A People Betrayed

Novembre 1918 #2

by Alfred Döblin, John E. Woods (Translator)

Book by Doblin, Alfred

Genres: Historical Fiction, German Literature, Germany, Politics, Literature

642 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1939

About the author

Bruno Alfred Döblin (August 10, 1878 – June 26, 1957) was a German novelist, essayist, and doctor, best known for his novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929). A prolific writer whose œuvre spans more than half a century and a wide variety of literary movements and styles, Döblin is one of the most important figures of German literary modernism. His complete works comprise over a dozen novels ranging in genre from historical novels to science fiction to novels about the modern metropolis; several dramas, radio plays, and screenplays; a true crime story; a travel account; two book-length philosophical treatises; scores of essays on politics, religion, art, and society; and numerous letters — his complete works, republished by Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag and Fischer Verlag, span more than thirty volumes. His first published novel, Die drei Sprünge des Wang-lung (The Three Leaps of Wang Lun), appeared in 1915 and his final novel, Hamlet oder Die lange Nacht nimmt ein Ende (Tales of a Long Night) was published in 1956, one year before his death.

Reviews

[Jonathan]

Because my big, excellent looking copy just arrived in the post...

From the NY Times 1983:

A PEOPLE BETRAYED November 1918: A German Revolution. By Alfred Doblin. Translated by John E. Woods. 642 pp. New York: Fromm International Publishing. Cloth, $19.95. Paper, $10.95.

WHEN Alfred Doblin, high on the Nazi hit list, fled Germany in 1933, he was one of the country's best-known authors, a serious contender for the Nobel Prize. He returned in 1945, an unwelcome revenant and all but forgotten; ignored for the rest of his life, he was unable even to find a West German publisher for what turned out to be his last novel. His death in 1957 went virtually unnoticed. It took 20 years and a new generation to rediscover him. Today most of his books are back in print, the body of his work is being academically dissected, and in a moving tribute to him prefaced to this novel, Gunter Grass speaks of ''the gratitude a pupil feels toward his teacher.''

As a practicing neuropsychiatrist whose doctoral dissertation dealt with memory disturbances among psychotics, Doblin should not have been unduly baffled by the vagaries of fate and fame. Born in Stettin in 1878 of Polish-Jewish parents, he had a brief, traumatic childhood that ended when his father, a tailor, ran off to America, leaving the mother nearly destitute and with five small children to support. She sought refuge in Berlin, and the dire poverty in which Doblin grew up made him a lifelong champion of the poor, his one and only consistent ideological commitment. He worked his way through school, became a doctor and from 1911 until his flight in 1933 practiced medicine in a Berlin slum district, with time out for service in World War I.

Through it all he wrote - incessantly, compulsively, in classrooms, hospitals, between patients, at the front. His offbeat stories stirred the avant-garde, but among the public at large he first made his mark as a novelist. ''The Three Leaps of Wang-Lun,'' published in 1915, was acknowledged by Bertolt Brecht and later by Grass as a significant influence on their work. It won two prestigious literary prizes and was followed by a prolific outpouring that included epic novels, polemics and reporting, culminating in the 1929 best seller ''Berlin Alexanderplatz,'' an immense success with the critics and the public.

Three years spent among the dead and dying on the Western front, however, had turned Doblin's visceral horror of militarism, power and privilege into political passion, and he ardently welcomed the overthrow of the Kaiser in the brief 1918 revolution. But his initial enthusiasm quickly turned to rage as he watched the new leaders sell out their followers and reinstate the same cabal of bunglers and assassins that had engineered the war. With a savagery that defied party politics - he remained an unaffiliated radical, a self-styled anarchist - he fought the Weimar Republic's drift into dictatorship until his worst fears came true and he found himself forced to flee for his life.

It was the bleak despair of exile and defeat that made him look back to November 1918, that fleeting moment of hope when Germany's fate - and, as it turned out, that of the world - hung in the balance. What was it that tipped the scales? That question he set out to explore in the epic trilogy ''November 1918,'' of which this volume contains the first two parts (called here ''A People Betrayed'' and ''The Troops Return''). A novelist's view of history, it deals not with issues and forces but with human beings forced to make choices. And while the stress on individual guilt and responsibility may seem simplistic, it results in one of the most graphic accounts ever written of what led from Weimar to Auschwitz.

THE first volume, completed in Paris before World War II, is a panoramic vision of disaster and betrayal that blends realism and fantasy to stunning effect. Its structure evokes John Dos Passos' ''U.S.A.'' - a nexus of multiple destinies, traced in brief segments and intercut with camera-eye views of history being unmade, an almost hour-by-hour log of 10 days that failed to change the world. The portraits of the Social Democratic leaders - Friedrich Ebert, Gustav Noske and Philipp Scheidemann - are etched in acid, but Doblin does not spare their opponents. Though openly siding with the left opposition led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, he finds them fatally flawed by indecision; revolution is no job for esthetes.

In fact, what he implies - and what his rather wayward caricature of Karl Radek, who was sent by the Soviet Communist Central Committee to lead the German Communist movement, spells out in so many words - is that the German revolution failed because there was no Lenin to guide it. This debatable proposition foreshadows Doblin's own yearning for authority, for a fixed point of reference in the midst of mounting chaos. And since in the end even Lenin proved mortal, the need for less fallible guidance must have suggested itself with an inner logic, though Doblin resisted it for some time. ''The Troops Return'' seethes with the soul struggles of the agnostic Jewish radical reluctantly yielding to the appeal of Christian socialism. Doblin's skill at conveying the drama of mass action remains unimpaired, but the focus increasingly shifts to the fictional protagonist, a hallucinating and suicidally depressed war veteran. Torn by doubt and self-hatred, haunted by Satan's argumentative emissaries, he is ultimately saved by the apparition of Johannes Tauber, a saintly 14th-century mystic whose spirit leads the veteran to Christ.

This second volume took several years to complete, its writing interrupted by the outbreak of World War II, the author's flight to the United States, and personal tragedy: One of his sons was killed in action with the French. Doblin spent the war years in Hollywood, where he proved unequal to the exalted literary standards of the movie industry and was eventually reduced to living on the charity of his more prosperous fellow exiles. In 1941 he formally converted to Catholicism. Four years later he returned to Germany as head of a French mission charged with re-educating the defeated populace. Bent on practicing his newfound faith, he preached forgiveness rather than vengeance, but his call for humility and prayer succeeded in the end in antagonizing friends and enemies alike.

The final volume of his trilogy, ''Karl and Rosa,'' published in 1950, reflects his own spiritual about-face. It charts the bloody finish of the revolution, marked by the murder of Liebknecht and Luxemburg, but the emphasis shifts to more transcendental concerns. The hero, defying his own hard-won principles of Christian pacifism, joins the armed uprising of the Spartacist rebels and atones for it by renunciation and martyrdom. Doblin, in effect, revised the message of the book: The revolution failed, not - as he initially set out to prove - because it was carried out by Germans, by a Liebknecht rather than a Lenin, but because it was bound to fail. The true revolution can only take place in the hearts of men.

The present English version, handsomely produced and splendidly translated, does not include ''Karl and Rosa,'' which lacks the rich and evocative vitality of the earlier sections. Literary judgment may justify the decision to delete it; moral judgment must take issue, since the omission significantly distorts the author's final intent. Even in this truncated version, however, ''A People Betrayed'' is a brilliant work by a major writer who grappled with the roots of darkness in our time.

[Steve]

A People Betrayed is a translation of volumes two, Verratenes Volk, and three, Heimkehr der Fronttruppen, from Alfred Döblin’s tetralogy November 1918: A German Revolution. Interestingly, volume one, Bürger und Soldaten, has not been translated into English. To me, A People Betrayed lags the excellence of Berlin Alexanderplatz, still it is an important read for those interested in the social consequences of that imperfect November peace. Herr Döblin brings the reader into the minds of both ordinary German soldiers and citizens as well as the political and military leadership, all confined to the immediate post-war period; he even goes so far as to include Woodrow Wilson. What a hideous, crazed environment, where so much of consequence unpredictably occurred in such little time. Maybe that’s why Lieutenant Becker, a main character, dreams of visits from a Brazilian, a lion and a rat, all with satanic overtones, and attempts suicide before having a conflicted Christian epiphany.

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like Celine, Alfred Doblin was a doctor, and a keen observer of the urban malaise of Europe in the 1920s. Unlike Celine, he lived with German nationalism and was immune to its dubious charms. "A People Betrayed" takes place during the German Revolution of 1918, following the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm. The Social Democrats took power, balancing between the defeated Army that was returning from the front and the more radical Spartacist League of Rosa Luxemborg. Luxemborg has a cameo, and other historical figures have fuller roles: General Hindenburg (he of the Weimar Republic), Karel Radek, the Russian emissary later murdered by the Stalinists, a passel of Social Democratic politicians, even Woodrow Wilson. Doblin sought to humanize this immense novel by bringing to life some ordinary victims of the time, a soldier with PTSD, a nurse, a revolutionary-turned-businessman, various lowlifes who would take pleasure fighting it out with Franz Biberkopf of Doblin's "Berlin Alexanderplatz." It's the larger set-pieces that are memorable: the demonstrations and rebellions, Wilson's struggle for the League of Nations, the machinations of the Social Democrats, their essential and unstable relationship with the military, the return of the soldiers. Vivid as they are, none of the minor characters stays on the stage long enough to command it (with the exception of the soldier with PTSD, who seemed to me to be on stage too long). This is a novel lost in its own sweep; its minor characters could use a little of the ferocity with which Biberkopf tries and fails to have a place in the city.

[Tentatively, Convenience · Rating 4 out of 5]

I 1st heard of Döblin when I saw Fassbinder's 15 hr "Berlin Alexanderplatz" based on a Döblin novel. For people wanting to read a series of epic novels about post-WWI Germany, this is probably what shd be read. There's a 2nd volume called "Karl & Rosa".

[Broch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Book two and three from Doblin's tetralogy. Book one not available in english translation. Written 15+ years after November 1918 German revolution. Interesting account of the events by someone known only as an autor of Berlin Alexanderplatz.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alfred Döblin: Spiritual Modernist
Alfred Döblin’s ‘1918 novels’ about the German revolution (abridged and translated by John E. Woods in two volumes: A People Betrayed and Karl and Rosa 1948-51 and (the original volume 1) Citizens and Soldiers by Chris Godwin) are political novels interleaved with Christian themes of faith, redemption, grace. More long-standing themes in Döblin’s work are also found in these novels ‘concern with materialism and rationalism, Döblin also relating these themes, however, to underline the bitter results of the faithlessness of 20th century society. To an extent these themes associate him with the ‘spiritual’ modernism of T.S. Eliot or, perhaps, John Cowper Powys.
The 1918 novels, published post-second world war but started in that war, coincide with Döblin’s conversion to Roman Catholicism and a comparison with, his near contemporary, the Roman Catholic writer Graham Greene inevitably comes to mind. Greene, however, was ‘late to the scene’ of modernism and soon abandoned it after his early novels like England Made Me. Greene’s early foray into modernism was essentially limited to a few stylistic tropes such as coincident narrative timelines, and his maturity as a ‘writer of faith’ came after abandoning modernism. In contrast, the style of Döblin’s 1918 novels continues with the mature modernism of his Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) whilst still able to address in a Christian spiritual manner themes like the domination of science and rationalization marking the modern megalopolis: out-of-human-control-mechanized technology, mass communication, and the mass slaughter of the trenches.
Döblin’s religious concerns mark the 1918 novels, particularly as they revolve around the major character in the novel, Lieutenant Friedrich Becker (it might be argued he is the only fully developed, ‘rounded’, character, at least in terms of usual understandings of character in conventional novels. However, Döblin rejected conventional characterization, a point of view seen in his essay ‘Remarks on the Novel’. Döblin’s characters are generally, but consciously, ‘flat’) In Karl and Rosa we find Becker recovering from his war wounds and returning to teaching the classics at a boy’s gymnasium. Due to his classics-background, as well as his convoluted (but inevitable) reproachment with Christianity, Becker is a symbolic figure allowing Döblin to address the faithlessness in the social and political roots of war and its immediate, revolutionary, aftermath.
Earlier, in volume 1 of Wood’s and Godwin’s translation we find Becker in hospital but soon to be repatriated with the hospital itself when Alsace was ceded to France. Back in Berlin, his friend Maus, also a veteran and thus a parallel figure (they both fall in love with the same nurse, Hilde, at the hospital) soon gets drawn into the German revolution of November 1918. Becker hasn’t the temperament for revolutionary politics and will not be lured in by Maus, a character more easily led by ideology, even if he was in any physical shape to become involved.
In Karl and Rosa we see him in recovery, at least in terms of regaining mobility, and he eventually returns to teaching. But, ironically, he finds that his pre-war pedagogic interpretation of classical Greek tragedy seems no longer relevant to his pupils. Most of the students have become cynical in the face of being on the losing side of the war - they represent a new generation, forced into a radical break, with the values of pre-war Bismarckian aristocratic-paternal German culture. Döblin shows how this pervasive sense of post-war trauma and alienation puts Becker’s ethical concerns with Sophoclean themes of redemption and conciliation into eclipse. Becker believes the ethical concerns of the classics can offer a source of post-war solace, but to the boys these ideas seem far too distant, abstract, perhaps too imbued with an ancient sense of faithfulness, and fall on their death ears.
Intermittently, Becker is shown to be visited by symbolic figures who tempt him towards suicide. To explain these as ‘hallucination’ is probably not right because in Döblin’s work from 1912 onwards it is not unusual to find characters engaging with ‘spirits’ which, however, have no lack of material presence. We cannot explain this away, either, that Becker is suffering from ‘shell shock’ - now PTSD – because that would be to rationalize his state of mind which would also go against the grain of Döblin’s spiritual modernism. These symbolic figures are stand-ins for the Devil and attempt to lure Becker to deep despair and suicide. He is, however, also ministered to by the figure of the medieval mystic and priest Johannes Tauber who consoles him with Christian tenets of redemption - hope, faith and grace. Döblin has Becker emerging from these Christian debates finding a sense of purpose which he links to the theme of redemption in Antigone. At the same time, we see Becker becoming involved in defending the disgraced gymnasium director whose platonic relationship with the student Heinz is misinterpreted by students and staff as paedophilic. Becker gets drawn deep into the controversy after the director is killed by Heinz’s father and he falls under the scandalized gaze of students, staff and the mass media of the Berlin press.
All around Becker’s story Döblin, in an historically ‘epic’ and detailed (the tight narrative time-span and detail is reminiscent of Solzhenitsyn’s Red Wheel cycle – although Döblin escapes Solzhenitsyn’s somewhat pedestrian style) story traces the revolutionary six months from November 1918. It is a story of machinations of the right: army staff, aristocrats, bourgeois, bureaucrats, the interim liberal government. In opposition are the forces of the left: revolutionary (Kiel) sections of the navy as well as communists and Sparticists. The compressed but finely detailed historical narrative is, however, jumpy, chaotic - Döblin’s modernism appropriate to reflecting the temper of the times, cinematic, shifting from location to location across Germany (and the Atlantic in the scenes covering Woodrow Wilson’s voyage to Europe.) Groups of key characters (i.e. Egbert, Eisner, Schleicher, Groener, Liebknecht, Radek, Luxemburg) as well as tens of other more minor historical figures from the period are shown vying for political power. Döblin’s modernism ensures that the reader’s attention is deliberately scattered, fragmentary, the writing and structure conveying an overall sense of the chaos of revolution: of shifting values, of liberalism, socialism, communism and Bismarckism not simply at odds with one another but internally fractured by internal suspicion and disorganization as well. Durkheim might have said (he died in November 1917) German society was at the time dangerously anomic - but in terms of Döblin’s spiritual modernism it is a state and society riven by faithlessness and soullessness.


Continuities: Spirits, symbiosis, rebellious bodies
The Christian themes that appear in the 1918 novels, as well as Döblin’s modernism appear in other forms in his earlier novels and stories. In his early stories (The Murder of a Buttercup (1912) such as ‘Bluebeard the Knight’ we find in the character Ilsebill who exhibits contrasting but similarly motivated spiritual beliefs in paganism and Christianity:
[P]raying at one tree, hanging her cross upon it and from the tree came a fire, fire smoke, smelling sweeter than lilacs.
Döblin’s ‘pre-Christian’ spiritual modernism figures in the ghost of the drowned lover in the story ‘The sailboat ride’. A more sceptical side of spiritualism is seen in Döblin’s 1945 story ‘Traffic with the beyond’. But before that, in Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) we find Biberkopf overseen by Sarug and Terah, ‘guardian angels’ who chat together about his fate and character. They choose not to intervene and are actually damning because although Biberkopf, admittedly no intellectual, endures, lives through much experience he lacks ‘grace’ and is tragically too easily inclined:
…towards mere knowledge, and then – towards escape, and death. He is no longer interested. He has passed along the road of experience and grown weary. His journey has outwearied body and soul. (345)
In this novel, also, we find the wheeler-dealer Meck (‘business is the best thing’, 49) suggesting that Germany itself is belaboured by ‘something on its conscience’ (54). The recurring images Döblin evokes in the slaughterhouse sections of Berlin Alexanderplatz reverberate with the deeply primal state of German post-war guilt and social trauma. This is also felt in the precariousness of narrative voice and the symbiotic manner in which Biberkopf goes from pillar to post. Biberkopf’s life is ruined by his unwilling (but resistless) involvement with gangsters, in particular with his spiteful animus Rheinhold. The latter may represent, a ‘cold force of life’, but Biberkopf is one amongst thieves and, symbiotically, implicated in his girlfriend’s Sonia’s death.

The idea of symbiosis is important in Döblin. Even in his early essay (1913) ‘To novelists and their critics’ Döblin writes of the need for the modern novelist to reject romantic-rationalised concepts of human behaviour for more ‘concrete’ or natural ones:
Rationalism was always the death of Art; nowadays the most importunate and cosseted rationalism is called psychology. Many a so-called “fine” novel or novella – the same goes for the drama – consists almost entirely of analyses of the characters’ trains of thought: conflicts arise in these trains of thought, leading to paltry or concocted “plots”. Maybe such trains of thought do occur, but not so isolated; in themselves they say nothing, cannot be represented: an amputated arm, breath without the breathing person, glances without eyes. Real motives come from quite another place; these, lacking a living totality, are humbug, aesthetic froth: a bored doctrinaire author bereft of ideas blathering to educated people desirous of instruction. (Essays-on-Literature-and-Autobiography.pdf (beyond-alexanderplatz.com) https://beyond-alexanderplatz.com accessed 17/11/2023)

In the early articulation of his modernism, ‘To Novelists and Their Critics’ (1913), Döblin called for a ‘cinematic’ prose style in order to give a sense of concurrency, not just of events but of states of consciousness, or of a ‘sequence of complexes’. In Two Women and a Poisoning (1924) Döblin formulates a ‘symbiotic’ analysis of how instinctual drives are equal if not more important than psychological motives or ‘inclinations’ when describing why characters act in a novel or, more generally, when analysing human behaviour:
If we want to examine closely the way we act, we would do well to turn our attention to unorganized matter and the general forces of nature (121).
In the ‘Afterword’ to this intriguing hybrid documentary-novel (appearing almost forty years before Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood), Döblin posits a literary modernist spin on symbiosis: to see characters reacting to one another (and their environment) rather than them each following their ego-individual orbits or psychological-motivations. Döblin prefigures here the aesthetic aims of Berlin Alexanderplatz by also arguing in Two Women that ‘disorder is knowledge’ (119). By 1929 symbiosis becomes a key aspect of this novel in which Franz Biberkopf (interestingly, given the above quote, missing an arm) effectively bounces-off or into one character’s orbit and another’s - going from pillar to post.
Another, stylistic, aspect of symbiosis the regular attributing of volatility in characters’ behaviour - their somewhat ‘jumpy’ motility. In the early (1914) novel Wadek’s Battle with the Steam Turbine, a comically wildly inchoate story with a fragmentary, sometimes bewildering, narrative, we find a bunch of madcap and conflicting materialists and rationalists in chain-reaction. Characters typically ‘thrust’ and ‘Shriek’ or ‘ricochet’ off one-another. This characteristic is also found, less regularly, in A People Betrayed where many characters are depicted as being in states of hyperactivity, they ‘leap’ about (32), they don’t visit but ‘disturb’ one another (44).
From the time of the early stories we find descriptions of bodies exhibiting, also, a certain ‘independence of action’ whilst in appearance they seem somewhat surreal and cubist (perhaps Döblin was influenced by contemporary developments in artistic representation.) Characters’ bodies are described as contorted and hollowed-out reminiscent of Henry Moore’ sculptures. Wadek’s wife has a ‘chest tightly compressed – a bit like the kicks in a tyre’, she is ‘a deformed heap of flesh’, her body’s geometry unruly:
Her head fell forward into its hollow between the breasts, so that her jowls pushed the two flabby bulges out of shape.
Similar images of contorted bodies appear in Berlin Alexanderplatz:
The girl daintily, then serpentines along the wall, and, dangling her buttocks, slithers sweetly across to Willy.
A man’s moustache is described as bending:
At a table sat two couples looking at the passers-by. The gentleman in the salt and pepper suit, his moustache bent over the prominent bosom of a dark, stout woman. (67)
The distinctive narrative voice in this novel is characterized by a somewhat soi-distant narrator, multifarious, difficult to pin down, dynamic and in its own right symbiotic. At times it is straightforwardly omniscient, but then by turns it is also an unnamed character, an onlooker or caught up in the events it depicts. Sometimes, also, it is the voice of Franz, or perhaps his voice being mimicked by the narrator:
Now it’s going to start, the four of them want to get me…(79)
In the episode in this novel of the ‘bald pate’ paedophile, we also find a manipulative voice characteristic of 1920s advertising and promotion interjecting itself:
Inverts: after many years of experiment I have at last found a radical antidote against the growth of the beard. Every part of the body can be depilated. Furthermore I have discovered the means of developing a truly feminine breast within an astonishingly short time. No medicines, absolutely safe and harmless. As proof: myself. (64)
The dynamism of narrative voice in Berlin Alexanderplatz even exhibits insecurity about the status of pronomination itself:
Pigs, oxen, calves – they are slaughtered. There is no reason why we should concern ourselves with them. Where are we? We? (195)

In his early story, The Death of a Buttercup, Döblin describes the entirely self-absorbed Fischer as being positioned by what might seem like the scenery – by nature: ‘The trees strode quickly past him’. This somewhat odd grammatical construction has the effect of endowing nature with agency and reversing the reader’s conventional assumptions of humans as subjects of sentences or primary agents acting on the natural environment. Fischer also exhibits what will become a regular trope in Döblin - a recalcitrant body, a body that seems to have a somewhat independent and unsettling mien:
One foot stepped ahead of the other, arms swung from his shoulders. […] This [buttercup] called to his eye, his hand, his stick. (52)
In Wadek’s Battle with the Steam Turbine, a novel contemporary with this early story, we find the industrialist Rommel watching his fist acting independently of him (228). And in ‘The ballerina and the body’, the ballerina’s body has being beyond our usual sense of it as secondary to self: we see it recalcitrant, obdurate to the dancer’s will. The body, in effect, has its own spirit, a view of corporality that phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty were developing at the same time as Döblin. This theme continues as late as Karl and Rosa where we still find nature, the material of technology, rearing up in rebellious technologies (coinciding with Döblin’s 1945 story, ‘Materialism, a fable’) such as bullets and guns having ‘preferences’ (121-4), ‘automatic weapons, which, angry at not being used, discharged themselves’ (365).

Conclusion
Like other spiritual modernists such as T.S. Eliot, the late novels of Döblin pit the eternal, faith and spirit against worldly transitory ideals of rationality, state and party. There are summary statements of this in the 1918 novels, like in this from the mouth of the aristocrat Baron Wylinski where both sides of the dynamic, faith and society, are in play:
‘If one understands the world as a totality,’ he explained to Motz, ‘as a sensual and existential context affecting each individual soul, then one cannot help but view it as a religious concept. The soul remains independent, apart from it, retaining a sense of its own value. But man has long attempted to build bridges across that gulf. And indeed the state as an organized, collective power has found its place at that juncture and is more than merely a negative concept.’ (A People Betrayed 431)
The 1918 novels are monuments to Döblin’s more particularly Christian reaction to 20th century politics – seen in the extensive depictions of political mechanization of Egbert, the army hierarchy, the police, the Sparticists and the communists, and the representative figures of delusional misplaced-idealists in Liebknecht and Luxemburg. There was an inevitable tincture of reactionism in Döblin’s post-war conversion to Christianity but, thankfully, this didn’t lead to the sort of espousal of organized right-wing reactionary groups, like Eliot’s with Maurras’ Action Francaise. But Döblin’s long-standing concern with human spirituality was a key aspect to his foregoing of the depleted genres of 19th century realist literature and to his becoming one of the key figures in the formation of modernism in the early 20th century.
References
Döblin, Alfred (1931) Alexanderplatz (translated Eugene Jolas) Martin Secker.
Döblin, Alfred (1983) A People Betrayed (translated John E Woods) Fromm International
Döblin, Alfred (1983) Karl and Rosa (translated John E Woods) Fromm International
Döblin, Alfred (2016) Bright Magic NYRB
Döblin, Alfred (2021) Two Women and a Poisoning Text
Döblin, Alfred (2020) Wadek and his Struggle Against the Steam Turbine (translated Anne Thompson) Independently published.
Other texts referred to, particularly volume 1 of the 1918 novels, Citizens and Soldiers and Döblin’s journalism and criticism, all translated by Chris Godwin, can be accessed on the creative commons at Chris Godwin’s site: Beyond Alexanderplatz (beyond-alexanderplatz.com)

[Lucinda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oddly, this is three volumes of a four volume book. It doesn't say that anywhere, but after the abrupt ending (two of the main historical characters live despite heaving foreshadowing of their impending demise) I did a little hunting. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg get a volume all to themselves. Hooray--more long German books to read!

[sslyb · Rating 3 out of 5]

I struggled through this one!

[Gary Reger · Rating 5 out of 5]

This edition, whose title is taken from the second volume of Doblin's tetralogy, November 1919: eine deutsche Revolution, comprises only the first and second books. Missing are Citizens and Soldiers and Karl and Rosa--referring to the Spartacist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, who were executed on January 15, 1919, after the suppression of the January revolution.

Doblin spins a long and complex narrative interweaving real figures--Friedrich Ebert, the socialist who supported the war and was elected first president of the German republic; Liebknect, who's depicted as a rather weak and indecisive leader, unwilling the grasp the nettle of violent revolution as urged by his Soviet advisor Karl Radek (later victim of DStalin's purges); Woodrow Wilson; and many others--with fictional: Friedrich Becker and Karl Maus, comrades in the war who go in very different directions afterwards; Hilda, who nursed them in the hospital and was loved by Maus, who raped her, and ended up nursing Becker during a prolonged dark night of the soul. Dozens of greater and lesser supporting characters move through the book in a kind of kaleidoscope of shifting viewpoints (shifting sometimes within a single sentence); I was reminded, a little, of John Dos Passos's techniques, though Doblin is not nearly as extreme.

Through it all, the city of Berlin is a constant, overweening presence. Its streets and parks, government buildings, ramshackle apartments, and even its river, the Spree, becomes a character, reflecting on the depressing postwar scene. Troops pound its pavements, orators decry in its squares, revolutionaries stroll its parks, deep in debate. As in Berlin Alexanderplatz, Doblin's great novel of the city published in 1929, it is the city that holds the whole together. Doblin wrote November 1919 in exile, and surely his longing for the city that was no longer his--and had been defiled by the Nazis--was always at the forefront of his mind.

It's not surprising that, with two volumes absent, there are unresolved plot points. Becker' sister Minna, a convinced communist, is an important figure early in the book but then largely disappears; Hanna, pregnant by a German soldier who's not just abandoned but evidently completely forgotten her, likewise vanishes as if in a cloud of smoke. I imagine these and other loose ends are tied up in the last volume, just as there are no doubt elements of the plot whose origins sprout in the first.

There seems to be an English translation of the last volume (at least on Amazon) but not of the first. Pity, if so; I might just have to read it in German!

[Joseph Hirsch · Rating 1 out of 5]

Historical fiction many times runs aground because the fictional characters are basically just ciphers through which events are related. I have this problem with some of Zola's fiction. Reading one of his books is sometimes like sitting on the sidelines watching a game of "Risk" between two people who debate their moves longer than chess masters. The other problem with such books is that when actual historical figures enter the stage, they are hidebound in their behavior by what we know about them and by what they've actually done. I've rarely seen someone make compelling characters out of people who are real (Teddy Roosevelt solving crimes in Caleb Carr's "The Alienist" is a pretty wince-worthy example).

This is a minority report (as a lot of my reviews are), but for me, everything that could go wrong in "A People Betrayed" does go wrong. After a few pages, I got that feeling I get when I try to read Mailer, like someone who has spent a lifetime writing instruction manuals has decided to turn their hand to fiction. This kind of multiple perspective, "God's Eye" view of things can work, as in the truly bizarre science fiction of Olaf Stapledon, or in the historical novels of John Dos Passos. It works in Lovecraft's fiction if only because the anti-human tone is perfect for unveiling his eldritch, otherworldly creations. Doblin is not writing Lovecraftian (sic?) horror, however, from an awe-inspiring and wonderfully misanthropic anti-human perspective, though. He's supposed to be writing a social history through flesh-and-blood characters trying to survive in the aftermath of the Great War.

The German writer Hans Fallada is certainly a master at evoking how what Vonnegut called the "hare of history" overruns the more modest ambitions of those who must endure her mercurial whims. But Doblin doesn't pull off the trick. This is a turgid history book posing as a wide-sweeping work of fiction. I usually find some way to qualify a negative review and I hate to tap out before finishing a book no matter how much I dislike it, but I really hated this book and could not finish it. I could not even slog my way through one-quarter of it. I might perforate my eardrums if it were turned into a book on tape, or gouge out my eyes if it were adapted for the screen.

[Javier de la Peña Ontanaya · Rating 4 out of 5]

En esta segunda entrega de la saga “Noviembre de 1918” Döblin continúa detallando el estado en que se encuentra Alemania con la revolución socialista acechando y propagándose comparaciones de esta con la que tuvo lugar en la Rusia soviética.

En el comienzo de la novela toma especial relevancia la toma de una comisaría de policía por parte de los revolucionarios. Además continúa desgranando la sociedad germana a través de numerosos personajes, como el ex profesor que vuelve casi tullido a visitar su antigua escuela y encuentra la distancia de sus ex colegas, incomodidad y una sensación de casi rechazo.

A lo largo del libro se presentan sucesos de todo tipo y que nos da una idea de la gravedad de la situación, de total abandono y decadencia social: dos tipos que entran a robar a casa de un usurero de noche mientras este duerme, los falsificadores de bonos para el pan en Berlín… Además comienzan a aparecer pogromos contra los judíos perpetrados por ucranianos y polacos, lo que provoca el éxodo de judíos a Estados Unidos.

Multitud de personajes discurren en la novela en sus breves capítulos. Muchos de esos personajes son los propios protagonistas históricos como Rosa Luxemburgo, Ludendorff o Hindenburg, lo que da una sensación de viveza al relato, que culmina con el trágico asalto a la cancillería del Reich y la matanza consecuente.

Un testimonio valioso sobre los turbulentos meses posteriores a la Primera Guerra Mundial. Döblin es testigo directo y su relato es casi contemporáneo podemos decir. La situación de crisis social en Berlín y todo el país, las luchas internas de los que cuecen la revolución, los que regresan marcados del conflicto con sus parálisis de guerra, cojos, mancos, sin encontrar trabajo ni llevarse nada a la boca, asesinatos y degradación general. El último capítulo es una muy buena muestra de las dudas acerca de la revolución cuando los golpistas alemanes Liebknecht y Radek se reúnen con su homólogo ruso y comparan los dos movimientos insurrectos, con los distintos contextos y peculiaridades y las dudas que les despiertan a los alemanes justificar su golpe socialista en tiempos de paz, pues los rusos lo tienen justificado al estar aún en guerra civil. Excelente obra.

[Esteban Galarza · Rating 5 out of 5]

La segunda novela de la tetralogía de Noviembre 1918 desarrolla mejor los personajes y las psiquis que presentó en la primera entrega. Al principio de El pueblo traicionado parece seguir en cierta inercia que quedó de Burgueses y soldados, pero eso solo es al principio. Los personajes cambian de bandos, de pareceres, mueren, viven ríen y lloran. Y la mirada poética de Döblin se agudiza. Se detiene hasta en el Spree que recibe y acuna suicidas o dialoga con las sombras, que comienza a convivir con la sangre de las víctimas de la represión de los Freikorps y de la traición del Estado. En la tercera y cuarta parte llegará el final de la revolución marcada a sangre, una represión antisemita y fascistoide que inaugura la República de Weimar y que mostraba lo que sobrevendría en los 30 con el nazismo. Si tan solo hubiesen ganado los revolucionarios de 1918 otra hubiese sido la historia de Alemania y Europa.

[Peter Jakobs · Rating 4 out of 5]

2nd part of the 1918 "revolution" in Germany covers 2nd half of November and early December; this time mostly playing in Berlin. Some folks from the first part made it to Berlin and got into the sphere of Ebert, Scheidemann and Liebknecht - and of course the militia. At the end of this part the faith of Germany is on the edge - more to come!

[a]

only vol ii atm

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sprawling, troubling, remarkable. My English edition is actually comprised of two of the original volumes, A People Betrayed and (my translation> The Troops Return Home from the Front, which are the first two of a four-volume set originally in German. Doeblin's history of the German experience at the end of the first World War---what he calls a revolution, and which it surprises me to realize I'd never really thought to describe with that word---is a really monumental piece of historical fiction.

I recognize many of the characters from their actual roles in history---Ebert, Scheidemann---and the ones who aren't based on historical figures are certainly recognizable as human, often intensely.

The only problem is now I have to finish the sequel, which is very nearly as massive. Strenuously recommended for anyone who wants to understand how the world got from the end of one World War to the traumatic beginnings of the next one.

[Pablo Andrés Vera Carrera · Rating 3 out of 5]

Primer tomo de la segunda parte de esta historia.

No dejo de encontrar paralelismos entre la etapa prerevolucionaria en la Alemania de 1918 y la nuestra. El caos, la sensación que todo se hunde, la salida violenta frente a la pactada, la tenaza que significan los extremos.

Sabemos el final de esta historia. Rosa Luxemburgo y Karl Liebknecht son sujetos históricos, pero el espacio desconocido de los eventos acá se muestra más complejo que lo que había imaginado.

A comenzar el segundo.

[Cooper Renner]

For the time being at least, I’m setting this aside: too sprawling, too much “history” and not enough character interest.