Alfred Döblin, the German novelist, essayist and most talented narrative writer of the German Expressionist movement, was born in 1878, in the Pomeranian port of Stettin, but grew up in Silesian Breslau and Prussian Berlin. He studied medicine and became a doctor, practicing psychiatry in the worker’s district of the Alexanderplatz in Berlin. His Jewish ancestry and socialist views obliged him to leave Germany for France in 1933 after the Nazi takeover, and in 1940 he escaped to the United States, where he converted to Roman Catholicism in 1941. He returned to Germany in 1945 at the war’s end but resettled in Paris in the early 1950s. He died in 1957 in West Germany. Döblin is best known for the novel Berlin Alexanderplatz, published in 1929.
Döblin was born in an assimilated and acculturated German-Jewish family, whose religious affiliations to Judaism were limited to a customary celebration of a few important Jewish holidays. While he grew up fully aware of his Jewish origins, the writer was not greatly influenced by Jewish religious specifics or Hebrew (and Yiddish) language and literature. Years later, in 1948, in a book about his WWII exile, he described his early Jewish past as insignificant: “I had been told at home in Stettin that my parents were of Jewish origin and we were a Jewish family. That was about the only thing concerning Judaism that I noticed about our family.” “My parents,” continuous the writer, “celebrated two holidays: New Year’s and Yom Kippur.” Döblin went to a German school, and he encountered there some aspects of anti-Semitism “as a matter of course.” These experiences, in his mind, were no different than for most of his “schoolmates who had been told the same thing I had been told at home.”
In general, young Döblin was not interested in his Jewish roots: “During my occasional religious instruction I learned a little Hebrew, no more than the basics. Why should I be interested in learning Hebrew on top of Latin, Greek, and French, when I had always found linguistic instructions disagreeable? What with the Iliad and the Odyssey, the lays of Edda and the Nibelungen and Gudrun, I had little interest in the early history of the Israelites, who later dispersed and disbanded.” He felt even less attachment to the modern Jewish religious system. At school, “instruction in Judaism was equivocal and more voluntary. … As for teaching, the actual religious teaching — I read it and listened to it. It was, and remained, superficial to me. It did not affect me emotionally. I felt no connection to it.”
His professional and creative life did not change his attitudes towards his Jewish roots and the Judaic religion and up until the early 1920s he did not show any specific interest in the social, political, cultural or spiritual life of German Jewry. He became more interested in Jewish politics, especially in the question of the Jewish national future as it was approached by German Zionist leaders, only after in “the first half of the nineteen-twenties, something resembling pogroms were taking place in Berlin, in the city’s eastern section, on Gollnow Street and its surrounding.” This pogrom-like attack on the Jewish section of the city “happened against the paramilitary background of those years; Nazism was in its infancy.” Immediately after these events, Döblin was drawn into a discussion group organized by the representatives of Zionism in Berlin who tried to invigorate interest in Jewish national politics among the German intellectuals of Jewish origin. “As a result of these discussions,” remembered Döblin, “someone came to my apartment to persuade me to take a trip to Palestine, which I found strange. His attempts at persuasion had a different effect on me. I did not, to be sure, agree to go to Palestine, but I found that I wanted to know more about the Jews. I discovered that I didn’t know them. I could not call Jews those of my acquaintances who called themselves Jews. They weren’t Jews in their beliefs, in their language, they were perhaps the vestige of an extinct people who had long ago assimilated to their environment. So I asked myself and others: where are the Jews? I was told: in Poland.”
Döblin went to Poland intellectually unprepared, so to speak, and he did not know what to expect from the country. Before and during the trip, he deliberately avoided most of the scholarly knowledge about the country. As he sarcastically remarked, he “leafed through” several books about Polish literature and Polish Jews, “read very carefully” one book, Tage in Hellas by B. Guttmann, and “neither read nor leafed through the national libraries in Berlin, in Warsaw, in Cracow, and in Lwow.” The narrative outcome of the rather spontaneous trip was several articles that appeared throughout 1925 in the Die Neue Rundschau, the magazine where since 1919 Döblin published most of his writings. The magazine also probably funded Döblin’s trip to Poland. In 1926 the writer collected some of the articles and with a few important additions published a book of his Polish impressions, appropriately entitled, Reise in Polen, and much later translated in English as Journey to Poland.
Reference:
Alfred Döblin, Destiny’s Journey, trans. Edgar Passler, New York: Parragon House, 1992.