2 - A Future-History Out of Time: The Historical Context of Döblin’s Expressionist Dystopian Experiment, Berge Meere und Giganten

Summary

WHEN ONE THINKS OF science-fiction novels in the Weimar Republic, the name of Alfred Döblin, author of the 1929 modernist classic Berlin Alexanderplatz, hardly springs to mind. As reception scholar Wulf Koepke describes it, “his publications [remained] texts for other writers, critics and the happy few. The public knew the man, but not his work.” Shortly following the hyperinflation of 1923, the writer’s writer Döblin abruptly published the vast, difficult, and bizarre tome Berge Meere und Giganten (Mountains, Oceans and Giants, 1924), which describes a future-history of humankind spanning thousands of years by way of an unstable dialectic between nature and technology.

Unfortunately for Döblin’s career between 1924 and 1929, he released this ambivalent dystopian novel at a time when utopian dreams had all but overwhelmed his potential reading public. As competing political ideologies tore apart the fragile Weimar democracy, the populace looked to different idealized versions of society to resolve the problems they faced. In the meantime, Döblin took a pessimist’s vacation in Berlin-Zehlendorf between 1921 and 1923, with the double aim of eloping with his mistress, Charlotte Niclas, (in which he was unsuccessful) and of writing humankind’s future “objectively” via his own subconscious revelations—hence Berge Meere und Giganten. “It cost me my nerves to stare these things in the face,” Döblin once wrote to a friend in 1922 about composing the novel. His own remarks about BMG express uncertainty about the work’s relevance to his own era: “Did it help others, what I said? I do not know. In general, one must slowly learn to see what’s strange. The mysterious becomes, after being repeated ten times, no longer mysterious.” By June 1924 Döblin had lost the energy to continuously defend and promote this experiment, moving on to the task of writing what would later become his acclaimed masterpiece, the city novel Berlin Alexanderplatz. Augustinus Dierick posits Döblin’s loss of faith in his work as endemic to expressionism in general, in that “it is tested in the process of reading, just as our faith in God is tested in living.”

Much of the book’s scholarly reception has focused on the aporias created by its nature/technology dialectic, leading Carl Gelderloos to conclude recently that BMG “stages a confrontation of these two terms as terms, resulting in their dissolution into one another.