November 1918 - Eine deutsche Revolution: Erzählwerk in drei Teilen. Dritter Teil: Karl und Rosa

Novembre 1918 #4

by Alfred Döblin

Rare Book

Genres: Historical Fiction, German Literature, Fiction, Germany

hardcover

First published January 1, 1950

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

[Hendrik · Rating 4 out of 5]

Der letzte Teil von Alfred Döblins "November-Trilogie", dem historischen Mammutepos über die deutsche Revolution von 1918/1919. Zugleich Schlusspunkt der Trilogie und endgültiger Abgesang auf die Revolution. Im Mittelpunkt stehen die Ereignisse rund um den gescheiterten Spartakusaufstand im Januar 1919. Die Handlung schildert den Kampf der beiden zentralen politischen Führer der Spartakisten Karl Liebknecht und Rosa Luxemburg, mit ihren politischen Gegenspielern, der provisorischen Reichsregierung unter dem Sozialdemokraten Friedrich Ebert. Der Ausgang ist allgemein bekannt, Luxemburg und Liebknecht wurden von nationalistischen Freikorps ermordet, der Aufstand niedergeschlagen. Döblins Darstellung ist keinesfalls neutral in der Beurteilung der politischen Akteure. Schon in den Bänden zuvor kam Friedrich Ebert überaus schlecht weg und wird auch hier als einer der Hauptschuldigen am Scheitern der "sozialen Revolution" ausgemacht. Klar ist, es war sicher keine Sternstunde der SPD, sich mit den alten Garden des preußischen Militärs zu verbünden, um den Aufstand niederzuschlagen. Doch befand sich Ebert in einer prekären Lage, einerseits den Forderungen der Alliierten nachzukommen und gleichzeitig die Sicherung der Ordnung bzw. Versorgung der Bevölkerung in Deutschland zu gewährleisten. Erklären lässt sich Döblins kritische Haltung mit seiner persönlichen Situation zum Zeitpunkt der Niederschrift. Von den Nationalsozialisten ins Exil gezwungen, erst nach Frankreich später in die USA, in einer prekären finanziellen und beruflichen Lage, sah er in der inkonsequent vollzogenen Revolution nach dem Waffenstillstand im November 1918, die Keimzelle für den späteren Machtaufstieg der Nationalsozialisten. Sein Vorwurf zielt wesentlich auf die unzureichende Entfernung der alten Eliten und Seilschaften aus den gesellschaftlichen Schlüsselpositionen. Die Frage, was im Gegenzug eine erfolgreiche bolschewistische Revolution für Deutschland bedeutet hätte, lässt er allerdings unbeantwortet.

Spannend sind die Beschreibungen der politischen Ereignisse. Dabei zeigt Döblin u.a. in satirischer Art und Weise, wie schwierig es angesichts einer weit verbreiteten Obrigkeitshörigkeit ist, mit den Deutschen eine Revolution durchzuführen. Zum Beispiel scheitert die Besetzung des Kriegsministeriums am Fehlen einer Unterschrift. Die Bürokraten schicken die Aufständischen einfach wieder zurück, um die fehlende Unterschrift einzuholen. Solche Szenen sind Döblin einfach großartig gelungen, wie überhaupt die Beschreibung Berlins. Gewöhnungsbedürftig fand ich seinen ausufernden Hang zu religiösen Darstellungen. Rosa Luxemburg erscheint tatsächlich der Satan und auch der Oberleutnant Becker, eine Hauptfigur aus den Bänden zuvor, hat ausgefallene religiöse Heimsuchungen. Man kann dies als Szenen des Wahnsinns deuten, aber speziell bei Luxemburg gleiten sie in romantischen Kitsch ab. Während seines Exils ist Döblin zum Christentum konvertiert, was hier vermutlich nicht unwesentlich mit hineingespielt haben mag.

Döblin beschränkt seine Darstellung der Revolution nicht allein auf die Sphäre der bekannten politischen Akteure. Er beschreibt, dem Prinzip der Totalität verpflichtet, wie sich einfache Menschen im Angesicht der sich vollziehenden Geschichte verhalten. Einige dieser Figuren und Beziehungskonstellationen, ziehen sich durch den gesamten Zyklus. Durch den permanenten Wechsel der Spielorte und Perspektiven kommt trotz der Länge keine Langeweile auf. An "Berlin Alexanderplatz" reicht "November 1918" zwar nicht heran, aber mit einigen Abstrichen trotzdem ein unterhaltsamer Roman zu einem bewegten Kapitel deutscher Geschichte.

[Steve]

Herr Döblin uses the last months of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg along with fictional Friedrich Becker, now recovered from his war injuries, to render a highly critical judgement on post-war German politics and society in this final volume of the November 1918 tetralogy. Karl and Rosa is written with an experimental pen, one that recounts critical historical events, provides occasional character dialogue through recurrent dreams with both deceased friends and even Satan from Paradise Lost, and considers civic duty through Sophocles’ play Antigone. A blurry contest between heaven and hell results.

In these pages, the author asserts the great betrayal of the German people came from the failure of the revolutionary socialist leadership to dominate the stage when history’s monumental fulcrum arrived on 6 January 1919, thus casting the die for the oppressions to follow through the next quarter century. “Now the hour of the black swan has come,” he wrote of that day. In opposition stood the likes of Friedrich Ebert, Philipp Scheidemann, and Gustav Noske who embraced reactionary force, providing important nourishment to defeatist nationalism in a short-term bid to remain in power. We are all familiar with the long-term consequences. The obvious flaw in this argument is that there is no firm reason to believe that Germany would have been better off had the Spartacists prevailed given the atrocities committed in the name of communism through history. Maybe Germany would have been in a worse position, though that is hard to believe.

Becker returns to teaching with a provisional position at his former employer. His director is shortly accused of an illicit relationship with one of Becker’s students. Becker’s descent begins when he intervenes in a frustrating attempt to restore reputations. By novel’s end, Becker has reached life’s depths, with some prompting from Satan, where he experiences the ultimate untethered freedom in poverty, though he’s missing a few teeth at this point.

I thought Herr Döblin’s use of Antigone interesting. He raises a good point about agency of the dead, therein making the case for the study of history and great literature generally. Becker tells his class

the real hero of the play is not she [Antigone], but—the dead Polynices. The subject of the play is the claim of a dead man upon the living. A warrior has fallen. He has left behind no unsullied memory. This dead man does not become visible, nor palpable, nor even audible in the play, but he forces his way into the world of the living and finds an advocate in his sister Antigone. A woman takes up his cause. Just as it is woman who receives the unborn, those who are not yet present among us. Polynices is held back and cannot speak for himself, but he works through her, uses her body and her soul, and she cannot escape him. Nor does she want to escape him either. For what he demands are his rights. She speaks for him and presents his arguments for him. Support for his existence, care—that is what the dead man demands.

This theme continues throughout the novel – indeed, we may ask whether anyone hears the dead in our world today, for I sense their voices are quite loud. We learn of the nationalist answer to this logic through the class spokesman, Shröter, who states his objection as “Simply put, whether one has a clear concept of the nation and what one owes it. We have no need for spiritualism these days. The nation just needs men who will take up its cause.” Shröter’s response amounts to a don’t think, just do declaration, or “Come on guys, grab your weapons and let’s show these soft-headed ninnies what it means to be a German with either a bayonet or a bullet, whatever kills ‘em the quickest.” So much for the hope of logic and education.

Then, toward the novel’s end, Becker comments on the success of fanatical nationalism and demagoguery in the final visit with his friends, the married Hans and Hilda Maus, Hilda being his former romantic interest. “We have fallen into the hands of the powers of darkness. What these pagans are preaching has strength and cunning. It’s sly. They have gathered the evil and unholy knowledge of our age about them. They have Satan’s muscles of iron and his malice. There’s no holding them back. For this is their age.” These words have special meaning to me given political events in my country in the past several years and what we now observe in Russia.

As for the murders of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, which happened days following the failed Spartacist uprising, full justice was denied. Truth was obfuscated; some of the perpetrators escaped with slight punishment, most avoided punishment entirely. Even the murderer of Becker’s former school director walks from jail after only a few years. Has Satan prevailed? We might easily think so. In the end, however, Becker experiences good reason for optimism.

[Grant Brookes · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novel is like several different books (suitably titled Book One to Book Nine) crammed into a single volume. It doesn't fully work.

The problem isn't the loosely connected plot lines involving fictional characters and historical figures, which works reasonably well. And it's not the themes from the The Three Theban Plays of Sophocles, which are woven artfully through parts of the novel, or those from the The Song of the Nibelungs. The first problem is uneven writing.

The weakest part of the novel is Book One, an overly long fantasy about Rosa Luxemburg's time alone in prison from July 1916 until November 1918.

The writing does take off in Book Two, mixing historical narrative with passages approximating magic realism. These passages are deployed to brilliant satirical effect, with office chairs coming to life and mocking the bureaucrats seated upon them. I'm glad I persevered. Similarly brilliant satirical passages are found through the rest of the novel as well, such as when marble statues descend from their pedestals at night and march in protest through Berlin.

The other problem appears to be a blurred purpose. Written in the dark shadow of World War Two, the novel on the one hand aims to show how the overthrow of the Kaiser and the generals at the end of World War One led to the rise of fascism and war on even greater scale just 20 years later. It is for this, I expect, that the novel was highly praised by Bertolt Brecht.

But on the other hand, written shortly after the author's late-life conversion to Catholicism, the novel also serves as an exposition of Alfred Döblin's religious beliefs. Unlike Leo Tolstoy, who famously set out to write Anna Karenina as a simple morality play about how "sin" leads to punishment and ended up producing a more ambiguous story by staying true to his characters, Alfred Döblin clings to didacticism, and his characters become unbelievable in the end.

Three stars.

[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)

[Esteban Galarza · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alfred Döblin es uno de los autores alemanes más raros que leí. Su literatura tiene fuerte raigambre en acontecimientos históricos contemporáneos suyos, pero se escapa todo el tiempo sin que por eso pueda ser encasillado dentro de ningún movimiento literario (realismo, surrealismo, expresionismo, etc). La tetralogía de novelas en torno a la Revolución Alemana de noviembre de 1918 es como meterse de lleno en sus inquietudes. Las primeras dos fueron publicadas antes del estallido de la Segunda Guerra Mundial y las últimas dos unos años después de finalizada la contienda. En medio Döblin se convirtió al catolicismo y esa impronta se nota mucho en la última parte de las novelas (el tomo Karl y Rosa). Toda la novela gira en torno a las tentaciones satánicas de las que son víctimas los personajes más fuertes (Rosa Luxemburgo y el oficial Friedrich Becker), armando lazos con la sTentacionesd e San Antonio y El Paraíso Perdido de John Milton. Si las tres novelas anteriores procuraron pluralidad de voces y de lugares, Karl y Rosa se condensan hasta la opresión en Berlín y los momentos más injustos y sangrientos del final de la revolución. Döblin toma partido por los espartaquistas (una hermana suya fue asesinada por los Freikorps en esos días) y delimita bien el lugar de los traidores, los burgueses y los militares como los causantes de la tragedia alemana del siglo XX.
Döblin es un espíritu indómito porque aún terminado el ciclo Noviembre 1918 y a pesar de ayudarme con lecturas de Brecht, no se a ciencia cierta qué leí, solo se que viví en una obra desde mayo del año pasado a hoy (9 de enero) y que será difícil desprenderme de ese mundo tan facilmente.

[Bernie4444 · Rating 3 out of 5]

The second part of the November 1918 Novel.

Although there is a real “Karl and Rosa”. This is the second half of a novelization of the November 1918 revolution.

The first book written by Alfred Doblin is “A People Betrayed.”

Karl Liebknecht was a German socialist and a co-founder of Rosa Luxemburg of the Spartacist League and the Communist Party of Germany.

Rosa Luxemburg was a Polish Marxist theorist, philosopher, economist, anti-war activist, and revolutionary socialist who became a naturalized German citizen.

It is safer to know the real story before reading this Novel. Then Doblin is a good writer.

[Peter Jakobs · Rating 3 out of 5]

The final book of the series with the end of the German “revolution” 1918/19 marked by the murdered Spartakists Liebknecht and Luxemburg. Overall good but I didn’t like the many esoteric episodes.

[Brandon Prince · Rating 4 out of 5]

An epic, unwieldy and truly very strange 1200pp expressionist/magical realist novel of the failed German Revolution of 1918-19. It is both a confrontation with the historical roots of Nazism as well as a fictional account of the author's conversion to a kind of socialist Catholicism.

A few of the dozen or so narrative threads: Rosa Luxemburg is haunted by the ghost of her dead lover, and in the maelstrom of revolutionary events courts the guidance of Satan; Döblin's alter-ego, a wounded school teacher, seeks spiritual guidance from a 14th century Christian mystic and also battles a Satan who shape shifts into a lion and rat; Karl Leibknecht discourses at length on Milton's "Paradise Lost"; Marble statues in Berlin come to life to curse the treachery of the Social Democrats; and a variety of lumpen characters collaborate with political opportunists, commit murder, and join both the revolution and the reactionaries.

Döblin's voice is thick with irony. The revolutionary and counterrevolutionary events are portrayed as a farce -- oftentimes with looney tune levels of inanity with characters turning into animals, inanimate objects, bouncing off the walls etc. Particular fun is poked at the absurdity of German respect for order and bureaucracy. In one scene, armed revolutionaries on an order to disarm a reactionary officers corp are sent away because they lack the proper documents. When they return with the correct paperwork the reactionaries have successfully fortified their ranks. Lurking beneath the levity however, lies Döblin's deadly serious historical summation: the failure of the revolution of 1918-19 to defeat German militarism set the stage for Hitler's rise to power.

The novel is also rife with high melodrama, sordid noir fiction, and absurd action adventure. The combination of acid satire, violence, sentimentality, and Christian theology is high-pitched and over-the-top. At times I could not help imagining the novel as source material for an imaginary Paul Verhoeven film.

One side note: relative familiarity with the historical events in question and its principle actors is recommended. There are no introductions or footnotes to help guide the reader, and Doblin's rapid and whirlwind treatment of historical events offers very little in the way of exposition. I sought out two helpful books on the German Revolution which I read simultaneously along with the novel -- Sebastian Haffner's "Failure of a Revolution" and Chris Harman's "The Lost Revolution".

[Martin Roberts · Rating 4 out of 5]

A crucial read for understanding that at the end of the First World War, only the Spartacists tried to stand up to German militarism and were easily beaten, meaning that a second war was inevitable. The failed revolution was also a watershed because paramilitaries were used as forces of repression and wholesale murder of political dissidents became acceptable. Döblin paints the spirit of the times through the eyes of a teacher returning from the trenches to discover his pupils have become ultra-nationalists despite the war. "This generation has learned nothing," he ruefully concludes.
The problem with the book for me, and why it doesn't get a fifth star, is that the book is not exactly a historical novel; about the first 100 pages are taken up by Luxemberg's ravings while she she is stir crazy, and much of the rest is given to on the metaphysical musings and the nature of evil, rather than the revolution per se, and the author even cites Milton, to whom I think such poetic speculation is best left.

[Bernie4444 · Rating 3 out of 5]

The second part of the November 1918 Novel.

Although there is a real “Karl and Rosa”. This is the second half of a novelization of the November 1918 revolution.

The first book written by Alfred Doblin is “A People Betrayed.”

Karl Liebknecht was a German socialist and a co-founder of Rosa Luxemburg of the Spartacist League and the Communist Party of Germany.

Rosa Luxemburg was a Polish Marxist theorist, philosopher, economist, anti-war activist, and revolutionary socialist who became a naturalized German citizen.

It is safer to know the real story before reading this Novel. Then Doblin is a good writer.

[Bill Wallace · Rating 4 out of 5]

Engaging, occasionally hallucinatory story of the Spartacist uprising in Berlin in 1918. Apart from the titular characters, others include the ghost of Rosa Luxembourg's dead lover, Satan, minor demons, and Friedrich Becker, a war hero and teacher whose internal moral struggles are both existential and mystical. The chapter in which Becker teaches the story of Antigone to a classroom of future Nazis is one of the best things I've read in awhile. Fine historical fiction all around.