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Amazonas: Romantrilogie (Fischer Klassik)
Döblins große Südamerika-Trilogie"Ihr seid in einer grauenhaften Unwissenheit", sagt der Häuptling am Ende der ›Amazonas‹-Trilogie zu den Europäern. Alfred Döblins im Exil entstandenes Erzählwerk veranschaulicht diese koloniale Ignoranz und ist so gesehen auch ein großes Buch der Trauer über die europäische Zivilisation. Darüber hinaus aber ist es der beeindruckende Versuch, dem unbekannten südamerikanischen Kontinent, seiner Natur, dem Wald und Wasser, den Tieren und Menschen, eine Vielzahl von Stimmen, Bildern und Geschichten zu verleihen. Ein opulent erzähltes Romanwerk, das unserer bis heute bestehenden Unwissenheit das ›Wissen‹ einer Tatsachenphantasie" entgegensetzt, die so überbordend und mitreißend ist wie der Amazonasstrom.Mit einem Nachwort von Alexander Honold
949 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1938
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About the author
Alfred Döblin
161 books226 followersBruno 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.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
April 3, 2021
Döblin's Amazonas Trilogy, written in the Paris exile 1935-1937, is an unheroic epos about the colonization of South America. It offers a strongly fictionalized account, Döblin freely juxtaposes historic facts with invention.
The flood of explorers, settlers, mercenaries, and idealists who come in the search of gold, out of lust to kill, or to impose their own ideas about life is contrasted with an unrelenting landscape of rivers and forests. The native population doesn't have the power to resist, but, like the landscape, they are impossible to "civilize". What Döblin describes in truly epic breadth is a process of absorption, the inability of us humans to truly change the course of things. The first two parts follow the periods of early conquest and the failing attempts to establish European traditions. The last part is a radical shift in time and style. Döblin returns to European history and tells his vision about what went wrong. He calls out Galileo, Copernicus, and Giordano Bruno; they were responsible for the destruction of the old world view were Man and God were at the center of the universe, allowing the rise of Modernism where all ethical values have been replaced by greed and rationalism. He tells the story of a modern Faust, who is eventually taken as prisoner to South America, flees, and is rescued by the natives. The attempt to explain European civilization to them is met with laughter and incomprehension.
The Amazonas trilogy doesn't offer answers. In this book Döblin didn't foresee the physical destruction (he did that in the earlier much more radical Mountains Oceans Giants), nor is this his theme. It merely shows that ignoring that the human soul is as vast as the jungles of the Amazonas can lead to a destruction of what it means to be human at a planetary scale.
Length, incoherence, and historical inaccuracies will irritate many readers. Döblin was an experimental writer, radically changing his style from book to book. Despite its straightforward prose in the first two parts, it is probably also read best as experimental fiction.
The complete English translation by Chris Godwin is available
here.
The flood of explorers, settlers, mercenaries, and idealists who come in the search of gold, out of lust to kill, or to impose their own ideas about life is contrasted with an unrelenting landscape of rivers and forests. The native population doesn't have the power to resist, but, like the landscape, they are impossible to "civilize". What Döblin describes in truly epic breadth is a process of absorption, the inability of us humans to truly change the course of things. The first two parts follow the periods of early conquest and the failing attempts to establish European traditions. The last part is a radical shift in time and style. Döblin returns to European history and tells his vision about what went wrong. He calls out Galileo, Copernicus, and Giordano Bruno; they were responsible for the destruction of the old world view were Man and God were at the center of the universe, allowing the rise of Modernism where all ethical values have been replaced by greed and rationalism. He tells the story of a modern Faust, who is eventually taken as prisoner to South America, flees, and is rescued by the natives. The attempt to explain European civilization to them is met with laughter and incomprehension.
The Amazonas trilogy doesn't offer answers. In this book Döblin didn't foresee the physical destruction (he did that in the earlier much more radical Mountains Oceans Giants), nor is this his theme. It merely shows that ignoring that the human soul is as vast as the jungles of the Amazonas can lead to a destruction of what it means to be human at a planetary scale.
Length, incoherence, and historical inaccuracies will irritate many readers. Döblin was an experimental writer, radically changing his style from book to book. Despite its straightforward prose in the first two parts, it is probably also read best as experimental fiction.
The complete English translation by Chris Godwin is available
here.
May 9, 2024
The Land Without Death (the Amazonas Trilogy) is the last great masterpiece to come from Alfred Döblin's pen before his conversion to Catholicism in 1941. Döblin is at his most profound, creative and inspiring in his writings in the 1920s and 1930s before his conversion (in my opinion) ruined the interpretive ambiguity of his best writings and turned a large portion of his work from the 1940s to 1957 into overtly religious polemic.
That aside, it is a powerful magical realist post colonial critique of the colonization of South America with the genocide of the indigenous inhabitants of the Amazon under the Conquistadors serving as an allegory for the rise of the Nazis and the persecution of the Jews during the Holocaust. It courts comparisons with the best of Joseph Conrad and Jorge Luis Borges.
Döblin's philosophy of nature in the novel anticipates modern day environmental philosophy and concerns with the legacy of the Spanish Conquest and the brutality inflicted upon the indigenous peoples of the Americas. It shares a strong kinship and overlap in thematic concern with Mountains Oceans Giants, his 1924 climate fiction epic, which is also very much concerned with Nature and the Anthropocene, with much of the philosophy owing a debt to the Naturphilosophie of German Romanticism and I personally detect an added debt to the pastoral tradition.
Döblin again shows the tension between Nature and the Promethean hubris of Humanity in attempting to exert power and control over the environment rather than attempting to coexist peacefully with it.
A lyrical passage on Page 544 of the present edition from the novel serves as a tour de force example of its prose:
"The Amazon, that flowing sea, those old, young, measureless rolling waters! How it pours down from the rocky wall of the Andes, quitting the icy horror of the peaks and plateaus down into its plain and eastward. Earth-shatterer, Earth-builder, it carries sediments in such quantity that they are borne along all the way to the ocean, there it lays down sandbanks, plugs the coastal waters between Caviana and Cabo Norte so full that they silt up entirely, and to the south, where it debouches, banks form along the coast, islands grow, the sea assaults them, the sea into whose jaws the river tirelessly pours its white water, sand, mud, floating grass, ubussi palms complete with fruit. And the sea shakes its fist, sends its tidal bore, the pororoca, up the valley, the sea builds itself into a wall, thunders onward, fills the rivermouths and rolls on upriver. But finally it must collapse and become stranded on the banks. All around the primal force of this river flowing over Earth’s ancient rocks, a forest has planted itself. The river does not leave untouched the land it has borne along. It penetrates it with a thousand rivers, rivulets, creeks, channels, lakes, soaks into the ground like placental veins in the body of a pregnant woman, there where the fruit grows. The river rolls for a while steady and assured in its deep bed, sends out mists as reminders to everything above that thinks itself secure. And then when the time of its swelling arrives, it invades the land that it has carried along. Fire has receded from the Earth, now the distant Sun must warm it. But the giant river, Amazonas, is not terrible and shrivelling like the hot Sun, through its mouth the Sun speaks to ancient Earth, it is the Sun’s proconsul. From the Sun it receives the snowmelt of the mountains, and enters intoxicated into its land and proclaims the power of the Sun, its king. This is the time of floods. The river worries away at its banks. It turns the land into a floating garden, scoops languid lakes into itself again, even forces back the rivers that contribute water to it, and colours their dark currents milky."
Though a work of imagination, Döblin seeks to humanize the native peoples especially in the first part, where they are shown as the uncivilized, one with nature. One wonders whether this idealism is escapist or authentic, but of primary concern is how strong and robust the translation is.
The translator Chris Godwin as he has done so in all of his Döblin translations mercifully unparagraphs and disentangles the dialogue in all of his translations going for a more traditional English typography and reader friendly layout unlike NYRB Classics who in their otherwise brilliant Berlin Alexanderplatz translation, stuck too closely to the original German typography, resulting in a confusing layout for the average reader.
Godwin captures Döblin's breadth and vast expanse of prose, with particular attention to the tonality of Döblin's language and style, a lyrical flood of the Amazon river overwhelming and spiralling into a vortex of thousands of words, a cadence of a million droplets of water.
Five stars.
That aside, it is a powerful magical realist post colonial critique of the colonization of South America with the genocide of the indigenous inhabitants of the Amazon under the Conquistadors serving as an allegory for the rise of the Nazis and the persecution of the Jews during the Holocaust. It courts comparisons with the best of Joseph Conrad and Jorge Luis Borges.
Döblin's philosophy of nature in the novel anticipates modern day environmental philosophy and concerns with the legacy of the Spanish Conquest and the brutality inflicted upon the indigenous peoples of the Americas. It shares a strong kinship and overlap in thematic concern with Mountains Oceans Giants, his 1924 climate fiction epic, which is also very much concerned with Nature and the Anthropocene, with much of the philosophy owing a debt to the Naturphilosophie of German Romanticism and I personally detect an added debt to the pastoral tradition.
Döblin again shows the tension between Nature and the Promethean hubris of Humanity in attempting to exert power and control over the environment rather than attempting to coexist peacefully with it.
A lyrical passage on Page 544 of the present edition from the novel serves as a tour de force example of its prose:
"The Amazon, that flowing sea, those old, young, measureless rolling waters! How it pours down from the rocky wall of the Andes, quitting the icy horror of the peaks and plateaus down into its plain and eastward. Earth-shatterer, Earth-builder, it carries sediments in such quantity that they are borne along all the way to the ocean, there it lays down sandbanks, plugs the coastal waters between Caviana and Cabo Norte so full that they silt up entirely, and to the south, where it debouches, banks form along the coast, islands grow, the sea assaults them, the sea into whose jaws the river tirelessly pours its white water, sand, mud, floating grass, ubussi palms complete with fruit. And the sea shakes its fist, sends its tidal bore, the pororoca, up the valley, the sea builds itself into a wall, thunders onward, fills the rivermouths and rolls on upriver. But finally it must collapse and become stranded on the banks. All around the primal force of this river flowing over Earth’s ancient rocks, a forest has planted itself. The river does not leave untouched the land it has borne along. It penetrates it with a thousand rivers, rivulets, creeks, channels, lakes, soaks into the ground like placental veins in the body of a pregnant woman, there where the fruit grows. The river rolls for a while steady and assured in its deep bed, sends out mists as reminders to everything above that thinks itself secure. And then when the time of its swelling arrives, it invades the land that it has carried along. Fire has receded from the Earth, now the distant Sun must warm it. But the giant river, Amazonas, is not terrible and shrivelling like the hot Sun, through its mouth the Sun speaks to ancient Earth, it is the Sun’s proconsul. From the Sun it receives the snowmelt of the mountains, and enters intoxicated into its land and proclaims the power of the Sun, its king. This is the time of floods. The river worries away at its banks. It turns the land into a floating garden, scoops languid lakes into itself again, even forces back the rivers that contribute water to it, and colours their dark currents milky."
Though a work of imagination, Döblin seeks to humanize the native peoples especially in the first part, where they are shown as the uncivilized, one with nature. One wonders whether this idealism is escapist or authentic, but of primary concern is how strong and robust the translation is.
The translator Chris Godwin as he has done so in all of his Döblin translations mercifully unparagraphs and disentangles the dialogue in all of his translations going for a more traditional English typography and reader friendly layout unlike NYRB Classics who in their otherwise brilliant Berlin Alexanderplatz translation, stuck too closely to the original German typography, resulting in a confusing layout for the average reader.
Godwin captures Döblin's breadth and vast expanse of prose, with particular attention to the tonality of Döblin's language and style, a lyrical flood of the Amazon river overwhelming and spiralling into a vortex of thousands of words, a cadence of a million droplets of water.
Five stars.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews