Alfred Döblin Davies, Steffan; Schonfield, Ernest
2009, 2009-10-28
eBook
Döblin´s texts, which range widely across contemporary discourses, are paradigms of the encounter between literary and scientific modernity. With their use of ‛Tatsachenphantasie´, they explode ...conventional language, seeking a new connection with the world of objects and things. This volume reassesses and reevaluates the uniquely interdisciplinary quality of Döblin´s interdiscursive, factually-inspired poetics by offering challenging new perspectives on key works. The volume analyses not only some of Döblin´s best-known novels and stories, but also neglected works including his early medical essays, political journalism and autobiographical texts. Other topics addressed are Döblin´s engagement with German history, his relation to medical discourse, his topography of Berlin, his aestheticisation of his own biography and his relation to other major writers such as Heine, Benn, Brecht and Sebald. With contributions in English and in German by scholars from Germany and the United Kingdom, the volume presents insights into Döblin that are of value to advanced researchers and to students alike.
In Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin, Marc Caplan explores the reciprocal encounter between Eastern European Jews and German culture in the days following World War I.
Gabriela Stoicea examines how the incidence and role of physical descriptions in German novels changed between 1771 and 1929 in response to developments in the study of the human face and body. As ...well as engaging the tools and methods of literary analysis, the study uses a cultural studies approach to offer a constellation of ideas and polemics surrounding the readability of the human body. By including discussions from the medical sciences, epistemology, and aesthetics, the book draws out the multi-faceted permutations of corporeal legibility, as well as its relevance for the development of the novel and for facilitating inter-disciplinary dialogue.
This manuscript offers an interpretation of Döblin's Schicksalsreise in regard to authorial identity. Schicksalsreise appeared in 1949, but long suffered from critical neglect. Now a few analyses of ...the work exist and effectively explicate its "confession" or "conversion" theme. The problem with this analytical approach is that by overemphasizing the confessional narrative, it misses other features of the book. Schicksalsreise reveals a complex author - not only a Christian convert, but a "former" Jew who has not turned his back altogether on Jewish political concerns and, also, a German who is drawn back to postwar Berlin and whose diction betrays the excitement of hearing his native language spoken on native soil. Important as religio is to Schicksalsreise, the work does not invite an interpretation that reduces these other elements to religious terms. The manuscript relies on a recent study by Roland Dollinger, who has represented Döblin as an "epic" writer constructing his works out of "fragments" - a perspective that is suited to Schicksalsreise and its "fragmentary" author. It is suggested that "exile" supplies a frame of reference in which to view the ambivalence of Döblin's identity.
On 10 November 1904, the then twenty-six year-old medical student Alfred Döblin wrote a highly instructive and, in two senses, confessional letter from Freiburg to Else Lasker–Schüler.
When Burhan Qurbani's adaptation of Döblin's modernist classic Berlin Alexanderplatz premiered in 2020, criticism included the allegation that Qurbani's protagonist Francis-a Black refugee from ...Guinea-Bissau stranded at the outskirts of present-day Berlin-does not resemble the novel's released prisoner and street vendor Franz Biberkopf. This article presents a comparative investigation of Qurbani's Francis and Döblin's Biberkopf. Drawing on Judith Butler's writing on precarity, grievability, and the quest for a "good life," I consider how both Francis and Biberkopf face increased risk of injury, occupy a liminal space in society, and cannot fulfill their intention to be morally good while also achieving upward social mobility. Their failure is a direct consequence of their politically and socioeconomically precarious condition: Biberkopf belongs to the underclass of the lumpenproletariat, whereas Francis, as an undocumented immigrant, is exposed to neoliberal hyper-precarity.
