The Three Leaps of Wang Lun

Contents
 

Introduction
 

The Three Leaps of Wang Lun
was Alfred Döblin’s first major work, and the first Western novel to depict a China untouched by the West. It was also the first modern German novel. Written just before the Great War and published in 1915, it was hailed as a masterpiece of the new movement called Expressionism, and won the Fontane Prize. In style and theme it marked a decisive break with the narrative tradition of the nineteenth century, and was to influence Brecht and Günter Grass. Why then is this book today so little known, even in German?
¹
The answer lies only partly in the book itself (which is by no means an easy or a comfortable read) and has more perhaps to do with Döblin’s own fate and the fate of German literature in the catastrophe of the Third Reich.

Döblin began
Wang Lun
in July 1912, and completed the two-thousand page manuscript in just ten months. He was working all the while as a doctor, “Lots of casualty duty, day and night … I wrote on steps, in the empty hours of waiting, could write walking or standing.”
²
As a medical student in the first years of the century he mingled with the café society of artists and writers who were creating Berlin’s version of the modern movement, later labelled Expressionism. Literary doctors are not rare; in Döblin’s case the choice of profession was no mere bread-and-butter one but reflected a profound duality. “I am a medical man,” he wrote,

This complexity of themes is rooted in Döblin’s family and the disaster that struck in 1888, when he was ten. The father, musically talented but feckless, absconded to America with a young woman employed in his tailoring business, leaving to the mother his debts and five children. Arrival in Berlin, where the family moved to be near relatives, was for Döblin his true birth. The years in Stettin had been a “pre-birth”, a “little paradise”, marred only by his father’s philandering; life in Berlin meant dismal rooms and shared beds, but also a new world: the big city. Small and shortsighted, poor, a provincial Jew, his education delayed some years by the family catastrophe, Döblin left school at 22 with a reputation as a rebel and a loathing for the militarism of the Wilhelmine state. He was also thoroughly at home in the fast growing metropolis which was to provide the matter of his only bestseller,
Berlin Alexanderplatz
.

His father’s family had artistic leanings, while his mother, of shopkeeper stock, had a low opinion of any activity that brought no income. Döblin was drawn to literature and philosophy, yet repelled by the bad example his father set for all that side of life. His early writings were a guilty secret. His mother had coped admirably to raise the family, yet life for her meant duty and little more. How to reconcile literature and duty, how to dig beneath the surface of life without retreating to mere speculation? Medicine on one level was a respectable career, but the choice of psychiatry reflected these deeper currents. “Why did I begin to study medicine? Because I wanted truth, but not a truth filtered by concepts and so diluted and frayed.”
⁴
He wrote much in these early years: papers in medical journals, a series of dialogues on the meaning of music, some essays (never published) on philosophy, a one-act play, a few short stories; but gave little hint of the imaginative power that was to produce
Wang Lun
and the epic novels of the next four decades. The scientific observation of psychiatric patients may have seemed to him a “withdrawal from the struggle for existence”; but this exposure to forms of human behaviour and states of spirit very different from those of normal society was crucial to the problems he would spend a lifetime addressing.

The damburst of creative energy in 1912, when he wrote this “fat Chinese novel” that broke all conventions of bourgeois fiction, coincided with events on the literary scene and in his personal life which together brought on a sort of crisis. The personal event was his marriage in January 1912, to a woman of his mother’s type—a union stormy from the start, though it lasted to the end of his life. He had now to set up his own medical practice, a change of work he found “odious”. The literary event was Berlin’s first Futurist Exhibition in the spring of 1912, an exhibition of modern paintings (mostly French) that also attracted to Berlin the leading Italian propagandist of Futurism in literature, F. T. Marinetti. Two years earlier Döblin had helped Herwarth Walden, the organizer of the exhibition, to found
Der Sturm
, Berlin’s leading avant garde magazine, and Döblin’s review of the exhibition in the May 1912 issue praised the bold, gigantic style of Futurist painting. He urged German painters, “The horror, the sympathy, the rage, the terror in you—out with it onto the canvas!… Futurism is a great step. It represents an act of liberation.… I am no friend of big inflated words. But I subscribe my whole name to Futurism and give it a clear Yes.”

Marinetti was a prolific penner of manifestos, extolling with gusto speed and war and aeroplanes and spelling out the rules of good Futurist style: verbs in the infinitive, no adjectives or adverbs, nouns strung together without conjunctions, similes as farfetched as you can make them; the “I” driven out of the novel and with it all psychology, since Man has become a mere cliché in literature.
⁵
A number of manifestos were printed in
Der Sturm
. In March 1913, in the middle of his work on
Wang Lun
, Döblin published an open letter to Marinetti in which he acknowledges some of the Futurist’s goals (“You have energy and hardness, masculinity, which should be unleashed with pleasure on the heels of a literature bursting with eroticism, hypochondria, distortions and torments … We want no prettification, no finery, no style … What is not immediate, not sated with objectivity, we both reject …”) but then, in sharp contrast to his own enthusiasm of the previous year, he harshly criticises Marinetti’s abstract aestheticism, his desire to cast words adrift, “the catastrophe of missing punctuation and missing syntax.” Döblin ended his letter, “You tend your Futurism. I’ll tend my Döblinism.”

A few months later, as he was finishing
Wang Lun
, Döblin published an essay
⁶
calling for the rebirth of the novel as a work of art and a modern epic. He urges the writer to learn from psychiatry, which has shaken off psychology’s pretence to explain human actions, and limits itself to the “noting of events, movements—with a shake of the head, shrug of the shoulders for the rest, the why and how.” He advocates a prose of “events” in which the motivation is not made explicit, and there are no authorial judgements—a programme realized to some degree in
Wang Lun
. Döblin was taking leave of the Futurists; they responded by ignoring
Wang Lun
and growing cool towards its author. “Neither Walden nor anyone else from the circle of the orthodox said a word about the novel.… They developed into pure word-artists. I took another path.”
⁷
Döblin’s individuality and distaste for cliques emerged stronger from the experience. He became one of the century’s greatest writers of German, while the self-styled Expressionists degenerated into “proclaiming the autonomy of the empty word, of wordshells, soundshells that they called ‘sensuous’. They turned words into mere sounds and noises, steered verbal art onto the cliff of music.”
⁸

Did Döblin choose China for his first major work because Marinetti, in his novel
Mafarka the Futurist
, had already done Africa and so he needed somewhere still farther off?
⁹
Was he drawing on a generalized “oriental” philosophy that could equally well have used India as a setting?
¹⁰
The first view is facile, and the second is refuted by Döblin’s claim to have had “a basic spiritual experience or focus which I guarded with the utmost care; served it, furnished it with everything necessary for its working out.”
¹¹
This was his experience of Taoism, that essentially Chinese religion, which he discovered in translations by Martin Buber and Richard Wilhelm.
¹²
It gave shape to his discontent with the neglect of existential meaning in modern literature. “In our bourgeois society,” he wrote,