12 - Amazonas

Summary

DÖBLIN HIMSELF DESCRIBED HOW he immersed himself in the maps of South America and was fascinated by the huge river system of the Amazon. In his trilogy Amazonas, also titled Das Land ohne Tod, Döblin used episodes from the history of the colonization of South America to voice his fundamental critique of modern Western civilization and his call for a return to a life more in keeping with the laws of nature. Amazonas was first published in two volumes in 1937 and 1938, titled Die Fahrt ins Land ohne Tod and Der blaue Tiger, but in his postwar edition of 1947/48 Döblin separated the last two parts of the second volume and presented it as a third volume, Der neue Urwald. This served as a pretext for Walter Muschg, who considered Der neue Urwald aesthetically inferior and without organic connection with the other parts, to eliminate the section altogether in his 1963 edition, an unpardonable act for an editor and one which was eventually rectified in 1988 with Werner Stauffacher's new edition for the Ausgewählte Werke.

Two early dissertations were devoted to Amazonas. Jacob Erhardt wrote his dissertation at Case Western Reserve University in 1968, and published a reworked version in 1974 as Alfred Döblins Amazonas-Trilogie. After an introduction about the writing and publication of the trilogy, Erhardt demonstrates the close connection between Amazonas, especially the first volume, and Döblin's philosophy of nature.