Alfred Döblin Libros

La revolución de 1918, un episodio decisivo en la historia de Alemania, precipitó el cambio desde la monarquía del Reich alemán a la República de Weimar. Alfred Döblin, testigo de primera mano, logró convertirlos en una monumental obra literaria: "Noviembre de 1918", en la que, a partir de diferentes recursos, muestra todas las facetas y aspectos de unos meses que cambiaron el curso de la historia de su país. En esta primera entrega, "Burgueses y soldados", buena parte de la tensión narrativa que genera Döblin reside en el acusado contraste entre los esfuerzos del líder espartaquista Karl Liebknecht por movilizar al proletariado y los pactos que el dirigente de la asamblea de los representantes del pueblo intenta establecer con los altos mandos militares. Una de las novelas más importantes de la literatura del siglo XX traducida por primera vez al castellano.

Siguiendo el sinuoso deambular de Franz Biberkopf, un ex convicto decidido a rehabilitarse y a llevar una vida honrada, por el bullicioso Berlín de entreguerras, el lector se adentrará en el mapa moral y geográfico de la ciudad en los años previos a la llegada al poder del Partido Nazi. En esta ambiciosa novela, se ofrece una visión de la realidad descompuesta en diversos planos que se reflejan aquí en un relato casi naturalista donde muchas veces la voz del narrador omnisciente se confunde con la del protagonista y se insertan en ella, literalmente, fragmentos de la vida real, como anuncios, folletos publicitarios, canciones de moda o cartas reales. Berlín Alexanderplatz concentra la asfixiante atmósfera de la Alemania que precedió al nazismo y constituye una imaginativa e inteligente parábola sobre la alienación del hombre y la angustia con la que se enfrenta a las grandes urbes.

Alfred Döblin (1878-1957) composed his epic trilogy of South America under difficult circumstances of exile. It was accessible on first publication in 1937-38 only outside Germany, and for only a couple of years before war broke out. The first postwar edition, like others of Döblin's works apart from Berlin Alexanderplatz, was little noticed in a Germany traumatised by Nazism and defeat. Neither the pre-war not the first post-war edition explicitly linked the separate volumes as parts of a unitary work. In the 1960s the separate novels were first brought together by Walter Muschg, editor of the first series of Döblin's 'selected works', under the overall title Amazonas. Muschg, however, decided to cut Volume 3 entirely. Not until 1973 did the trilogy first appear in full, in East Germany. Another 15 years passed before the first complete edition in West Germany. So only in the past three or four decades has this work begun to receive the critical attention it richly deserves. The epic is set mainly in South America, but its true focus is Europe. The urgent guiding proposition is: The Nazis did not emerge from nowhere.

As Jewish refugees living in Paris, Doblin and his family were forced to flee Hitler's armies in 1940. This story of his tortured journey through France, Spain, Portugal, and finally to America reads like an adventure novel. Here is Doblin carrying heavy luggage and a manuscript along the dusty roads of France, traveling in a cattle car, stuck in one obscure provincial town after another, in and out of refugee camps, constantly out of money. He had left Paris after his family, and only after desperately searching for them are they reunited. Fortunately, when it comes to their final escape from Europe through Marseille and Lisbon, their passports are prolonged, exit visas granted, and an unknown French civil servant provides them with money for their tickets to America. The last part of the book chronicles Doblin's stay in Hollywood and gives a devastating portrait of Alexanderplatz upon his return to Germany.

"Fascinated by the nature of the Jewish identity, Doeblin, the author of "Berlin Alexanderplatz", a non-practising Jew in Berlin in the 1920s, decided to visit Poland to try to discover his Jewish roots. This book is a record of that journey. He describes Polish-Jewish language and tradition, the striking costumes and colourful markets, and the terrible poverty that surrounded everything. The book is both a personal investigation into ancestry and a portrait of a unique society on the eve of its destruction."

In 1915, fourteen years before Berlin Alexanderplatz, Alfred Doblin published his first novel, an extensively researched Chinese historical extravaganza: The Three Leaps of Wang Lun. Even more remarkably, given its subject matter, the book was written in Expressionist style and is now considered the first modern German novel, as well as the first Western novel to depict a China untouched by the West. It is virtually unknown in English. Based on actual accounts of a doomed rebellion during the reign of Emperor Qianlong in the late 18th century, the novel tells the story of Wang Lun, a historical martial arts master and charismatic leader of the White Lotus sect, who leads a futile revolt of the "Truly Powerless." Densely packed cities and Tibetan wastes, political intrigue and religious yearning, imperial court life and the fate of wandering outcasts are depicted in a language of enormous vigor and matchless imagination, unfolding the theme of timidity against force, and a mystical sense of the world against the realities of power.

"Alfred Doblin was a titan of modern German literature. This collection of stories--astonishingly, the first collection of his stories ever published in English--shows him to have been equally adept in shorter forms. Included in its entirety is Doblin's first book, The Murder of a Buttercup, a work of savage brilliance and a landmark of literary expressionism. Mortality roams the streets of nineteenth-century Manhattan, with a white borzoi and a quiet smile. A ballerina duels to the death with the stupid childish body she is bound to. We experience, in the celebrated title story, a dizzying descent into a shattered mind. The collection is then rounded off with two longer stories written when Doblin was in exile from Nazi Germany in Southern California, including the delightful "Materialism: A Fable," in which news of humanity's soulless doctrines spreads to the animals, elements, and molecules of nature"--