Berlin's harsh reality and Alfred Döblin’s utopian hope for a cure
“Writers are not self-generating…. I come from Döblin.” — Gunter Grass.
BERLIN, 17. June, 2024 — Alfred Döblin had little tolerance for other writers who busied themselves “mulling over the problems of their own inadequacy.”
“Writing is not biting your nails or picking your teeth,” he declared. “It’s a public activity….”
“The subject matter of a novel is untrammeled reality.”
Döblin (1878-1957) was a fiction writer of contradictions. Trained as a psychologist, he treated shell-shocked German soldiers during World War I. Afterward, he became a public-service psychotherapist serving indigent patients on the streets of Berlin’s Lichtenberg district. Döblin was a pioneering iconoclast, according to author Gunter Grass (“The Tin Drum”). He “demanded, excluded, (and) issued rules.” Citing Döblin, Grass declared of his own work, in 1967: “I see books as time bombs.
They explode in the reader’s head.”
Döblin’s “Berlin Alexanderplatz” exploded on the German literary scene in 1929. Quickly selling out of its first print run (10,000 copies), the modernist novel then sold another 50,000. It was subsequently made into a radio play and then, in 1931, into a relatively conventional movie. This was the first of at least three interpretations of the work for film and television, the latest appearing in 2020 (unfortunately during the height of the covid pandemic).
Years after its German publication, “Berlin Alexanderplatz” was translated into ten European languages, including Hungarian, Czech, and Russian. [Conformist Soviet critics accused the German author of being too petite-bourgeois. The Stalinists also frowned upon the book’s proletarian protagonist, Franz Biberkopf, a convicted criminal and, much worse, definitively a-political. Despite the official protests, the Russian translation came out during the 1930s.]
‘I see books as time bombs. They explode
in the reader’s head,’ declared Gunter Grass
in 1967, referencing Alfred Döblin.
Political and literary events in the West also conspired against Döblin, with the effect of quickly extinguishing the popularity of “Berlin Alexanderplatz.” Less than a month after its publication, the 1929 Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Thomas Mann, with special notice going to Mann’s traditional 1901 novel “Buddenbrooks.” Mann’s publisher, Fischer Verlag, quickly re-issued and sold some 700,000 copies of that work, smothering its other titles, including Döblin’s more punkish “Berlin Alexanderplatz.” Within a few years, Döblin’s Jewish background and the rise of the National Socialists forced him to abandon Berlin and Germany, where his book (and its royalties) ceased to exist for the next dozen years, a grossly altered life — escaping the god-awful German civil/cultural conflict(s) that famously exploded into global war.
Time, on the other hand, has been kind to Alfred Döblin, whose “Berlin Alexanderplatz” continues to be hailed as a monumental work. Similar to his Irish contemporary, James Joyce, Döblin’s book offers a seemingly random, train-of-thought narrative; a weird montage of events in the life of his wandering, anti-heroic protagonist, Franz Biberkopf. The book captures the enduring Geist of our odd German capital, ever well-populated with freebooting crews of haunted ne’er-do-well survivors.
As few readers have known, Alfred Döblin rendered “Berlin Alexanderplatz” from his notes as a practicing psychotherapist. He counseled city residents suffering the overwhelming poverty of that time, alongside “murder, prostitution, theft, betrayal, drunkenness…and crippledom,” as one writer described it.
In her book — “Berlin Psychoanalytic: Psychoanalysis and Culture in Weimar Republic Germany and Beyond” — Veronika Fuechtner explores the history of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute (BPI). Here, she describes Döblin’s professional work as part of a historic struggle that emerged from World War I — a struggle that pitted psychoanalysis (and its newest front-line practitioners like Döblin) against a more traditional psychiatry, already being taught in well-established university/academic institutions then.
Germans’ participation in the tragedy and human loss of World War I had changed everything about the practice of psychology and psychoanalysis, says Fuechtner. The new postwar era saw more intense competition over new ideas and new conclusions regarding war-neuroses, “shell-shock,” parent roles, sexuality, etc. Young thinkers were asking: “How might a new revolutionary state support the most successful psycho-therapeudic practices as an emerging social-welfare resource? How might we apply these therapies to heal Germany’s social wounds, caused by the soul-destroying, (patriarchal) militarist nationalism of the fallen Kaiserreich?”
Every day, public-health and social-service workers like Döblin faced entire urban populations shaped by the political/social failures of the past decade or more. After 1918, Berlin was home to armies of damaged men — veterans from all sides of different conflicts — as well as war widows,and orphaned children. (For its part, the fallen German Kaiserreich had sent more than 2 million men to their deaths in the First World War, most of them being 19 years old.)
Now, under the partial influence of reformers and social revolutionaries, the German national welfare system was being reorganized to try to fix the human damage of the war, according to Fuechtner. As such, it developed a new social-psychological “language of innocent victimhood.”
Under Berlin’s new public health-insurance system, Döblin’s responsibilities included serving as his patients’ therapist — but also as their system-mediator or advocate. This while he and others were able to channel state welfare and insurance money into new, emerging methods of practical psychoanalysis, rather than the more theoretical academic psychiatry, according to Fuechtner’s important book.
Döblin took copious notes about his psychotherapy patients — and these (surviving) notes served in the writing of his novel, ‘Berlin Alexanderplatz.’
For her research, Fuechtner pored through the very (never-published) patient books and notes that Döblin used to compose “Berlin Alexanderplatz.” He’d begun working with soldiers on the battlefield in 1914. While praising psychotherapy’s significance in the treatment of hysteria — especially in contrast to electroshock, as “therapy,” for example — Döblin publicly criticized certain long-established methods of Freudian psychoanalysis.
Working with other doctors in Berlin, Döblin addressed the myriad psychological vulnerabilities of the working poor. His patients were unskilled laborers, factory employees, railroad workers, etc. Not only was his research directed toward improving their treatment at the hands of the state health-care system; he also explored how the doctors’ psychoanalytic insights contributed to new theories of societal change — to more practical political work.
Under Fuechtner’s microscope, “Berlin Alexanderplatz” reflects psychoanalytic discourse on war-neurosis, sexuality, and social misery that was specific to Berlin during those turbulent post-war years. Contemplating the relationship between science and literature (or art), Döblin ultimately developed “a model of fictional psychology,” she writes, ideas that directly challenged his own traditional psychiatric training.
As a socialist in ailing post-WWI Germany, Alfred Döblin hoped that the evolving science of psychoanalysis and emerging psychotherapeutic practice would contribute to practical and positive social change — toward building a society of people who could free themselves from the pervasive social- and psychological misery that surrounded so many Berliners (and Europeans) of that time.
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Sources:
Döblin, Alfred. “Berlin Alexanderplatz.” Afterword by Michael Hofmann. (Penguin Modern Classics, 2017.)
Fuechtner, Veronika. “Berlin Psychoanalytic: Psychoanalysis and Culture in Weimar Republic Germany and Beyond.” (University of California Press, 2011.)
Grass, Günter. “On Writing and Politics 1967-1983.” Translated by Ralph Manheim. Introduction by Salman Rushdie (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985.)
I have “Berlin Alexanderplatz" waiting patiently on my Kindle. Thanks for the review/background!