractive to other sc...
Berlin Alexanderplatz
Alfred Döblin (1878-1957) studied medicine in Berlin and specialized in the treatment of nervous diseases. Along with his experiences as a psychiatrist in the workers' quarter of Berlin, his writing was inspired by the work of Holderlin, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and was first published in the literary magazine, Der Sturm. Associated with the Expressionist literary movement in Germany, he is now recognized as on of the most important modern European novelists. Berlin Alexanderplatz is one of the masterpieces of modern European literature and the first German novel to adopt the technique of James Joyce. It tells the story of Franz Biberkopf, who, on being released from prison, is confronted with the poverty, unemployment, crime and burgeoning Nazism of 1920s Germany. As Franz struggles to survive in this world, fate teases him with a little pleasure before cruelly turning on him. Foreword by Alexander Stephan Translated by Eugene Jolas>
Alfred Döblin
Alfred Döblin is one of the most important twentieth-century German writers. This volume reassesses the uniquely interdisciplinary quality of his texts, which are paradigms of the encounter between literary and scientific modernity. It analyses Döblin's best-known literary works as well as his medical essays, political journalism and autobiographical texts, and it situates him in relation to other writers such as Heine, Benn, Brecht and Sebald. Wide-ranging and with contributions in English and German, this is a valuable study for students and advanced researchers alike.
The Three Leaps of Wang Lun
Here for the first time in English is Alfred Döblin's astonishing epic of eighteenth century China, hailed on its publication in 1915 as a master-piece of Expressionist prose, and since recognized to be the first modern German novel. The Three Leaps of Wang Lun is the story of a doomed sectarian rebellion during the reign of Emperor Ch'ien-lung (1736-1796). It is also the most sustained evocation, in any European language, of a China untouched by the West. Döblin's imagination, almost hallucinatory in its intensity, brings this China to vivid life. Teeming cities and Tibetan wastes, political intrigue and religious yearning, life at Court and the fate of wandering outcasts are depicted in ...
Destiny's Journey
Destiny's Journey is a memoir reconstructed partly from notebooks that Döblin kept from the time he worked in the French Ministry of Information in the spring of 1940 and partly written without notes in Los Angeles where he took refuge during the Second World War. It tells the personal and generational story of the flight of Jewish and anti-Nazi intellectuals from Europe to America, their fear and frustration, isolation, and inability to work. Döblin’s story differs from that of other Jewish intellectuals and artists in that his family converts to Catholicism in Los Angeles. Unlike most of them, he returns to Europe as an officer with the French forces and works on denazifying German lit...
Bright Magic
Alfred Döblin’s many imposing novels, above all Berlin Alexanderplatz, have established him as one of the titans of modern German literature. This collection of his stories —astonishingly, the first ever to appear in English—shows him to have been a master of short fiction too. Bright Magic includes all of Döblin’s first book, The Murder of a Buttercup, a work of savage brilliance and a landmark of literary expressionism, as well as two longer stories composed in the 1940s, when he lived in exile in Southern California. The early collection is full of mind-bending and sexually charged narratives, from the dizzying descent into madness that has made the title story one of the most anthologized of German stories to “She Who Helped,” where mortality roams the streets of nineteenth-century Manhattan with a white borzoi and a quiet smile, and “The Ballerina and the Body,” which describes a terrible duel to the death. Of the two later stories, “Materialism, A Fable,” in which news of humanity’s soulless doctrines reaches the animals, elements, and the molecules themselves, is especially delightful.
Mountains Oceans Giants
The 27th century: beleaguered elites decide to melt the Greenland icecap. Why? - to open up a new continent, for colonisation by the unruly masses. How? - by harvesting the primordial heat of the Earth from Iceland's volcanoes. Nature fights back, and it all goes horribly wrong... In the early 1920s confirmed city-dweller Alfred Doblin - he was 15 before he saw his first cherry tree - became puzzled by a nagging sense of Nature: "I experienced Nature as a secret. Physics as the surface, begging for explanations. Textbooks... knew nothing of the secret. Every day I experienced Nature as the World Being, meaning: weight, colour, light, dark, its countless materials, as a cornucopia of processe...
Two Women and a Poisoning
A marriage gone horribly wrong; a secret female friendship and affair; a murder plot. This precursor to the true crime genre is told by Alfred Döblin, one of the giants of 20th century German literature and author of Berlin Alexanderplatz, which was named as one of the Guardian Top 100 Books of All Time.
Tales of a Long Night
The story of a young Englishman called Edward Allison who loses a leg during World War II and returns home a nervous as well as a physical wreck, tormented by doubt and anger, and obsessed with what seems to him the mystery of where the blame for the war really lies. He is released from a clinic in the hope that living among his family will hasten his cure, but he simply transfers his fixation with hidden guilt to the domestic front. ... In an effort to exorcise his demons, the Allisons and their friends start telling a series of stories, many of them variations on ancient myths and legends. Some of these tales serve to reveal the character of the storyteller, others as a riposte or as a com...
