/lit/ - Literature

Here are some of the issues Döblin tackles:

Migration, demographic change. Right from the first page, we (or rather the much more homogenous Europeans of the early 20th century) are being primed for big shocks. ‘New people’ take over from the Whites. In Milan and other southern European zones these are Africans; in London, Amerindians. Many migrants suffer the fate of the uprooted who cannot bed down in the new environment.
Prometheanism: the techno-industrial mindset that the world is there for humans to control and exploit, regardless of the impacts on the natural world. Again, we are primed right from the first pages: submarines cut through ocean waters like a scalpel through a living organ. But Prometheanism is a mainly European trait: the ‘yellow races’ remain suspicious of technology; while tribal cultures recoil, or succumb only after the blandishments of the ‘boosters’.
Urbanisation and the Cosmos: as masses continue to flock to cities, losing their contact with nature, the world continues to revolve around the sun; the seasons recycle, winds blow, rain falls.
Industrial society as a war machine: weapons are among the first European products offered to tribal societies. Townzones erect defensive ray-barriers. Technology weaponises water and air. Often the weapons don’t work, or turn on those wielding them. The Urals War, begun as a diversion from domestic problems, is justified on ‘religious’ grounds (Asians aren’t Promethean enough), and ends in neither victory nor defeat.
Elites vs. Masses: mass unrest leads elites to seal off knowledge, turning the masses into helots.
Work and automation: elites must find ways to keep people employed, or keep them amused. War is a good way to use up surplus people. Industrial oligarchs take over governments.
Gender relations: patriarchy, matriarchy, feminism, family, control over women’s bodies, eugenics.
Sexual pathologies: voluntary eunuchs; Melise of Bordeaux.
Machine-hatred, machine-worship: religious mania, self-sacrifice against/for machines, Promethean fire the motivating symbol.
Individuality: Wind and Water Theory posits the individual human as a water-molecule in a homogenised mass of indistinguishable molecules.
Food: Synthetic food – junk food taken to the extreme – ‘frees’ humanity from the hazards of the natural world; its development requires large-scale human (not mouse or guinea pig!) sacrifices and removes a major link between urbanised masses and Nature.

>>13411345
Sometimes an important issue is mentioned briefly, to be taken up at length later in the novel; e.g. Light Paint, which features (post-Iceland-Greenland) in the Ibis/Laponie story in the underground city; or the ocean-excavating that halts the Pacific fleet in the Urals War: the vision of Mutumbo excavating the Arctic Ocean to provide his fleet with a refuge from the Iceland-Greenland disaster was Döblin’s initial stimulus for the epic.

Döblin has an almost cinematic vision. He cuts rapidly from a wide-angle scene to a close-up, from a broad-brush paragraph covering a large expanse of time to a more traditional story-telling account of specific people and incidents. His language in almost every paragraph includes vivid, intensely poetic touches, easily missed if you skim too fast. This happens even when he presents an encyclopaedic description, as of the Sahara:

>Winds tore at naked glowing hills, flying sand abraded crags splintered worn down by the heat. Whirlwinds worked like whetstones.

As you read, remember that Döblin was writing almost a century ago. Ask yourself: what aspects of his vision are still valid today? How does the actual development of our techno-industrial society in the intervening decades match with or negate his vision (not in terms of this or that invention, but of underlying trends and currents)? Can anyone deny that greed, war, wealth concentration, elite dominance of politics, gender relations… remain of critical concern today?

>>13411338
>>13411345
>>13411350
So you're the translator, right?

>>13411584
Not even, I'm just a guy that wants to read this book for a long time because it sounded awesome, but can't read German.
I just found out about this translation, so I wanted to share it with you.

Bump

>>13411597
You're a good man

>>13411597
Thank you, I appreciated reading this

I thought 95 years were more than enough to make the copyright license useless.

>>13412741
Isn't it 70y after the author's death ?
Döblin died in 57

>>13412741
No thanks to disney

Bump

>>13412196
>>13412221
Thanks, hope you guys will like it if you're going to read it

It looks cool I'll get it

i found that guy's site a while ago after getting really into berlin alexanderplatz. it's pretty interesting, reminds me a bit of the first chapter of 2666

bump

bump2

another one

>>13411338
Thanks for posting this. Prolly gonna read it in German.

>>13411338
Have you read pic related, OP?
I've been interested in the Thirty Years' War for a while now, and the description on the translator's website makes it seem interesting.

>>13418109
Not even, I have yet to make a full dive into Döblin's corpus

Anyone read his China book? I also been meaning to read this fellow

bump

Berlin Alexanderplatz was really fucking good so I'll at least download this before it disappears.
Why wouldn't anybody touch this I wonder? A previously-untranslated work by an author they already print seems like something NYRB would be all over. They just did it for Vasily Grossman.

>>13421607
>Why wouldn't anybody touch this I wonder ?
Too niche.
Seems like he's been overshadowed by other German and Austrian writers such as Mann, Musil and Jünger.

>>13412176
>>13414047
>>13420967
>>13416051
>>13415410
>(((döblin)))

>>13421715
I dunno about this book but the protagonist of Berlin Alexanderplatz literally joins the Nazi paramilitary because he's bored and they sing fun songs

>>13421715
He converted to Catholicism.

>>13411338
I've read that one. It got a bit weird towards the end.

>>13419868
The three leaps of wang lun?
Yes. It is interesting and I really appreciate the read after having finished it now even more than when I was reading it. I have a feeling Döblin in general can write quite imposing works.
The three leaps... also has very beautiful and touching prose (in german) but many also that were context related so even a translation should be able to encapsulate them. It is not an edgy LARP of typical eastern beliefs either, though it is obviously influenced by the region, the plot of the work is unique to anything actually from China.

Smol bump

Bump

Another one

>>13421607
Even in Germany nobody gives a shit about anything by Döblin other than Berlin Alexanderplatz and Die Ermordung einer Butterblume

bump

>>13421607
Grossman had the whole soviet point of view and then banned by Stalin.

>>13424915
Alright then, Butterblume it is. Thanks.

bumpy

Does anyone wanna give their interpretation or at least impressions on Döblin's Three Leaps of Wang Lun?